Battleground Yorkshire: How 'Whitby Woman' could deny Labour a majority

For Blair, “Worcester Woman” was the Conservative voter who could be swung to New Labour’s rebrand.

Cameron courted the “Holby City Woman”, the public sector worker who could be convinced that the Conservatives could be trusted with the NHS in a time of austerity.

Most recently “Workington Man” provided the inroad for the Tories in the Red Wall following Boris Johnson’s pledge to see their vote for Brexit through to its conclusion.

Yorkshire has been sorely overlooked in recent years in its search for its own special group of kingmakers, until this year, with the arrival of “Whitby Woman” explains Luke Tryl, the UK Director of More in Common.

“I think it’s fair to say that support for the Conservatives is now pretty much limited to its base,” he says.

“The main groups that we will be talking about in the run up to the election are the groups that have, from 2019, switched from Conservative to Labour, from the Tories to “don’t know” and also from Conservatives to Reform.”

Mr Tryl’s research suggests that this first group of voters are not coming back to the Tories and, had it not been for Jeremy Corbyn, would have voted Labour in 2019.

The former Tories who are now undecided, however, are what will determine the “scale of Labour’s victory”, he says.

These voters are generally frustrated with the lack of competence by the Government, in addition to the worries about the cost of living and the NHS which all voters share.

“They are a really interesting group, demographically,” says Mr Tryl. “They are overwhelmingly women, getting up to about 70 per cent. Their average age is about 61, and they are more likely to live in a small town or suburb.

“If you map that against the sort of seats Labour needs to win for a majority, Whitby is probably quite a good proxy for where this voter lives.

“While Whitby Woman isn’t the group that can get the Conservatives back to a majority, they are the group that might just prevent Labour from getting an overall majority.”

Whitby, on Yorkshire’s coast, is a key battleground between Labour and the Tories following the announcement that Robert Goodwill, the local MP for almost 20 years, will stand down.

Rishi Sunak is alive to the challenge and has visited the seat several times in the past year, with pollsters predicting that Labour are anything between 8 and 20 points ahead in the seat.

While women are telling posters they are undecided, their husbands, brothers and fathers who voted Tory in 2019 are going to Reform.

One solution, prayed for by many in Conservative Campaign Headquarters, is that Reform strike a deal, as they did in 2019, not to run against seats with a Tory MP.

But Mr Tryl says his research shows this may not be enough, having asked these voters who they would vote for if they could not vote for Reform. Only 26 per cent said they’d go back to the Tories.

This fracturing of the Tories 2019 support is due to, in part, the unstable mix of the electorate that the party was able to cobble together, he says, adding that Boris Johnson’s coalition of voters was “impressively broad”.

If we slice the voting public into seven groups, four backed the Conservatives at the last election.

The “disengaged traditionalist”, who is more likely to be self-employed and has been voting Tory since Thatcher, along with the party’s bread and butter “backbone conservatives” made up their electoral base.

Added to this we have the “loyal nationals” who are the Red Wall voters who switched from Labour, in addition to the “established liberals” who are the converts from David Cameron who are socially liberal but economically more right wing.

“Three things glued this coalition together: Getting Brexit done, Boris Johnson himself, and Jeremy Corbyn,” he says.

“All three of those factors are now gone.”

Now, things have reversed, and Labour holds on to five of these seven slices of the electoral pie, with the party with a coalition that is “even broader than the one that elected Boris Johnson”.

While the Tories have held on to its disengaged nationals and backbone conservatives, the loyal nationals and established liberals have gone to Labour.

These two, along with “progressive activists” (Corbyn’s base), “civic pragmatists” (a socially-conscious but not overly political group) and the “disengaged battlers” (those struggling to make ends meet), now make up Labour’s would-be voters.

Winning both of these two groups of switchers back, is unlikely, says Mr Tryl, adding that the policies on offer will likely alienate one of the other in the absence of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

These “loyal nationals” in the Red Wall do not like Rishi Sunak and have not been able to connect with his vast wealth, but do care about immigration.

The “established liberals” like the Prime Minister, because he reminds them of David Cameron, but would be alienated by a shift to the right on social issues.

“You end up with a situation where neither wing is satisfied, which is basically where we are at the moment, leading to a Labour landslide,” he says, adding that the Conservatives must choose one over the other before polling day.

The demise of Boris Johnson’s coalition of voters is also a warning for Labour in the future, hoping to take them to No 10, and to keep them while in government, with an electorate becoming more volatile and less tribal in which party they vote for.

“I don’t think the electorate is going to become any more static,” he says.

“We can’t predict the degree to which there will be a sense of “give them a chance,” he adds, but warned that the party needs to build up a real sense of its own brand for voters to have something to not only buy into, but stick with.

“I think they’ve reached peak “not being the Tories”, they need to start spelling out what a Labour government would do to make your life better.

“The notion of a mandate can be overstated in politics, but it is less about a mandate and more about building up the brand so when the difficult times come, they’ve got some good will in the tank.”

Part of this good will could come, though Labour will be pained to admit it, from Boris Johson’s key policy of Levelling Up.

Mr Tryl notes that focus groups have seen more and more mention of town centres looking good as the effects of the money starts to trickle through.

“There is a world in which Labour gets much more of the benefits of Levelling Up and Angela Rayner (the party’s shadow leader who leads on this policy) has actually stuck with a lot of it.

“I think Boris Jonhnson tapped into something with the Levelling Up agenda, and if people start to see those tangible improvements to their everyday environment, that might be what creates that reservoir of goodwill for the Labour Party.”