It has been “many, many years” since the communities of north Somerset have “seen red”, local accountant John Mayer remarked of the main opposition Labour party’s prospects in his part of south-west England.
But Mayer, whose 300 clients include struggling small businesses, senses a deep malaise that could shake up voting habits in traditionally Conservative areas such as his in the general election expected this year.
“A lot of people are just closing their businesses because they can’t make a go of it anymore,” he said, adding that trains were overcrowded, bus services patchy and working young people such as his sons unable to get on the property ladder.
For Rishi Sunak’s governing party, the bleak picture risks translating into a steep decline in support across its countryside heartlands, according to recent polls — two of which showed Labour leading in rural constituencies for the first time in generations.
“The blue wall is collapsing like the red wall did before it,” said Neil Ross, a painter who runs a café part-time on the Severn estuary, in a reference to the swath of historically Labour-voting seats in northern England that switched sides in the 2019 general election.
Labour had an opportunity to eat into traditionally safe Tory seats, he suggested, because Sunak’s party had for too long taken votes in them for granted.
Last week, a Deltapoll survey of more than 4,000 people showed Conservative support in farming constituencies plummeting from 58 per cent in 2019 to a projected 33 per cent this year. Labour was on 36 per cent, up from 20 per cent in 2019, and the Liberal Democrats at 14 per cent.
A Survation poll for the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) found a similar pattern. It forecast the Conservatives would lose 53 of the 96 rural seats they hold now, and that Labour would win 51, up from 3 in 2019.
High-profile casualties, on these projections, could include former cabinet ministers Thérèse Coffey and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP for nearby North East Somerset.
“This poll makes it clear that rural voters up and down the country feel politically homeless and disconnected from central government,” said CLA president Victoria Vyvyan. “Nobody has our vote for life.”
The last time North Somerset did not return a Tory candidate was in 1892, when the then Liberal party won the seat. Liam Fox, the sitting MP and former international trade secretary, has won comfortable majorities for much of the past 32 years.
But Labour has come second in the past three elections, and the polling now puts the seat within the party’s reach.
“I think this one is up for grabs,” said Tim Ledbury who runs the North Somerset Agricultural Society, the kind of group whose members are typically “true blue”.
He put this down largely to disaffection with government — a sentiment echoed by chicken farmer Martin Ford, who owns 133 acres of undulating countryside bordering the Mendip hills.
A Tory voter, Ford said he felt aggrieved that British farmers were held to the highest standards but constantly undercut by imports from countries with laxer regulation while contending with supermarkets’ tighter margins.
Local Somerset farmers such as him voted for Brexit in large numbers, hoping for a more even playing field. They feel disappointed.
“Farmers have always traditionally voted Conservative but also admitted under their breath that they are better off under Labour,” Ford said.
He added that some unusual mail in his inbox in recent days, outlining everything the prime minister hopes to do for rural areas, suggested the Conservatives were waking up to the trouble they are in.
“Rishi is obviously getting worried as we just got a letter from him,” he said.
Fox has also produced a local flyer listing Tory achievements. While he took the fight seriously, he said he was sanguine about being re-elected and that he had always championed farmers and small businesses.
“Incumbency will be an advantage where MPs have served their constituents well,” Fox said. “That will put them in a good place at a time people are fairly disillusioned about politics.”
A straw poll at the Thursday market in Clevedon, one of three main towns in the constituency, provided some pause for thought. Of about 20 people queueing at a grocery stall, not one intended to vote for Fox — even habitual supporters of the party such as retired couple Ron and Chris Stratton. “Not this time. They have made a terrible mess,” Chris Stratton said.
Laura, who runs the nearby stationery shop, and was switching from blue to Green, said: “Covid killed the Conservatives. We buried people and couldn’t have a wake while Boris [Johnson] was partying in Downing Street.”
Nor has Labour been sitting idly by. One official in London said the party had been working hard to overcome the image it portrayed of urban bias in 2019.
Recent research by Labour found that more than 6,300 agricultural businesses have gone bust since 2017, and the corresponding workforce has shrunk by one-third. If government did not act, the official said, the fabric of the rural economy would collapse, “like it once did for mining communities”.
In seats such as North Somerset much will depend on how the vote splits among opposition parties, and how many disaffected Tories lurch further to the right and vote for Reform UK. Liberal Democrats in the south-west of England, where they have a long-standing following, said they were focusing firepower on constituencies they were best placed to win.
Local Labour activists are encouraged by their party’s roughly 19-point lead over the Conservatives in national polls, and think they have the best chance to unseat Fox and Rees-Mogg. They are impatient for the party to select candidates to take them on.
Clare Hunt, a Labour representative on the North Somerset council, said: “It seems impossible when you look at it on paper. But rural areas are struggling in so many ways, and we are finding a real desire for change.”
