Election focus: Brighton Pavilion
Both the Conservatives and Labour seem to be fighting the Brighton Pavilion campaign as if the Green menace is nothing more than a bad dream. Their nightmares could yet come true.
It’s possible both parties are making a big mistake. For this is not like most other places in the country: here the Greens are a force to be reckoned with. They have 13 councillors on Brighton and Hove council. They took 30% of the vote in the 2007 elections and were ahead of Labour in Brighton at last year’s European elections. “It’s one of our best hopes at the coming general election,” the Green party’s leader – and candidate – Caroline Lucas says. No surprise, therefore, the Greens are feeling “upbeat”: “It’s one of our best hopes.”
Local politics reflects the uncertain outcome at the coming general election. The Conservatives run the council, but can only form a minority administration. This raises the sporadic threat of a Green-Labour “coalition of convenience”, as the Tory candidate Charlotte Vere describes it. “But then,” she adds, “they start arguing and it all falls apart”.
Brighton is the sort of place which attracts supporters of all the main parties.
“It’s a hugely diverse constituency,” Vere says. Lucas says there are “real pockets of deprivation”. Nancy Platts, the Labour candidate, says it is “like anywhere else – pockets of affluence, pockets of deprivation”.
Given the mixed nature of the constituency the electoral maths becomes much more understandable. David Lepper held the seat in 2005, taking 35 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives were second with 24 per cent, but only just: the Greens notched up an impressive 22 per cent. As we’ve seen, they’ve made significant progress since then. And with the energy poured into the seat by Lucas and her supporters, there are real hopes they could make a breakthrough.
A lot of hard work has gone into improving the Greens’ position in Brighton – but that doesn’t make it easier to understand why it is here, rather than elsewhere in the country, that their performance is so much stronger than elsewhere. The truth is it’s easier to distinguish between the Conservative and Labour views of Brighton than it is to place the Greens in the spectrum.
Suffering Brighton, recovering Brighton
If we were to exclusively listen to Vere, the Tory candidate, we would see a place ravaged by recession and with an unnatural bias towards London commuters. She says Brighton has higher unemployment than in the rest of the region. Its high street has lots of empty buildings. “It’s quite concerning,” she says. “I think there’s only one party that’s going to be able to fix that.”
Her proposal is to create an environment where more “local jobs” can be created for “local people”.
“I don’t want people getting on that train every day. Brighton is a long way from London, let’s face it,” Vere says. “It shouldn’t really be a commuter town.”
She would rather people can fall out of bed in the morning, be at work in ten minutes and enjoy a “fantastic local job”. “We’ve got the graduates with the skills,” Vere says. If she was MP her focus would be on building up local businesses and services – and “taking it from there”.
Platts, the Labour candidate, is less keen on taking a miserabilist approach to Brighton. She acknowledges that the main concerns on the doorstep are with the economy, but rejects the idea that Brighton is “struggling” outright. There are 10,000 less people unemployed than there were in 1997, she points out. A recent Centre for Cities report talks about Brighton being one of the cities leading the way out of recession. It is a strong city, she claims, when it comes to growth industries – a very strong creative sector, especially in the digital media, and high levels of small independent businesses and entrepreneurship.
“Where you’ve got growth areas – economic growth, where you have a lot of people employed in your constituency – that will help you employ and weather the recession,” she explains. It sounds like a completely different city to the one described by Vere. Platts has her own explanation. “That is the Conservatives reeling off propaganda that suits their purposes,” she says scornfully. “If the Conservative candidate hasn’t bothered to talk to people about what’s going on out there, that is shameful.”
There is a strong hint of personal animosity here. Platts has a bone to pick with Vere, who was only selected in November last year and openly admits her only past experiences of the city were weekends there while a university student in London. Vere talks of the benefits of a “fresh pair of eyes”. “Charlotte might not realise Brighton’s strengths,” Platts says. She is on stronger ground here, despite having only got to know the seat for three years. This trumps six months; and Platts says she has “immersed herself” in it over that time. “People know me as a local person,” she insists.
Vere has her own grounds of attack. “Nancy Platts went through a period of disowning herself from the Labour party,” she says. “But now the polls have narrowed she’s suddenly owning them again, which is – interesting.” Platts, naturally, says she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Dealing with the Greens
The Labour-Tory battle seems the most intense contest taking place in Brighton Pavilion. Equally revealing, though, is the differing ways in which they’re approaching the Green party conundrum.
Vere’s strategy is clear enough. “It goes back to saying to voters: do you really know who they are?” The Green party has presented itself as mainstream in recent years, but Vere is utterly convinced they remain very close to the loony left. She cites their policies to scrap VAT and employers’ NI, which would cost around £130 billion, as an example. Then there’s a national citizen’s income to be received whether or not you’re working; a focus on part-time or local work, implying “you don’t need a full-time job”; and a proposal to disestablish the Church of England.
“There’s so many of them you just think – it’s not ready, it’s not a party that should be ready for parliament,” she said.
“You shouldn’t have someone who supports desertion in the armed forces in the House of Commons.”
Labour’s approach is to ignore the Greens altogether – the same strategy being pursued north of the border when it comes to the SNP.
On the doorstep, Platts says, people understand that the choice is between her and Vere – between Labour and Conservative. “They know the Greens can’t form a government. If they vote Green, they risk letting the Tories in.”
This is a Westminster election about who will form the next government, Platts argues. “I haven’t met many people on the doorstep who are voting for David Cameron, to be honest,” she insists. “Most people are saying they don’t want to risk the Tories getting in.”
If that’s true, Platts has nothing to worry about from the Greens. Lucas remains upbeat, however – and has answers to all the points made against her.
“Of course people would say ‘what difference would one more Tory or one more Labour MP make?’ The first Green MP, I think, would send a real signal this was the beginning of something new at a national level.”
Lucas says the Greens have been “anxious” to show they are good constituency representatives. In Brighton, having lots of councillors has meant the party are close to the ground in knowing what lots of the issues are. On transport, waste and affordable housing, the Greens are united by issues of “inequality”, Lucas says. “Those kind of social issues are key to our campaign.”
An ICM poll carried out at the end of last year showed the Greens a clear seven points ahead of the Tories and ten points ahead of Labour. With the main parties’ extra resources taken into account it’s clear this race is very, very close.
