Sidestepping, but staying on a similar subject, I find it interesting that you live in a safe Tory seat and you're getting this stuff. I'm in what was a relatively safe Tory seat that looks like it no longer is (due to Tories tanking in the polls and boundary changes) and I'm not seeing anything. From anyone.
Maybe it's the fact that this forum is the closest I get to social media (I hate it and don't use it) and all the campaigning is on there these days? But if I watch the telly, the coverage is the same as it's always been. Locally however, it's like there isn't even an election on. By now, the fields and country lanes are normally dressed with large Vote Conservative adverts. Posters and signs for the other parties are normally seen in gardens and living room windows in the housing estates. I normally have a collection of election leaflets and someone would normally have knocked on my door by now.
But all I've seen is one Green party board in someone's garden that fell over 2 weeks ago and hasn't been erected again since, 1 Labour poster in a living room window, and the Tory MP has sent a single leaflet through the door, in which the colour blue does not feature and it only says that he's Conservative in the small print on the back. There's no local news on the consistency, I haven't seen any door knocking, no one is talking about it, leaflet drops haven't happened.
I thought it could be that it was a little too early. But the manifestos were launched last week. I've heard more from the neighbouring constituency (Wells and Mendip Hills which is pretty much brand new) and I drove through it and Bridgwater constituency yesterday because there was a crash on the M5. We went to pick up 2 arm chairs near Bridgwater, and when we entered the constituency boundary via the A38 (also snarled up) there were Blue placards everywhere (mentioned the candidate by name rather than Conservative). We decided to head down the towards Glastonbury and came through Cheddar on the way home, which is our neighbouring constituency of Wells and Mendip Hills. Every time we went through a village it was plastered with orange Lib Dem signs trying to get Tessa Munt back. Get back here and there's nothing at all. I haven't been since the election was called, but apparently central Bristol is plastered in Green and Red posters (not unusual in that city at election time).
Anyone else finding this? It strikes me as odd that not a single party seems to be putting funds into this constituency. It's like there's an election not even happening. It's a seat the Tories will be desperate to retain, and the exact kind of seat Starmer is targeting. Yet only 5 candidates are standing (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, and Reform) and you have to search quite hard on the internet to find anything about any of them. It all seems rather odd?
I’m getting quite aggressively targeted by the Conservatives and Labour on Facebook (the only social network I actively use), but they’re the only two. The Conservative targeting is more local in focus, with it mostly being videos of Mark Harper talking about his travels around the consistency and saying why we should re-elect him on 4th July, whereas the Labour stuff is from the countrywide Labour Party rather than our local Labour candidate. It’s usually either “Keir Starmer” or “The Labour Party”… and oddly “Welsh Labour” every now and then even though I live in England, not Wales.
In terms of locally, I’ve definitely seen a few campaign posters, although I agree that there perhaps aren’t quite as many as usual. Interestingly, the most prolific party posters around here actually seem to be the Green Party, who’ve started to get huge victories in the Forest of Dean at recent local elections (they now control the district council) and do seem to have a fair (or perhaps just vocal) following around where I live. There are also a good few “Vote Labour” posters, as well… although in the next village over, where my grandparents live, things have kicked off a bit. Someone went through the village in the dead of the night and tore down all of the “Vote Labour” placards, while mysteriously leaving all of the “Vote Green” ones up… clearly someone in the village
really doesn’t want people voting Labour!
Most fascinatingly, I’ve seen
no “Vote Conservative” placards this time… with the previously alluded to Tory results around here, there’s normally at least a fair modicum of Tory promotion in local homes, but I’ve seen
nothing this time around. I haven’t yet seen anything for Reform either… which is interesting given that I remember seeing quite a bit of “Vote UKIP” locally when Farage’s political project last stood around here in 2015 (UKIP was diminished beyond recognition in 2017 and did not have Farage’s affiliation, and the Brexit Party did not stand here in 2019 due to their pact with the Conservatives).
Touching on Forest of Dean for
@Matt N though, and despite it being considered as a safe Tory seat previously, current polling suggests there’s an
extremely good chance of the seat going to Labour. That’s thanks to Reform splitting the remaining votes on the right, and base don Labour picking up an additional 10-15% of the votes. That’ll likely explain the daft panicky ads Harper is running at the moment.
I‘ll be interested to see how the election pans out locally. For years, I’ve been resigned to a Labour vote not really meaning a whole lot around here, but it does look as though there’s a chance that Labour votes might finally mean something in the Forest. Polls for this seat seem very mixed; the YouGov MRP poll suggested that it’s a toss up between being a marginal Tory hold and a marginal Labour gain, some polls have suggested that Labour could win, and others have suggested that the Tories could hold it and Harper could retain his seat.
If we look to history, the only times in recent history where this seat has voted Labour were in 1997 and 2001, when Blair was at his absolute peak. The seat was Tory for years prior to 1997, quickly went Tory again when Blair lost popularity in 2005, and Mark Harper’s vote share only seems to have increased ever since. My prediction is that Labour will only win this seat if they have an absolutely
spectacular night nationwide (i.e. a 1997-style landslide). If the result ends up being more marginal in Labour’s favour or if the Tories defy the odds and win, I think the seat will probably stay Tory.
I think the election could be interesting, and for the first time in my lifetime, I'm interested to see how it pans out locally, as this is the first time I can remember where a Tory win hasn't seemed like a foregone conclusion. I think Labour definitely have a chance, although I think the Greens could also do quite well too. At very least, a sizeable, and vocal, minority of locals seem to support the Green Party around here. Furthermore, I think Reform UK could throw a real cat amongst the pigeons in the Forest; a sizeable minority voted UKIP in 2015 (they were the third largest party behind Conservatives and Labour, and got something like 20% of the vote, in the Forest in 2015). I don't see the Liberal Democrats doing too well here, though; despite us being in the Lib Dem heartland of South West England, this area has never had a significant Lib Dem support base. In fact, the Lib Dems actually didn't stand here at all in 2019.
I will say, though, that Mark Harper is not a terribly popular local MP, from my experience. The wide consensus is that he's pretty much invisible around here, with all of his Facebook posts attracting lots of snide comments such as "Harper in the Forest? Must be election time..." or moaning about how he's never seen around here or how he doesn't respond to people's emails. My one set of grandparents were saying to me that they would happily vote tactically for Labour just to get rid of Harper, and my other grandad doesn't exactly like him after he had a rather heated doorstep disagreement with him during the 2019 election campaign over Harper not responding to any of his emails...
On a side note, I find this seat’s consistent tendency to vote Tory quite peculiar. The Forest of Dean has a strong mining heritage, and I thought most mining areas were Labour through and through (or “Red Wall” Tory seats in 2019) after Margaret Thatcher decimated the mines? While the constituency is admittedly pretty rural, has some pretty affluent areas, and also leans considerably older than England as a whole, there are also some notable belts of deprivation locally, particularly within the Forest's larger ex-mining towns.
