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TERRY DIGNAN: St Albans. One of many prosperous
towns in southern England which went Labour at the last election. Rising
incomes, soaring house prices and falling unemployment should mean Labour
will hold on to these seats. That's what the opinion polls say. But do
the polls tell the whole story?
Here in St Albans the
Tories believe they can win - and, surprisingly, Labour appears to agree.
In Tony Blair's nightmare scenario, come election day, core Labour supporters
stay at home while Conservative voters flock to the polls, enthused by
William Hague's strong campaigning on issues like the Euro and the Dome.
In truth, few people believe the Conservatives can win this General Election,
but that still leaves a huge amount of uncertainty over the actual result.
Can Hague slash Blair's majority or will Labour be returned with another
landslide victory?
TARIQ; "Would you like a cup of
tea?"
DIGNAN: This young family say they're
unlikely to make the effort to vote Labour again. Tariq and Nikki expected
more from Tony Blair - better jobs, decent wages, more money for public
services.
TARIQ: They've built the Millennium
Dome which they could've put money into homeless people, into anything,
into benefits, into hospitals.
NIKKI: Yes, I understood that Labour
was supposed to do things with the NHS and make it better and everything,
but the hospital in St Albans is just closing down more and more. And,
like, I couldn't have my baby in St Albans and I had to travel, spending
money on getting to the appointments.
DIGNAN: And what about the next
election, are you going to vote for them?
TARIQ: No, I'm not going to vote
for Labour again. Unless they can actually prove that they are actually
gonna make an effort or just talk about it you know.
DIGNAN: Labour fears seats like
St Albans will be lost if its so-called core vote abstains. Peter Kellner,
an expert on voting behaviour, who lives in St Albans, says that here in
London Colney, a less well-off part of the constituency, fewer than a quarter
of voters turned out in last year's local elections.
PETER KELLNER: Observation, certainly of
recent elections, local, European elections - those types - show an enormous
disparity between the turnout in middle class areas and the turnout in
working class areas. Now if that disparity were to persist in a general
election, then the results would be that Labour support would be significantly
below what the opinion polls say and that the Tory support would be significantly
above what the opinion polls say.
DIGNAN: Wednesday is market day
and the town's Labour MP Kerry Pollard is manning the party stall. He
says it's going to be a hard slog holding on here at the general election,
and he takes seriously the Prime Minister's warning that seats like St
Albans will fall to the Conservatives if just one in five Labour voters
stays at home. Since 1997 turnouts have collapsed in Parliamentary by-elections
in Labour-held seats.
KERRY POLLARD MP: Labour has not lost any single
by-election which is a first for any government in, in office. But what
has happened is the, the turnout has been remarkably low. And I think that
is a worry and that's why, I think the Prime Minister's absolutely right
to say, let's not be complacent.
DIGNAN: To give core voters a reason
to turn out, from April the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown will
put more cash into the pockets of less well-off families through changes
in the tax system. There'll be extra funding for childcare and pensions.
But it's not just about money - how the Government presents its policies
to Labour supporters is regarded as equally important.
GWYNETH DUNWOODY MP: There is a real need to spend
money but the other real need is to stop talking nonsense and I think that
when you say for example, about comprehensive schools, where most of our
children are being educated, that they are bog standard, you lose an enormous
amount of support.
DIGNAN: If Labour voters in these
marginals need a further incentive to turn out, Gordon Brown will try to
entice them with a pre-election budget.
UNNAMED MAN: Have a look at that - all
that steak for a tenner.
DIGNAN: He may have up to eighteen
billion pounds of surplus revenue to spend. It's argued he should target
more money at those core voters who've missed out on the help Labour has
given elsewhere to its urban heartlands.
KELLNER: If I were a Labour strategist
advising him, I would say help families, rather than help alleviate poverty.
Go for the people like those who live around here, where their incomes
are too high to qualify for welfare benefits but too low for them to feel
really comfortable.
DIGNAN: But will the core vote
here in St Albans really abstain? Professor John Curtice says the party
is exaggerating the threat to guard against complacency among party activists.
He derides Tony Blair's claim Labour will lose sixty seats if twenty per
cent of Labour voters stay at home.
PROFESSOR JOHN CURTICE: If we take the ICM poll this week
we discover that in fact Labour voters are only two per cent less likely
to say they're going to turn out and vote than Conservative voters are.
So there isn't anything like the twenty per cent difference. Now that
kind of difference might cost Labour two, three, four seats but it's not
going to cost them anything like the sixty seats. So, at the end of the
day, yes Labour, of course, will want to work to get its vote out - all
parties do, and they will always certainly want their activists to do so,
but the idea that Labour face a serious problem of the scale that's publicly
being talked about it is frankly not credible.
DIGNAN: How the Liberal Democrats
perform in marginal Labour seats like St Albans may have a crucial effect
on the outcome of this General Election. Last time round, many people voted
Labour instead of Liberal Democrat because they thought that was the best
way of getting the Tories out. Labour is desperate to hold on to these
so-called tactical voters but here at local Liberal Democrat offices plans
are afoot to win them back.
UNNAMED MAN: Hopefully we can get those
people to turn out again in May or April, whenever it is.
DIGNAN: The party has its eyes
on those streets where Liberal Democrat voters switched to Labour in ninety-seven.
They'll return to the fold, it's suggested, because they, too, are disappointed
with the Government's record.
NICK RYJKE: I don't think Labour's core
vote in places like St Albans is high enough for them to win on their
own. I think that they need additional support from people like the Liberal
Democrats but I don't think at this election they're going to get it because
Liberal Democrats are disappointed with what they've seen from Labour in
power.
DIGNAN: This Labour MP says
it's absolutely vital he holds on to Liberal Democrat support. He's urging
Tony Blair to keep the promise of a referendum on the voting system, a
sign of his amiable attitude to Liberal Democrats.
KERRY POLLARD: I've worked very hard to
keep those Liberal Democrats who voted for me last time, there must've
been many who voted for me, on board. For example issues that I'm very
keen on, the student fees, I voted against the Government on that which
is in accord with Liberal Democrat policy.
CURTICE: At the last election we
can estimate that probably between twenty-five and thirty-five Labour seats
were the product of tactical voting by Liberal Democrat voters lending
their vote to Labour because they were so keen to get rid of the Conservatives.
But the evidence now is that we're not going to see tactical voting on
that scale.
CHARLES ELPHICKE: We want to build a better St
Albans. We're going to win here today and we're going to win here at the
General Election as well. Great - thanks very much.
DIGNAN: There's an election in
St Albans today and the Tories are on the stump, led by their prospective
parliamentary candidate. A seat on the parish council has fallen vacant
in an area which deserted the Conservatives at the last General Election.
But time may be running out for these Conservative Party activists.
If they are to have any chance of stopping Tony Blair winning the General
Election by another landslide, they've got to persuade people living in
better off areas like this to re discover the habit of voting Conservative.
It's claimed that middle
income earners who voted for Tony Blair will come home to the Tories after
four years of Labour tax rises. They're being promised tax cuts without
harming public services.
ELPHICK: We're not going to be
cutting public spending, we're going to be cutting public waste, areas
where there is spending on bureaucracy and rather than on services. We
want to see more spending on health and schools while ensuring that services
are run more efficiently and that waste and bureaucracy is cut out. That
way, we can cut taxes by eight billion pounds.
DIGNAN: This couple used to be
active Conservative members when Margaret Thatcher was their MP. Having
rejected the party at the last election they're now not sure how they'll
vote. They'd certainly welcome tax cuts but they worry about how Mr Hague
will find the money for them.
KEVIN BISHOP: They haven't given their
policies in great detail. They say they're going to reduce taxes but what
I'd like to know is how they're actually going to reduce them.
MARY BISHOP: If I felt the cuts would be
taken from the hospital, that would be a great concern because we've already
lost our hospital in St Albans quite a while ago and we have to travel
to Hemel, to Hemel Hempstead to the main hospital there.
DIGNAN: The Conservatives can celebrate
- they won the parish by-election. Some believe they could win the General
Election on a single pledge - to keep Britain out of the Euro. The star
guest at this evening's dinner says that's a better strategy than trying
to compete with Labour on bread and butter issues.
ANNOUNCER: So without further ado I shall
simply introduce Mr Frederick Forsythe.
FREDERICK FORSYTHE: We cannot take on Mr Brown
on the economy and the public services and win convincingly simply because
we are going to run into a wall of disbelief. Whether we do or we do
not have a, const.. a currency or our own, five years from now, is actually
more important."
DIGNAN: An election campaign fought
on the Euro might enthuse these activists but fail to win back Tory deserters
- according to the polls.
PETER KELLNER: The problem is there's no
real evidence yet that the Euro is a top issue as far as the voters are
concerned - it comes sixth, seventh, eighth when pollsters say what are
the most important issues facing Britain or what are the most important
issues that affect you and your family.
KEVIN BISHOP: I don't think that's a good
idea to make the Euro or the European issue very big. It's.. it might
be important to the politicians, but the man in the street - and that includes
myself naturally - doesn't understand, probably half the issues involved
in the Euro.
DIGNAN: The Conservatives feel
compelled to say that the polls have got it wrong - otherwise party members
both here and in other marginals might lose heart. Labour, too, doubts
their accuracy - to avoid complacency.
KELLNER: Even if it's blindingly
obvious as polling day approaches that it's going to be a Labour landslide,
you'll still find both parties saying it's going to be a close run thing.
Now there is a half truth in there even if it does end up as a runaway
Labour victory.
DIGNAN: The polls say Labour is
heading for another landslide. Yet they've got it spectacularly wrong in
the past. And it's in the parties' own interests to at least pretend that
they're wrong again.
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