The new seat of Waveney Valley cuts through the border country of Norfolk and Suffolk and is attracting national attention. This is due in no small part to Adrian Ramsay, the Green Party co-leader, who is standing to become the local MP. Carved into being last year by the Boundary Commission, the constituency takes in parts of four seats previously held by Conservative MPs. The new seat stretches across five market towns as well as the villages which dot this largely agricultural landscape.
I grew up in Harleston, one of those market towns, and returned this week to attend a packed-out election husting at the local church. There was broad alignment on some local issues. Both candidates on the right—Richard Rout for the Conservatives, Scott Huggins for Reform—agreed with the four centre and left candidates, Adrian Ramsay, Labour’s candidate Gurpreet Padda, the Liberal Democrat John Shreeve and the Social Democratic Party hopeful Maya Severyn on the need to rethink the National Grid’s unpopular proposals to erect electricity pylons across a much-loved stretch of the valley (following pushback, a public consultation on an alternative design is now open). Audience questions clustered around poor local public services and the lack of affordable housing. When Huggins blamed immigration, there was some audience pushback.
For decades, East Anglia has been a safe Conservative stronghold but the area’s history of centre-left activism may swell local hopes of a progressive win. Some 200 years ago, agricultural workers known as the Swing Rioters smashed up farm machinery across the east of England in protest at falling wages. In the early 1900s, the Burston school strike, in which pupils walked out the classroom to protest the sacking of teachers who held socialist beliefs, galvanised local people and trade unionism. The strike is still commemorated every year.
In the 1970s and 1980s, some left-leaning and environmental types moved to the area, looking for decent affordable housing and a pastoral landscape. But those centre-left voters have never tasted national victory at the ballot box in East Anglia, where the green fields on either side of most roads have always been littered with blue Tory placards at election times. Not so this year. As I drive from Diss to Harleston the fields are empty, except for a poster for the Reform party by an overgrown roundabout, the lone campaign poster among various placards for local services, including a furniture store and another offering gardening services.
Instead, entering Harleston on the London Road, it is Green and Labour party posters that vie for attention. It seems that progressive voters have been galvanised by an energetic campaign from Adrian Ramsay. A survey commissioned by his party and carried out by pollsters WeThink/Omnisis between 6th to 14th June suggests that the party is polling at 23 per cent in the constituency, tailed by the Conservatives on 15 per cent. Labour is trailing on 11 per cent and Reform UK on 10 per cent. The biggest group, however, was of undecided voters, at 34 per cent of those polled.
Ramsay tells me that the strong local record of the Greens, now controlling Mid Suffolk and leading East Suffolk councils is helping to woo voters. He senses a shift locally in voter loyalty. “There are people who have always voted Labour or Lib Dem here and want to make a change this time, as well as centre-ground Conservative voters who feel let down by standards in public life.”
Labour voters seem genuinely torn as they weigh up casting their votes. One local artist tells me: “It’s a gamble. We are scared of letting the Tories in.” Susie Capon, a former local NHS nurse, has always voted Labour: “This is the first time I’ve considered voting Green,” she says. She is now leafletting for the party and says that older people who normally vote Conservative in the town are telling her that they may vote Green, with the recent betting scandal engulfing the Conservative party influencing their decision. With the Labour vote in this area never amounting to much, the party has never tried very hard to sway the valley’s voters. Now it looks like a missed opportunity. Joe Schofield, a sports magazine editor and Labour loyalist, says: “It could be I’ve swallowed the Green Kool-Aid, but Labour has never shown well here. I want to see the Tory vote destroyed.”
Gurpreet Padda, an environmental scientist and the Labour candidate, dismisses the Omnisis poll and urges voters to look at the party’s policies. “Labour is projected to win nationally, and we want Waveney Valley to be part of that,” she tells me, adding that being in government means important local issues can be given proper consideration.
Both the left and right in this local contest seem to be vulnerable to a split vote, which seems not to be replicated elsewhere. Ipsos’s so-called MRP seat predictions, with data collection carried out between 7th and 12th June, calls the contest here a toss-up, with Reform on 28 per cent and the Greens on 33 per cent. The Conservatives tail them on 23 per cent and Labour comes fourth with 10 per cent. Reform’s Scott Huggins is unrepentant about potentially splitting the right-wing vote. “I’d be gutted if the Greens or Labour got in,” he says, but he blames the Conservatives for moving into what he describes as the centre ground.
Conservative voters I spoke to seem resigned to defeat. Terry Clarkson, a retired motor trader who lives in one of the constituency’s villages, says he will vote Conservative “out of duty”, though adding he expects the party to “get a stuffing” both locally and nationally.
For Waveney Valley to actually go Green, however, would mean a huge shift in voting patterns. Lovisa Moller, director of analysis for the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), points to the thinking of political experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher on what the 2019 general election result would have looked like, mapped to the new constituencies. That would suggest a 57 per cent vote share for the Greens in Brighton Pavilion, but only 9 per cent in Waveney Valley.
Moller adds that NatCen’s analysis of voter types in its constituency map suggests that “Middle Britons” and “Well-off Traditionalists” are over-represented in the seat, rather than the “Urban Progressives” who have until now made up the bedrock of the Green vote: “To win in Waveney Valley… they will likely need to secure support outside of their most obvious supporter base.” She says that “Our model does show progressives in the countryside, but they are more common in larger cities.”
Terence Blacker, a writer and musician who lives locally and is normally a staunch Labour voter, smells change. “The Greens have taken us seriously,” he says. “This area was Conservative to its bones; to have this new constituency combined with the implosion of the government suddenly puts everything in play.”
Looking at recent polling, it’s pretty steady that the Greens are likely to get two seats. On the face of it, that would mean that Waveney Valley wouldn’t be a gain, but the local showing of support for the party is surprising. As Lovisa Moller puts it, the seat is “an outlier amongst outliers”. Rural progressive voters are having their moment.
