WATFORD, England — One of the curious things about the British election is that the Labour party is campaigning largely on national issues while candidates of the Conservative party, the lead partner in the coalition with the Liberal Democrats that has governed the United Kingdom for the past five years, are concentrating on local issues and tailoring their appeals to local matters. A case in point is Richard Harrington, running for a second term in Watford, just inside London’s M-25 beltway. Watford used to be a proudly separate factory town, with Europe’s two largest printing operations and lorry and aircraft engine factories, and generally voted Labour. Now it is a commuting town, with 50 percent of workers commuting to central London, and an unemployment rate of only 1.6 percent, according to Harrington: an overheated labor market if anything. In 2010 it was one of Britain’s closest three-way marginals, between Labour (which held the seat since 1997), Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
One might suppose that Harrington would emphasize the Conservative coalition’s economic record: job increases in five years greater than all the rest of the European Union put together, a 72 percent work force participation (compared with 62 percent in the United States), booming home prices. He does make these points, but his campaign literature features other things: a foldout leaflet features on a map of the constituency locations labeled from A to Z in which he has expanded, financed, built or rebuilt schools. Education bureaucrats, he notes, don’t do a good job of projecting classloads. Many of the Watford schools are academies (like American charter schools) encouraged by former Education Secretary Michael Gove. It appears that parents with school-age children have been attracted by these schools. And they may be pleased as well that Harrington secured funding from Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne for a Metropolitan Line tube station, to supplement Watford’s rail commuting services. Osborne, a shrewd political strategist, surely understood that Watford was one of the few three-party marginals in 2010, and that Harrington won after the Conservative candidate finished third in 2005. And he surely knew that Harrington, a successful resort property developer, has raised large sums for the national Conservative party.
Gove’s successful education reforms were a good deed that did not go unpunished: He was shuffled from the Education ministry for the chief whip position last year, in large part because he was hugely unpopular with the National Union of Teachers (yes, the acronym is NUT), which resented his initiatives for accountability and competition. But his reforms have created constituencies of parents on the ground in places like Watford: They will fight any Labour efforts to put their schools at the mercy of the teacher union whatever the national government says.
A couple of conclusions might be drawn from this contest. First, as British parties fragment, politics seems to become more local: Harrington’s chief rival seems to be not the quiescent Labour candidate but the Lib Dem, Dorthy Thornhill, who has won three terms as Watford’s mayor. Nationally, localism helps Conservatives, since they have more incumbents who have had five years to work on local issues. Second, macroeconomic issues do not necessarily drive votes. Despite Britain’s good economic performance, most polls show the Conservatives running below the 37 percent of the popular vote they received in 2010, while polls show the vote for their coalition partners the Lib Dems at less than half the 24 percent of the popular vote they won then. So while local experience helps Thornhill, national trends hurt her. Third, population-gaining areas like Watford are underrepresented in Britain’s current districting plan, which dates back before the 2011 national census. That means that Conservatives need a several-point lead over Labour in popular votes to gain more seats in the House of Commons.
