– towns like Harlow and Peterborough will decide the election

‘With a history voting both Conservative and Labour, they lack the tribal ties and buyer’s remorse that will be in play in the Red Wall’ Yet whenever the PM does finally decide to go to the country and campaign for re-election, his party will be missing the one Tory politician whose own legacy is almost certain to outlast anything Sunak could hope for., is the Tory MP whose campaigning led to the Cameron-Clegg coalition to freeze fuel duty way back in 2010 and it’s remained in place ever since.

Just as importantly, the Harlow MP’s drive for “blue collar Conservativism” also played a key role in persuading his party to lean into Labour’s, with George Osborne introducing an enhanced “National Living Wage” in 2015. And their high concentration of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers – plus their lower than average number of public sector workers – means these really are bellwether constituencies, where a switch to one party normally signals a change of government.

The often wafer-thin majorities in New Towns ram home just how many floating voters there are. Labour’s Bill Rammell won Harlow by just 97 votes in 2005, while Tory Mike Penning had a 499-vote margin that year in Hemel Hempstead. After the 2017 election, Labour conducted some soul searching research specifically in these seats. It discovered that while its anti-austerity policies were popular, too many voters distrusted the party on Brexit, immigration, support for small business and economic credibility. The disastrous result of 2019 suggested none of those lessons was learned – the Tory majority in Harlow increased to a massive 14,000.

Halfon is not the only “New Town Tory” who has decided not to contest the next election. Steve McPartland in Stevenage, Henry Smith in Crawley, Lucy Allan in Telford, Mike Penning in Hemel Hempstead will quit the field too, perhaps anticipating another generational shift taking place.

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