Exeter’s electors go to the polls tomorrow to elect two new members of parliament. One will represent residents in the Exeter constituency, the boundaries of which have changed since the last general election, and another residents in the new Exmouth & Exeter East seat.
At the same time voters across the country will elect MPs in 648 other constituencies to form a new government. The national outcome is not in doubt. Labour leader Kier Starmer will be the next prime minister: it is only the scale of his majority that remains uncertain.
Some polling organisations predict a Labour landslide far larger than Tony Blair’s 1997 win that could leave the Conservatives with less than 100 seats, making “vote Labour to keep the Tories out” redundant as a campaign slogan. Some reckon the Liberal Democrats could even overtake the Conservatives to form the official opposition.
Labour’s Steve Race is sure to be the new Exeter constituency MP. He was parachuted into pole position here shortly after being re-elected to his Hoxton East & Shoreditch seat on Hackney council in 2022 for a second four-year term. He also contested the East Devon parliamentary constituency for Labour in the 2015 general election, coming fourth behind UKIP.
He has worked in corporate PR for thirteen years at companies including BCW, McKesson, Teneo and FleishmanHillard and has just joined lobbyist Lexington Communications. He also worked for Ben Bradshaw as a parliamentary researcher from September 2007 to February 2011 and again in 2015, for a few months, when Exeter’s retiring MP stood for election as Labour party deputy leader.
He has been an Exeter primary school governor since May last year.
With Steve Race a shoo-in, the contest for second place in the Exeter seat is more interesting. Much of the Conservative support that is still visible in local elections results is now east of the revised constituency border and the Green Party has received a bigger vote share in the nine city council wards that now make up the constituency at the past three local elections.
In newly-created Exmouth & Exeter East the outcome is much less certain, according to the MRP-based predictions that have been published during the election campaign. These combine a range of demographic, economic, social and political indicators with direct polling data to produce voting intention estimates at constituency level.
Electoral Calculus, FocalData, Ipsos, JL Partners, More in Common and YouGov all predict ex-Royal Marine and BAE Systems manager David Reed will win for the Conservatives here. All reckon Labour will come second except Electoral Calculus, which expects a close two-horse race between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
WeThink predicts a Labour victory for ex-employment lawyer and consultant Helen Dallimore, while Savanta has both parties on level pegging and Survation expects Reform UK to win.
Last year’s boundary changes, which left only 65 of the UK’s 650 constituencies entirely intact, are likely to have introduced errors into MRP predictions, particularly where constituency boundaries have changed significantly, as in Exmouth & Exeter East.
Other factors, including tactical voting, also affect MRP predictions. And this is the first time that five of these organisations have produced them. Only YouGov has an MRP track record spanning three general elections, and it also uses very large polling samples to inform its modelling.
It currently expects the Conservatives to beat Labour by a 4.6% vote share margin in Exmouth & Exeter East and The Economist, which combines nine MRP seat-level predictions with its own swing model, also has the Conservatives beating Labour here by a similar margin.
Once the Labour government has been elected, what might it do with the mighty parliamentary majority it is expected to wield? Its party manifesto, which contains 33 images of Kier Starmer but only mentions Brexit once, promises £7.4 billion of tax rises to pay for £4.8 billion of new spending.
However, Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson characterises its failure to be forthright about the parlous state of the public finances, alongside the other main parties, as a “conspiracy of silence”. The Resolution Foundation warns that current spending plans mean the country faces either a £33 billion public finance shortfall or a return to austerity.
Labour prompted dismay when it scrapped its 2021 commitment to invest £28 billion each year in green energy projects in February in response to public finance peril, after watering it down last year. It still says it will still spend £1.7 billion on a state-owned energy generation company, £1.5 billion on a green investment fund and another £1.1 billion on insulation grants and loans.
It says it will reuse space in primary school classrooms to provide 3,000 new nurseries but doesn’t say who will staff them and will recruit 6,500 new secondary school teachers despite teacher training targets only being met in one of the past eleven years. It also says it will hire 8,500 new “mental health staff” and pay for 13,500 urgent dentist appointments each week alongside 40,000 more operations, scans and hospital appointments.
But Nuffield Trust CEO Thea Stein says Labour’s health and care aspirations are “let down by a stunning lack of detail on exactly how the party intends to deliver these pledges” and King’s Fund CEO Sarah Woolnough says its “promises on social care reform could best be described as a plan to come up with a plan”.
All fifteen Exeter and Exmouth & Exeter East general elections candidates. Images: Democracy Club.
More locally, Labour says it will extend devolution. But the Devon & Torbay combined authority is set to make local government less accountable, not more. And it plans to overhaul local authority auditing, although it is city council resistance to improving its governance and financial and performance management that is the root of problems in Exeter, not the audit process itself.
Perhaps most significantly for our city, Labour says it will immediately reverse recent National Planning Policy Framework changes in the belief that policy reform (and its plans for several new towns) will facilitate the construction of 1.5 million new dwellings by the end of the parliament.
It says it will restore mandatory housing targets and further tilt the planning system in favour of developers by strengthening the “presumption in favour of sustainable development” that reduces the weight of local plan policies in planning decisions. Kier Starmer says the changes will come by the end of the month.
This means that the basis on which Exeter City Council can currently refuse unwanted greenbelt development proposals is going to disappear faster than you can say “five year housing land supply”.
Labour Party 2024 general election manifesto. Source: Labour Party.
There’s more, and other party manifestos are available. However, despite Labour’s single-word slogan, very little will change for most Exeter residents as continuity candidate Steve Race slips into Ben Bradshaw’s shoes. The newcomer nevertheless faces a key challenge.
Exeter’s Labour leadership has relied on the excuse that the Conservative government is to blame for all the things it has not achieved for years. But there will no longer be any reason for Exeter’s electors not to expect their new MP to lobby Whitehall for all the help the city needs with its housing, transport, economic and social problems. After all, this is what he does for a living.
His first ask should be a significant reduction in Exeter housing delivery targets, given the shortage of viable development land inside the city boundaries and the faulty ONS population growth projections that are distorted by Exeter’s disproportionately large student population.
This is the only way to protect the city from developers that have it by the throat, not to mention its remaining green hinterlands, once Labour is in power in Westminster.
Meanwhile, with public trust and confidence in government at record lows and the general election on course to be the least representative on record, the bigger risk is that the winner-take-all approach relished by the city council’s political leadership will define the coming parliament too.
Labour could use its decisive majority to replace the UK’s increasingly unrepresentative First Past the Post electoral system with proportional representation at all levels of government. Renewing the franchise at its most basic level, so every vote counts and every voice is heard, is essential to restoring trust and engagement in politics.
Instead, for all the fine words in its manifesto about strengthening democracy and putting the country’s interests first, the 45% who now “almost never” trust British governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above their own political interests may turn out to be right.
The Exeter constituency election result is expected by 3.30am on Friday morning from the Riverside Leisure Centre count. The Exmouth & Exeter East result will not come until much later: a declaration from the count at Exeter Science Park is not expected until around 5am.
Exeter Observer’s 2024 general elections briefing covers when, where and how to vote in person, by post and by proxy as well as voter ID requirements, new regulations for postal votes and boundary changes in both constituencies.
