Forget the history and the investment. Even Sunderland is tempted by Tories

Memories of Thatcher are receding here in the north-east, and the idea of a spectacular Labour defeat is all too plausible
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The idea of a Conservative MP in Sunderland has been an outlandish notion for most of the past 40 years. It is the most solid of Labour cities in a region that has been loyal at every parliamentary election: in the whole of the north-east, there is only one Conservative MP, in the picturesque rural constituency of Hexham. Surely Sunderland, of all places, will hold out against the appeal of David Cameron's Tories?

The only way to find out was to go and find out how the speculation on the future of Gordon Brown's government and the country's financial system reverberates there. In the autumn sunshine, there is plenty of evidence of how loyal the Labour government has been to Sunderland. Ten years of public investment have brought new schools, health centres, children's centres, business parks and housing developments in every part of the city. Plenty more is in the pipeline, with a school due to be rebuilt every year over the next 14 years and huge sums announced recently by Hazel Blears for more regeneration.

Hazel Blears: 'We have never won an election with just our core vote'
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But patience, loyalty and gratitude are virtues that seem to carry little political weight, and Sunderland Central - the boundaries have been redrawn to create a new seat - could prove to be a spectacular Tory gain at the next election. Likely to be the first seat to declare on election night (it's a point of local pride), the seat could ring the death knell for Labour. A Tory win would signal the sort of dramatic Tory revival projected by polls such as that in the Observer yesterday: if the Tories can win in Sunderland, they can win almost anywhere. The Electoral Calculus website already puts the seat as a Tory gain, one of the tightest marginals in the country. So how on earth does a place like Sunderland get tempted by Toryism, and what shortcomings does it reveal in Labour?

The first surprise is that history carries less weight than one might imagine. The Ryhope ward in Sunderland is a former pit village but it went Conservative on a very tight margin last May in the local elections, to everyone's astonishment. Its councillor, Christopher Fairs, was 19 when the Tories lost in 1997, and he argues that the history of pit closures and the devastation under Thatcher has become a distant memory to enough younger voters. Even those old enough to remember high levels of unemployment don't always regard it as a reason to determine their vote; as one former Labour voter puts it, there have been plenty of job losses under Labour as well. The decline of Sunderland's manufacturing base is no longer a crime that can be laid solely at the Conservatives' door. Labour's own mantras about the pace of global change have succeeded in exonerating Thatcherism.

When Labour conjures up the past as a method of attack in Sunderland on the Tories, it does so at its peril. Harking back to the past doesn't generate confidence that it is a party with ideas about the future. One can understand why Labour is tempted to do so - it was a very successful Tory scare tactic against Labour in 1987 and 1992 - but it's not going to work the other way round. And if the history is not of much interest, it follows that discussions about whether Cameron has or has not changed the Conservative party are irrelevant. The Tory voter in Sunderland who acknowledges that the minimum wage has been a success sees it as no reason to vote for Labour, given that the Tories have come round to the idea. It's not fair - but then politics doesn't work on fairness.

The second surprise is how little credit Labour gets for the massive state investment in a place like Sunderland. Chris Mullin, the much-respected Labour MP whose constituency is now mostly covered by the new seat, is retiring. He admits to being more than a little baffled by what he calls a "disconnect". He was canvassing on an estate that had been transformed by a big regeneration scheme. At the doorstep of a brand new house, a woman told him: "I'm not voting, you've done nothing for us." Mullin was left speechless as she slammed the door. He defends the huge sums as essential to begin to repair the social damage of a "lost generation" who grew up unemployed, and he admits it's a long-term project that needs probably a generation to succeed.

But the Tories can make an appeal to those sections of the working class who don't see this as a matter of patience and see Labour as having been far too generous to the undeserving. They pride themselves on their hard work and deeply resent their taxes funding a benefit system which they argue is being used as a lifestyle choice rather than a reciprocal commitment to a shared safety net. A former Sunderland Labour voter who plans to vote Tory for the first time talks of seeing the same people on benefit in the betting shop for over a decade: how come they have disposable income for a flutter? The same sentiment feeds into the deeply held anxiety over immigration; "foreigners" coming to live off "our" taxes. This is expressed as often by Labour voters as Tories, despite the fact that Sunderland's immigrant population is small.

Meanwhile, there's a long litany of complaints about Labour's record, from the botched abolition of the 10p tax rate (which affects an area like Sunderland with a below-average per capita income particularly badly) to the perceived squandering of money on schemes such as teaching single parents to cook. Sunderland's model of inner-city regeneration - fancy apartments, marina and coffee shops - looks fragile in the current economic climate, and critics say it never had much to offer anyway to those estates round the city where 40% of children are born to single parents and rates of incapacity benefit remain stubbornly high.

The appeal of Toryism to working-class voters has often baffled people on the left - they don't see it coming until it's too late, as in 1979. A comparable shift seems to be under way now, and the only question is how deep will be the inroads into Labour heartlands. It takes only a small number of Tory votes and a lot of disillusioned Labour voters who don't bother to turn out to make a seat like Sunderland Central Tory.

Gordon Brown's pollster, Deborah Mattinson, seems right that people are not entirely persuaded by Cameron, but that should be no comfort. They don't need to be. This political shift is not about the appeal of an individual leader but about a set of sentiments of which Labour has failed to give an adequate account: individual self-reliance, responsibility, family values and community. It may sound like apple pie, and Labour wouldn't disagree with much of it. Nor does it stack up into a coherent credible set of policies, but on the doorstep that's not how voters judge politicians - they're not policy wonks. Successful politics is ensuring that the voter hears, through the clutter of modern media, a set of symbolic messages. Cameron, for instance, may never implement tax breaks for marriage, but suggesting them has enabled him to position himself as a politician who backs the family. That's how you get the oddest of political outcomes - a Sunderland Tory who feels this Eton-educated southerner is speaking his language.

· A series of discussions from Comment is Free and Soundings journal starts with Is the future Conservative? at Kings Place, London, on October 6. For tickets, visit or phone 0844 264 0321 and quote the Guardian reader offer

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