This year’s general election is expected to be a disaster for the Conservatives. A 1997 scale collapse of their vote only four years after their 2019 landslide victory.
Take the London constituency of Chingford and Woodford Green. It’s the former stomping ground of Norman Tebbit, the erstwhile “Chingford Skinhead”. Iain Duncan Smith, former Conservative Party leader and arch Brexiteer (widely known as IDS), was Tebbit’s chosen successor and has held this seat since 1992. He is now under serious threat from Faiza Shaheen, the Labour candidate, who slashed IDS’s majority to 1,262 in 2019 – she even garnered the celebrity endorsement of Hugh Grant. Today, Shaheen is polling at 54% of the vote.
No longer a Conservative bastion
How could this turnaround happen in Chingford and Woodford Green, a Conservative bastion once held by Winston Churchill, whose statue still stands in the constituency?
Maybe because Chingford and Woodford Green straddles two London boroughs, Waltham Forest and Redbridge. A walk around North Chingford’s large 19th-century town houses bordering Epping Forest, and Woodford’s upmarket Monkhams Estate and prestigious Bancrofts School, might suggest prosperous suburbia. But go a little further into Chingford Mount and you’ll find a more familiar picture of outer London: increasingly decrepit high streets of barber shops, takeaway joints, and closed banks suggesting daily financial struggles.
While the north of the constituency traditionally turns to Essex and was a part of the county until 1964, Chingford and Woodford Green is really the front line of what the London School of Economics (LSE) Prof Tony Travers has called the Londonisation of the home counties.
The London arrivals
The 2021 census found that 39% of Waltham Forest’s residents were born outside the UK. These are unlikely be natural Tories. On top of that change the outer boroughs and home counties are receiving an influx of London arrivals – young people priced out by soaring rents and house prices, and households seeking to raise a family in the suburbs. With these London arrivals come London politics. London is a Labour city, and it voted resolutely for Remain. Here, IDS is surprisingly vulnerable. Polls indicate the majority of UK voters would vote to rejoin the EU and, with its close proximity to the City, the constituency’s 2016 vote was marginally in favour of Remain even though IDS was one of the notorious Eurosceptic “bastards”.
The Tories have already felt the electoral impact of Londonisation with its emphasis on rents and cost of living: they lost 380 seats across the South East in the 2023 local elections. Some of this was tactical voting, but the younger demographic brings a change in priorities. The losses will not be easily recovered.
Faiza Shaheen
Labour’s candidate Faiza Shaheen is articulate, and highly intelligent. A “Chingfordian” (to use the local term), she is quick to remind voters of her shifts at Greggs, as Sadiq Khan is to remind voters of his father’s job on the buses. Shaheen attended Chingford Foundation School, studied at Oxford, and has had stints at New York University and the LSE. She was also the Director of the think tank, Centre for Labour & Social Studies (CLASS).
Labour has played on this strikingly traditional “working-class girl made good” story. It fits with the seat. Chingford was once where working-class East Londoners decamped when they had saved enough. The Krays are buried in the cemetery.
Shaheen’s campaign taps into London concerns, telling a story of inequality, spending cuts, and the resultant decline in public services. She refers to IDS’s stint at the Department for Work and Pensions, frequently mentioning his keynote policies – Universal Credit (UC) and the bedroom tax – as drivers of poverty. Her disabled mother died aged 64 in 2017, and she attributes that early death to the stress of navigating the new UC system and an NHS struggling after years of Tory rule. In 2018 she had referred to her “duty” to unseat IDS “because of the misery he has created in so many people’s lives”.
Will Labour benefit from local antipathy towards the Tories?
IDS has thrown himself into local campaigns to rebuild the local Whipps Cross Hospital, to open a second exit at Chingford Station, and to keep a local community library open. After thirty years, he is working to be the local MP tackling the concerns of local people. He maintains a tough stance on China and Brexit.
The Lib Dems and Reform will also be fielding candidates. These are unlikely to make a significant impact although Reform could hit the Conservative vote further.
Both IDS and Shaheen are fighting this election on local issues. IDS is campaigning for the commuter and the community, but antipathy towards the Tories is such that Shaheen could say nothing and still win. This year’s will be a “winds of change election” and it seems IDS will succumb, like many worthy and unworthy Conservative MPs.
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