What Britain's pubs tell us about Labour's electoral strategy
3 min read
Politics and pubs go hand in hand. That is why the ‘Marston’s Belt’, Labour’s new fertile ground, is worth more careful consideration than it first appears.
Pub chains are remarkable. They are one of the UK’s truly regional cultural touchstones.
Many of our inner-cities are dotted by Wetherspoon’s. Affluent suburbs in the South East have Young’s pubs and in the leafy Southern countryside there is a domination of Greene Kings. Quietly, we are earmarked by the pubs we live closest to.
Any geographic marker (our nearest pub chains included) is going to tell us something about the 2024 vote, because the 2024 General Election was very weird. Uniform national swings were thrown out the window. Labour had an incredibly efficient votespread and the party made more gains in rural and semi-rural seats than ever before. On top of this, the shaky 2019 Conservative coalition was pulled in every direction. Any breakdown, no matter how seemingly arbitrary, tells us something significant about the election, as this was an election shaped by geography.
With that in mind, where did Labour earn the most support and do the best? The Marston’s belt. Those constituencies that have more Marston’s than any other chain of pub.
Among the pub chains measured (Wetherspoon’s, Marston’s, Young’s, Greene King and Fuller’s), Marston’s had the most branches overall and had the most geographic control. The brand dominates the north of England and there is not a single constituency in Wales where it is not the most dominant pub chain.
Therefore, it is in those northern seats, the seats that typified Labour’s catastrophic loss in 2019, that there was a huge amount of swing towards Labour. In 2019, Conservatives held two thirds (66 per cent) of the seats in Marston’s constituencies. Now, Conservatives hold a measly 16 per cent. After the election, Labour hold 71 per cent of Marston seats and 41 per cent of seats where Marston’s is the largest pub chain was a Labour gain in 2024.
It’s not just about the raw seat changes, the trend is evident in more detailed data.
On average, there was an 11 per cent swing to Labour across all constituencies. In Marston’s constituencies, this goes up to 13 per cent and is the highest Labour swing in the pub chains measured. Even more notable is that the constituencies saw an absolute decimation of Conservative vote share, with a drop of 23 per cent of votes for Conservatives in these areas, the biggest drop in Tory vote share.
Do I think Labour strategists will be doing research visits to Marston’s pubs in the near future? Probably not. However, this is all to say that we need to see 2024 as an election that was coloured by geography. Labour swung hard where it needed to, swung softly where it could. And, it turns out, the Marston’s belt is where that hard swing did them best.
Calum Weir is Political and Social Research Executive at Opinium.
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