The Labour party's "southern discomfort" – its poor electoral performance in the south of England – is a well-known phenomenon.
But a third of the seats Labour lost to the Conservatives in May's general election were in the Midlands – in Derby, Telford and Corby. Labour now needs to turn its attention to its slow-burning but insistent "Midlands Misery".
New research which I will be presenting in Aston at Progress' West Midlands conference this Saturday reveals that Labour is actually doing slightly better in parts of the south as that region becomes more like London. But in the Midlands, outside the region's main cities, Labour has slipped backwards.
Since Labour's big loss to the Conservatives in 1992, in the Midlands there has been a fairly straightforward improvement in the Conservative position at Labour's expense.
A map of England would show the blue part of the country creeping north behind a line which runs from Suffolk in the east through Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire.
A set of Midlands seats seems to be slipping away from Labour. Constituencies such as South Derbyshire and North-west Leicestershire look as if they are going the same way as seats such as Wellingborough or North-west Norfolk, which were often Labour in the past but are now only winnable with a big national landslide.
Some other constituencies where Labour victories might have been taken for granted before the 1980s, such as Cannock Chase and Nuneaton, all now demand swings to Labour which would only happen if the party were winning a majority in England.
The picture is mixed, though. On the other side of the ledger for Labour there are some metropolitan and suburban seats where Labour has dug in, like Gedling, and Wolverhampton South-west, which was one of the few places that Labour won back from the Tories this year.
Birmingham itself (including Sutton Coldfield) has swung by 8.3 per cent to Labour since 1992 (with the Conservatives down a lot – 13 percentage points, and Labour up 3.6 points). But the outlying counties have swung to the Conservatives since 1992: Staffordshire by 3.7 per cent, Shropshire by 4.8 per cent, Herefordshire and Worcestershire by 2.9 per cent, Warwickshire by 1.9 per cent.
The pro-Labour swing in the parts of the West Midlands metropolitan area beyond Birmingham is much lower. This reflects a movement of voters from Labour to UKIP. Labour cannot win any more seats in Birmingham itself (Sutton Coldfield is not going to go over!), and the healthy results for the party here in 2015 compared to 2010 yielded a gain only in Yardley, from the Liberal Democrats.
But the poor results in the outlying counties meant Labour failed to gain apparently easy target seats like North Warwickshire, where the Tory majority had been just 54 votes.
Why the anti-Labour change? If the Midlands are becoming more like the south in terms of how it votes we might expect to see this reflected in things like house prices, normally a strong sign of how people might vote.
But my new research shows that much of Midlands house prices are still to recover their pre-crash levels, unlike the south.
Instead, I have dug deeper to examine if the way people live is changing. I looked at how car-ownership changed between the 2001 and 2011 census.
This revealed that the Midlands has become more like the south, with more people owning more cars, and generally having more privatised patterns of work and behaviour.
Many of the bad Labour performances in the Midlands are in areas with very high figures on the car indicator – places like Rugby, Stafford and North Warwickshire. This suggests that voting patterns are changing according to the different, more individualised ways people are now living their lives.
Meanwhile, low scores on the car indicator, which reflect areas with better public transport, and which have more young people and a poorer population, follow relatively good Labour performances.
These include some of the most urban areas outside London, like Nottingham and Birmingham itself.
Of course ethnicity is an extremely important political indicator too.
In some ways, Labour's problems in the Midlands outside the main cities are more to do with a lack of resemblance to the south.
Some of the worst Labour results here this year were in areas where the white British proportion of the population is well above average. Places such as North-west Leicestershire (95.3 per cent white British in 2011) and Cannock Chase (96.5 per cent) are white in a way that hardly anywhere in the south-east is any more.
Even elite high-income local authority areas like parts of Surrey and Hampshire are more ethnically diverse than the small town Midlands.
Labour's task in beating the Conservatives is therefore different in the urban areas with relative ethnic diversity and middle-class Labour support, like Northampton or Derby, than it is in the less urban, nearly all-white Midlands areas in which the party has lost so much ground with the white working class. This is the real dilemma for the Labour party as it faces another long five years in opposition.
Lewis Baston is a contributing editor to Progress and senior research fellow at Democratic Audit
