How would a “progressive alliance” work?
The recent by-elections have prompted a rash of discussions about whether and how the non-Tory parties can work together. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, with experience of both seats where Labour was the leading non-Tory party (Broxtowe, Islington North) and seats where it wasn’t (Chelsea, SW Surrey). A few facts to start off with: Historical comparisons make it implausible that Labour will win an absolute majority at the next election. In our volatile climate, you can’t rule anything out, but the wall to be climbed is staggeringly steep. Relations between the Labour and LibDem parties at national level are reasonably cordial.
It’s said that Starmer and Davey chat frequently, and both parties direct their fire primarily at the Conservatives. There are few obvious policy clashes.The recent Con-LD coalition was not such a success that most LibDem members are eager to repeat it, especially as the current Government has moved away from the centre on cultural issues and attitudes to Brexit are massively different. If the LibDems hold the balance of power after the election, everyone expects them to support Starmer rather than another 5 years of Conservative government.
There are plenty of Tory seats where Lab+LD+Green votes massively outweigh Con+Reform/UKIP. A tactical alliance could unseat them all. The parties are, however, still different, and that produces some snags to practical cooperation:You can’t shift voters like chess pieces. If a Lab-LD alliance was formally declared, some voters would refuse to play ball. There are LD voters who really prefer the Conservatives to Labour (I’ve seen polls that estimate this at a tenth of LD voters), and there will be Labour voters who see the LDs as soft Tories and would regard a pact as further evidence that Starmer is more centrist than they can swallow (also around 10% is my best guess).
A rough rule of thumb which I’ve found to work is that only half the voters of both parties are willing to switch for tactical reasons even if it’s clear who the main anti-Tory challenger is. (That might increase with a formal pact.) Constituency parties define themselves in competition with each other. Telling activists in one constituency to support their traditional competitors so that the party will benefit in another constituency is a really hard sell.Scruples during elections are… in short supply.
The party which objectively has less chance of beating the Conservatives will often find ways – dodgy bar charts, misleading canvass returns, whatever – of muddying the waters. Both Labour and LibDems are repeat offenders in this. Some voters are fooled, and activists of the other parties are infuriated. The elephant in the room is electoral reform. Labour members are really keen to get the Tories out and by and large will accept any halfway reasonable deal that may be necessary to achieve that. LibDem members largely share that, but they don’t want to help Starmer into power and then suffer the traditional grim fate of smaller supporting parties (in Tony Benn’s memorable phrase, propel the Labour leadership into orbit and then fall harmlessly into the sea), so they want to lock in permanent influence by PR.
That effectively rules out Labour majority government indefinitely, and is still a big pill for Labour to swallow. It’s actually a bigger pill for Labour centrists – left-wingers see potential for a left-wing party to thrive under PR, as we see across most of the Continent.We should distinguish between pre-election and post-election deals. Pre-election, an informal understanding that the national parties will focus in different places is nailed on. It already happens at every election to some extent, but it’s undermined by aggressive local parties fighting hard in hopeless seats. That needs to be curbed, and if a local constituency party with no real chance pretends otherwise, I expect to see a very cold response from their national leadership.
It’s also up to individual activists to focus their efforts in nearby winnable seats. A little generosity from the dominant opposition challenger in terms of letting the smaller party fill some spaces in local elections would go a long way, and the national parties need to tolerate this sort of deal. For example, if the LibDems in Broxtowe, for example, soft-pedalled their Parliamentary effort and in return Labour tacitly supported a LibDem effort to gain more seats at Borough and County level, both could feel they’d got something out of it.
Generosity in victory is also important – the Shropshire North victor showed the way by frankly thanking Labour supporters for “lending” their votes.
After the election, if Labour was the largest party but dependent on LibDem support, I’d suggest introducing PR at borough and county level, with a promise to review the possibility of Parliamentary PR after 4 years’ experience of that. If we’re honest, leaders aspiring to Number 10 tend not to be much bothered what happens in Greater Snodding District Council, and few rational people really defend situations where one party has 50% of the votes but 90% of the seats on a local authority.
LibDems couldn’t realistically demand instant PR at national level, but a commitment to a breakthrough at local level looks achievable and offers real prospects of progress across the whole country. Objectively, too, cross-party cooperation, which PR promotes, really makes sense on most local issues.Problems remain.
A similar deal might be needed with the SNP – confidence and supply for 5 years in return for IndyRef2 at the end is the obvious one: they might well lose again, but it’s their best shot. The Greens are harder to accommodate – there are no Tory seats where they are obviously strong challengers, and expecting them to defer politely in return for nothing is unreasonable. Constituency-based deals where they gain council seats in return may help, and they do pull over some Tory voters who don’t fancy the prospect of a Lab-Lib government.
Overall, the mood in opposition parties is now overwhelmingly that sensible cooperation is needed: very few really want to risk Conservative government extending to 2028. Expect to see more and more overt pragmatic arrangements – and, consequently, an electoral outcome which may see the Conservatives lose their majority even while getting a large national vote share than anyone else. The Tories need in my view to get significantly over 40% to be confident of retaining their majority.