Victor Anderson says the question now is what sort of alliance could work?
The mismatch between voters’ wishes and the voting system is increasingly clear, and the obvious way to resolve it is through proportional representation. But there is another way of coping with First Past The Post: parties forming up into two blocs or alliances, effectively a new form of two-party politics.
The Right knows this. There is every sign that there will be some form of understanding between Reform and the Tories, with the possibility even of a coalition government. Right-wing newspapers are arguing for “uniting the Right”.
This raises the question of whether the parties of the left-of-centre can match this realism, sharing power rather than being so keen to fight each other that they split the vote and let in the Right. This idea has, for some time, gone under the banner of “progressive alliance”.
In 2017, the threat of a Tory Government led the Greens to stand down in some constituencies and advocate a vote for Labour. In some places, this made a difference. But there were no constituencies in which Labour stood down or offered the Greens anything at all. The Green Party ended up feeling it had been taken for a ride, and the chances of any future such moves sharply declined.
Things have changed since 2017. The threat from the Right is worse: we can look back now with some limited nostalgia on Theresa May in comparison with Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick. Support for cross-party working and electoral reform has grown within the Labour Party and trade unions. At the same time, support for the Greens has soared many times higher than it was in 2017.
The Labour Party cannot now realistically view the Green Party as merely a little irritation to be flicked away. But it will probably take a lot more election results and opinion poll surveys to change Labour’s deeply tribal approach to politics. There is no sign that Labour is prepared to stand down in any significant proportion of seats. And neither are the Greens, the LibDems, the SNP, or Plaid Cymru.
So if there is to be any form of “progressive alliance”, it will be a movement of voters, not parties. It will be about organised tactical voting. And it won’t be 100%: there are many cases where progressive voters will find it impossible to vote for right-leaning Labour candidates even where their Tory/Reform opponents are worse. In many cases, it will grow from understandings reached between parties at the local level, often through the connections being made now in “no overall control” local authorities.
It will also crucially depend on accurate information. Many voters are open to tactical voting but don’t know who that means they should vote for, and can easily be misled by the infamous LibDem “dodgy bar charts”. All this is made particularly difficult by the fact that the 2029 spread of voting preferences will be very different from those of 2024, mostly through switchers from Labour to Green, and so the 2024 figures will not provide a reliable starting point.
For many on the Left, all this talk of tactics feels like treachery, but of course, voting Labour always already involves compromise. Is Steve Reed any more of a socialist than Zack Polanski or even Ed Davey? And “progressive alliance” can never be a whole strategy, because each element in such an alliance should also be free to argue its corner. This means socialists amongst both Greens and Labour are arguing for major redistribution of income and wealth, and the Greens are continuing to argue the case for serious action on the climate crisis.