Since Brexit happened, a lot of energy that was focused on halting our exit from the European Union has gone into a new project which can be defined as the “progressive alliance”. The idea is that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens (and in some iterations, the SNP) make a pact for each party to stand down in an array of seats at the next general election, paving the way for whomever got the best result there in 2019. This would then eliminate the problem of “progressive” votes cancelling each other out and the Tories being able to come through the middle in seats where the non-Tory vote is split between two or even three parties. Once this progressive alliance gets into government, it would then legislate for a PR voting system, ending two-party politics forever.
The idea is a terrible one that will never work. Here are the three main reasons why.
- It’s been attempted before and failed miserably
To be fair, it has only ever been tried on a limited basis as opposed to any large scale venture, such as something set across the whole of the country involving hundreds of seats. But the returns from this have been historically abysmal. The reason why is easy to understand if you try and look at it objectively.
Say you have a seat in which the Labour party stands aside for the Lib Dems because the latter came second and have a much better chance of beating the Tories. Just for a start, why would Labour people campaign for the Lib Dems? Fine, perhaps a relatively minor issue but this one isn’t: assuming that voters think like Westminster activists, i.e. politics is split between progressives and the evil right-wing, is a huge mistake in the thinking around this. I can imagine lots of people who might have voted Labour if a Labour candidate had run not voting for the Lib Dems but for the Tories instead. Or staying at home. The notion that you can just smush all of the Labour, Lib Dem and Green votes together in any given constituency and if they come to more than the Tory total then that seat would automatically fall to a progressive alliance is wrongheaded. It isn’t how people actually vote in real life.
2. Labour have no interest in this idea. At all. None.
It’s worth pointing out that at the 2019 general election, less than a year and a half ago, Labour sent activists into Finchley and Golders Green knowing they had no chance whatsoever of taking the seat – but realising that they could stop Luciana Berger from winning it. I say this not as some bitter Lib Dem – Labour were smart to have done this. You’re facing electoral oblivion anyhow, so why not stop the Lib Dems as much as you can from being a possible hope for non-Tory politics ahead of you?
I point this out to demonstrate how far from being seriously considered by anyone in the Labour party the idea of a progressive alliance is. It’s one of the very few things that unites all factions within the Labour party, in fact. No way do the right of Labour want to help prop up the Lib Dems anywhere. No way do the left of Labour want to seriously help the Greens build themselves up.
It is deep within the DNA of the Labour party that they are the only force that can save the nation from the Tories. This cannot be unwound. And if Labour don’t want to be involved in a progressive alliance, it has a zero percent chance of working.
3. Even if you could get everyone to the table and did everything as well as could be, it still wouldn’t work out the way the progressive alliance cheerleaders think it would. In fact, it would probably strengthen the Tories
Let’s imagine by some miracle the Labour party decide that their days of being a party capable of winning a majority at Westminster are over and embrace the progressive alliance idea fully. Then let’s say that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens manage to put aside all differences and then agree on which seats each one of them will stand in. You’d still have a massive problem – you’ve handed the Tories a huge campaigning tool.
The Conservatives can tell the country: “Labour clearly cannot win a general election anymore on their own steam – even they know that now. That’s why they have decided to try and circumvent democracy by attempting to stitch up the election between themselves, the Lib Dems and the Green party. Know this – a vote for Labour is a vote for an unstable coalition that has an express purpose – to change the voting system forever to their advantage.”
There’s a difference between someone voting Lib Dem in a Lib-Tory marginal because they don’t mind the Lib Dems and want to vote against the Conservatives and someone doing so with the knowledge that they are in effect voting for a Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition. It would change the way people vote dramatically. And I think a lot of people would rally around the Tories at that election.
I understand the psychology around the progressive alliance idea. It is a way of avoiding seriously confronting the mistakes that left of centre politics has made over the past decade and a bit and instead pining it all on a structural issue. ‘You see! The problem isn’t that people don’t like us or our ideas! It’s just that the system is rigged against us!’ As hard as it may be, it would be so much better for non-Tory politics to move away from these silly ideas and begin to try and engage with the actual politics of the 21st century.
This article assumes that there are only two options: either one candidate/seat, chosen from whichever of Labour, Lib Dems and Greens is most likely to win against the Tories or all the progressive parties fighting tooth-and-nail for every seat. There is a Third Way as exemplified by the General Election of 1997. In that election the Lib Dem vote fell from 17.8% in 1992 to 16.8% but the number of seats won rose from 18 to 46. All it required was a good relationship between the leaders of Labour and the Lib Dems (Blair and Ashdown) and a conscious decision not to campaign hard in seats that the other party was better placed in. Labour’s decision to campaign hard in Finchley & Golders Green in 2019, was entirely driven by its Corbynite leadership that wanted to punish Luciana Berger yet again.
Formal pacts may work between the Lib Dems & Greens in England and both of them plus Plaid Cymru in Wales but that is because they are all parties of a similar size in Parliamentary terms.
There is a Third Way as exemplified by the General Election of 1997. In that election the Lib Dem vote fell from 17.8% in 1992 to 16.8% but the number of seats won rose from 18 to 46.
Surely that’s more to do with the fact that the Conservative vote fell from 41.9% in 1992 to 30.7% in 1997? It’s kind of obvious that if one of the other parties’ vote falls by 10%, and yours only falls by 1%, and you were second to that party in a lot of seats, then you’re going to pick up a lot of seats from them. Relationships between the party leaders are irrelevant when you’re looking at that kind of collapse in one party’s vote.
Whereas at the moment polling has the Conservatives and Labour pretty much the same as they were at the 2019 general election. Without a ten-point collapse in either party’s vote, all the ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ not to ‘campaign hard’ won’t make any difference.
Of course neither will any formal alliance, for exactly the reason the original article states: it will look to the electorate like you’re trying to game the system and take them for fools, and they will punish you for it mercilessly. I mean I kind of would like to see it tried just for a laugh, but it wouldn’t really be healthy as we do need a functional opposition for the system to work.
“[A formal pact] will look to the electorate like you’re trying to game the system … and they will punish you for it mercilessly” that didn’t happen when the Brexit Party unilaterally stepped aside for the Tories in many seats in 2019. Nor does it seem to have been a factor in relation to the limited local pacts involving the Lib Dems, Greens, Plaid Cymru and assorted Tory defectors in that election. A pact between Lib Dems and Labour wouldn’t work, but not for that reason. It wouldn’t work because Lib Dems are not the Brexit Party, which was basically a Nigel Farage fan club whose supporters would do whatever he told them to. The Lib Dems cannot instruct their supporters about which other party to vote for, as the Brexit Party could. Many potential Lib Dem voters (particularly in the so-called “Blue Wall” where the party is now hoping to gain seats) would rather vote for Count Binface than for Labour, and any perception of a formal alliance would most likely drive them to the Tories, whichever party is standing in any particular constituency.
I often find Nick Tyrone to be spectacularly wrong whenever he talks about Lib Dems. However, I’ll give credit where it’s due, he’s 2½/3 right on this occasion. The half where he’s wrong is that the “stitch-up” argument won’t gain any traction with the electorate, as it hasn’t done in the past.
“[A formal pact] will look to the electorate like you’re trying to game the system … and they will punish you for it mercilessly” that didn’t happen when the Brexit Party unilaterally stepped aside for the Tories in many seats in 2019.
Who do you suggest was trying to game the system in that case? Not the Conservatives, as they made no pact, formal or informal — as you write, it was the Brexit Party that unilaterally stood down. TheBrexit Party? Maybe, but everybody already knew they were a protest vote and had no chance of actually getting into power, so they could hardly be said to be gaming the system either.
So who would the electorate have punished?
Whereas a ‘progressive alliance’ would be an attempt to game the system and get into power (in order, incidentally, to do something which most voters oppose: change the voting system for Parliament).
It’s a totally different situation from the Brexit Party standing down candidates unilaterally.
And incidentally, I think if the Conservatives had done a deal with the Brexit Party, as Farage was pushing for, then that would have been seen as trying to game the system and would have hurt them with voters, and that’s why they refused to do any such deal.
The “Unite to Remain” pact created no backlash from the electorate. Several Lib Dem MPs (inc Sarah Olney, Layla Moran, Munira Wilson, Wera Hobhouse, Tim Farron) were elected in such pact arrangements. Of those I mentioned, all but Tim won with very large majorities. There was absolutely no sense that we were “gaming the system”, and that never came up on the doorstep where I was campaigning in Sarah’s seat.
There is no history of electorates punishing parties who supposedly “game the system” by arranging electoral pacts. In the 1950s most Liberal MPs held on only because of local pacts with the Tories. In 1955 only Jo Grimond was elected without the help of such a pact. Most of them lost their seats after the pacts came to an end.
What makes you think that “most voters oppose chang[ing] the voting system for Parliament”. Please show me some *recent* opinion polls that suggest this. And please don’t talk about the 2011 AV referendum, which was 10 years ago, won by lies and for adopting a system that few supporters of reform were enthusiastic about. Most people haven’t thought deeply about it, and that referendum campaign probably didn’t enlighten them very much. The equivalent back then of the £350M for the NHS? The one-off £250M that AV would supposedly (but not actually) cost was hypothetically spent many times by the No2AV campaign in its emotive and dishonest campaign ads.
A lot of people haven’t really thought about how the present FPTP system works, and would be surprised if they realised how few Lib Dems are elected compared to their vote share. Sarah Olney told about how in the 2017 GE she encountered many mainly younger voters emerging from polling stations confused because they couldn’t find Jeremy Corbyn’s name on the ballot paper. If you don’t understand even that we elect a local representative, not a national leader, how can you have an informed opinion on the voting system?
There is no history of electorates punishing parties who supposedly “game the system” by arranging electoral pacts.
Well then do go ahead and try it, by all means. I’m sure by the next election we could all go with a good laugh.
What makes you think that “most voters oppose chang[ing] the voting system for Parliament”.
Exactly what you write: most people haven’t thought about it. Electoral reform is the concern of a tiny number of very odd nerds. There’s absolutely no great groundswell of report calling out for it. And I don’t believe that most people think the current system is working all that badly: it delivers (with a couple of exceptions in 2010 and 2017 but those days seem to be over) stable single-party governments that can be judged and kicked out of office if people don’t like them, which is all most people want form an election: to have a clear winner and a clear loser and to feel like they played their part in deciding who those roles were going to be played by.
The idea that an election is about choosing the composition of a debating chamber that then does deals from which a random assembly of parties forming a government might emerge is, just like electoral reform itself, an idea beloved of odd nerds but not one that has any popular appeal.
M :You are making s massive leap in logic by supposing that “most people haven’t thought about it” maens thaty “oppose” it. The lack of strong movement to support X and active opposition to X are completely different things. It doesn’t mean they think it’s working, it means they don’t know how it works and wouldn’t be able to tell you how it works.
And “those days [of Hhng Parliaments] seem to be over” you draw that conclusion from what? One election result that produced a single-party majority government? I’d say it’s rather premature to draw that conclusion; you cannot extrapolate a trend from a single event that’s opposite to the previous ones. At the moment Johnson and the Tories are riding high in the opinion polls because of the pandemic bounce, but you can’t assume those high ratings will continue.
I’d say it’s rather premature to draw that conclusion; you cannot extrapolate a trend from a single event that’s opposite to the previous ones.
And yet people did exactly that all the time from 2010 to 2015, claiming one hung Parliament meant that the days of two-party dominance were over and there’d never be a majority government again. And what happened? Which result turned out to be the aberration?
You’re right that most people don’t think about electoral reform. You’re wrong to think that means there’s some vast untapped reservoir of support just waiting to be unleashed once you explain it to them. What it actually means is that there’s no great appetite to change a system that works pretty will in delivering what most people (who aren’t odd nerds) fundamentally want from elections: a decisive result so they can go back to not thinking about politics for another few years.
M claims that FPTP gives a “decisive result”. Well, yes, it did in 2019, in terms of seats (Conservatives with an 80-seat majority). But the actual vote share, Con vs. Lab/LibDem, was almost exactly equal at 43% each. This blatantly skewed result is why people will continue to campaign for a fairer voting system. It could also be why so many people are turned off politics, when they realise their vote cannot influence the outcome in a non-marginal seat.
FPTP does not deliver true representative democracy. It’s time to stop making excuses for it, and to change the system.
But the actual vote share, Con vs. Lab/LibDem, was almost exactly equal at 43% each.
The Conservatives got 43.6% of the vote. Labour got 32.1% and the Liberal Democrats got 11.6%.
The Conservatives therefore got more of the vote than any other party (by more than 10% over their nearest rival), therefore form the government and can be held to account on that basis. The current system delivers that decisive result.
What would you prefer? That on a 43.6/32.1/11.6% spilt we end up with a massy hung Parliament situation, another coalition, no clarity about who’s actually in charge (remember all those interminable arguments from 2010 to 2015 about how much the Conservatives were responsible for versus how much the Liberal Democrats were responsible for, that politics nerds just loved but that just bored normal people silly)?
You might prefer that. Most people just want it to be clear who is in charge, so they know who to thank or who to blame four hears later, and can stop thinking about politics until then. That means a system that gives a decisive result — and that means the current system.
It could also be why so many people are turned off politics, when they realise their vote cannot influence the outcome in a non-marginal seat.
I’m pretty sure that’s not why, actually, because I’m pretty sure that 99% of normal people (ie not politics nerds) have no idea whether they live in a marginal or a non-marginal seat.