Is a ‘progressive alliance’ pact the answer to Labour’s prayers?

It was by electoral pacts that the Labour Party first came to power. The party gained seats in its early years partly because its candidates and Liberals stood aside for each other in parts of the country. In the 1923 election, in which newspapers encouraged anti-Tory tactical voting, Labour finally overtook the Liberals, who then allowed Ramsay MacDonald to take office as prime minister in a hung parliament.

The attractions of such tactics for the Labour Party were underlined yesterday by an unusual opinion poll that suggested the Conservatives would lose three-quarters of their seats if Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens stood down in each other’s favour in a general election.

The poll, by Find Out Now and Electoral Calculus for the Constitution Society, asked people how they would vote if there were only one “pact” candidate in their constituency, and projected that the Conservatives would be reduced to a rump of 101 seats, while Labour with 393 seats would have a majority of 136.

It would be the most dramatic change in the House of Commons since the war, with the Lib Dems gaining 71 seats, more than they had at their peak in 2005 (62), and the Green Party would have 17 seats instead of the single seat it has held since 2010.

Such findings are bound to prompt scepticism, but Find Out Now is a member of the British Polling Council, and the poll took some care to make its simulation as realistic as possible. It used MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) modelling from a sample of 16,000 people to project the result of an election, seat by seat.

It assumed a pact between the three parties in England (the election in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was assumed to go ahead with a full slate of parties), and asked English voters: “Suppose at the next general election that all the usual political parties are standing in your seat except that the [party 1] and [party 2] have agreed not to stand and are asking their supporters to vote [party 3]. Which party, if any, would you vote for?”

Seats were allocated to each of the three parties under a notional pact that would give Labour or the Lib Dems a free run at seats in which they came second last time, except for 6 per cent of seats allocated to the Greens where they did best in 2019.

The result is very different from the last time such an exercise was carried out, in June last year, when the Conservatives were 10 points ahead in the conventional polls. Then, a “progressive alliance” pact would have just about wiped out Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority, leaving the Tories poised on the brink of a hung parliament. Since then, the vaccine bounce has faded and the Tories are less well-placed.

Under normal assumptions, today’s opinion polls suggest Labour would be the largest party in a hung parliament, and close to a majority. But if there were an electoral pact among the three opposition parties, it would win a landslide. Even allowing for new boundaries, which would reduce Labour’s majority by about 10 seats, it would win a bigger majority than Johnson’s.

Why, then, are Keir Starmer and Ed Davey so unwilling to consider a pact that would seem to be so much in their parties’ interest? One answer is to go back to 1923. That was the moment when Labour displaced the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives in an essentially two-party system. By entering into electoral deals with Labour, Liberal leaders thought they were serving their short-term interest, but they sealed their long-term doom.

Davey might be tempted by the short-term prospect of leading a party of 71 MPs, but under a Labour government with a huge majority, any promises of cross-party cooperation – or, more specifically, of changing the voting system – might go the same way as Tony Blair’s joint committee with the Lib Dems and the promise of electoral reform after 1997.

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A more practical problem, however, would be persuading local parties to abide by the terms of a national pact. It would be hard to stop aggrieved local activists putting up candidates as Real Labour or Local Lib Dem.

And the objection of principle to such a scheme would be that it treats the voters as the chattels of the parties, to be traded in pursuit of power. It might be considered worth offending millions of voters by depriving them of the chance to vote for their party if it worked, but how a pact would play out in the heat of an election campaign is uncertain.

There may be a difference between how people say they will vote in answer to an opinion-poll question based on a hypothetical scenario and how they will actually vote after a campaign in which the Lib Dems and Greens are portrayed by the Tories as wholly owned subsidiaries of the Labour Party.

There are no shortcuts in politics. If Labour policies are unpopular, trying to game the electoral system isn’t going to make them popular. The danger of campaigning for an electoral pact is that it is a diversion from the serious business of getting the policy right in the first place.

Which is why Starmer and Davey are going for a different approach, of operating an informal pact by which they agree without ever writing anything down that Labour won’t try very hard in Lib Dem target seats (including the by-election in Tiverton and Honiton) and vice versa (including the by-election in Wakefield).

The first rule of the progressive alliance pact is never admit there is a progressive alliance pact.