Labour divided over tactical voting to block Tories at by-elections

A rift between Sir Keir Starmer’s office and the Labour grassroots over tactical voting has broken out, as activists urged the party to form a “non-aggression” pact with the Liberal Democrats to defeat the Tories at upcoming by-elections.

There is growing frustration among Labour campaigners and some MPs that the informal alliance with Ed Davey’s party at recent by-elections in North Shropshire, Tiverton and Wakefield won’t be revived for crucial contests ahead.

Labour HQ has ordered the party to campaign hard in Nadine Dorries’s Mid Bedfordshire constituency – despite warnings that the mostly rural home counties seat is “natural territory” for the Lib Dems and a three-way contest could split the vote and see the Tories cling on.

One Labour insider told The Independent: “It would be madness for us to fight this seat hard. There would only be one winner – the Tories.”

Neal Lawson, director of the centre-left group Compass, which advocates tactical voting, has accused Labour of “petty tyranny” after being told in a “heart-breaking” letter that he could be expelled from the party for a 2021 tweet calling on some voters to back the Greens at local elections.

Labour said the former Gordon Brown speechwriter was told he had two weeks to respond to allegations that he broke the rules by expressing support for another party. But the Compass organiser said he stands by the tweet and wants to keep fighting for the “spirit of pluralism”.

Unrepentant, Mr Lawson told The Independent: “Why is Labour running a proper campaign in Mid Bedfordshire and getting shadow cabinet members out campaigning? I don’t get why they’re slugging it out – all they’ll do is split the vote.”

It comes as figures shared with The Independent revealed the success of a tactical voting campaign in England’s recent local elections.

Compass had targeted 64 Tory-held marginals in May’s vote – areas controlled by the Tories despite votes for left-wing parties being higher than for right-wing parties. After the election, only 15 remained in Tory hands.

open image in gallery

Mr Lawson said the rise of tactical voting had been helped by local Labour, Lib Dem and Green activists forging informal agreements “under the radar” to field “paper candidates” – politicians who do little or no campaigning – in some areas.

“Activists and voters are way ahead of the party leaders – they’re thinking about how best to get the Tories out,” said Mr Lawson. “It would be helpful if the leadership could help signal they are OK with cooperation. But that is not what is happening.”

The former Brown adviser isn’t the only one facing discipline. He said Labour’s regional offices “are being told to go after members who have done any electoral deals [at the local elections] – the machine is trying to clamp down just as voters are getting more into it”.

Sir Keir and Sir Ed have ruled out a formal progressive alliance to encourage tactical voting at the by-elections. Activists said the parties’ leadership are terrified of the Tories and right-wing press banging on about a “stitch-up” deal.

But Labour and Lib Dem activists told The Independent they want to see the parties get closer and build on the local elections which saw informal arrangements agreed “over a pint”.

Some hope it’s not too late for a by-elections deal that would see Sir Keir’s party effectively step aside in Mid Bedfordshire and Somerton and Frome, the South West seat vacated by David Warburton.

open image in gallery

Allowing Sir Ed’s party to focus on “natural territory” would give Labour a free run in Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge constituency and Selby and Ainsty, the Yorkshire seat where Tory MP Nigel Adams has quit.

The Independent understands that Mr Starmer’s initial instinct was that the Lib Dems had the best shot in Mid Bedfordshire – but some advisers urged him to go all out in the area to show that the party was on course for a general election victory.

As one Labour insider put it: “This would cement him as the prime minister in waiting and send a signal that we don’t need to rely on the Lib Dems.”

A spokesperson for Mr Starmer said the Labour leader had asked frontbencher Peter Kyle to run the campaign “because we want to win it and believe we can win it”, adding: “We’re not doing deals. We’re campaigning to win across the country.”

open image in gallery

One Labour activist in the southeast of England said they had been “working on collaboration with the Lib Dems for a while” at local elections, adding: “Our regional office would probably have our [membership] cards if they knew what we were talking about.”

The Labour campaigner said there were by-election seats and dozens of general election constituencies where Labour and the Lib Dems would be wise to “step back” for one another. “Everyone denies it, but there are informal arrangements [already]. If we did more of it, it would make winning seats easier,” they said.

A Lib Dem activist in Oxfordshire described the “very, very informal conversations” with Labour on where to field local election paper candidates.

“Pragmatic local activists look at what the voting numbers look like and come to a view on how hard they’re going to fight each seat, and that may lead to a conversation between the parties over a pint: ‘Look, we’re not going hard in X and we hope you don’t go hard in Y.’”

open image in gallery

The Lib Dems are understood to have drawn up a target list of around 30 to 40 seats for the general election – mostly in the “blue wall” south. One party source said they had learned their lesson after “spreading ourselves too thin” in 2019 by targeting 100 seats.

One Labour MP told The Independent they hoped Sir Keir and Sir Ed could still enter into the kind of discussions had by Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in the run-up to the 1997 election, when the parties shared target seat information and coordinated media announcements.

“There are apparatchiks who know it’s pointless to put resources in certain seats, when they want to focus on neighbouring target seats,” the MP said. “It would be sensible to have gentleman’s agreement conversations at the highest level about how to step back in some areas – it’d be silly not to.”

Another senior Labour MP said anti-Tory tactical voting can be “nudged along” by agreements between local party activists about how best to focus resources.

“There are a growing number of conversations about how we can maximise the anti-Tory vote. It can be done organically, rather than in a top-down way,” they added. “You can’t stop it happening. If it’s to our benefit, what’s not to like?”

Despite ruling out an electoral pact, the Lib Dem leader is still keen to encourage Labour and Green supporters to “lend” their votes to help kick the Tories out in Somerton and Frome.

Campaigning in the area on Saturday, Mr Davey told The Independent: “If Labour and Green supporters in Somerton and Frome lend us their votes on 20th July, we can send a clear message to Rishi Sunak and finally get the hard-working and decent MP people here deserve.”

Graham Simpson, an activist in Canterbury who recently quit Labour to campaign for Compass, said: “I hope they can agree to focus on the seats they need to win, and Lib Dems do the same, and there is no unnecessary competition. Local parties who know their own areas are best placed to judge these things.”

Despite his row with the party’s HQ, Mr Lawson said there is still an opportunity to use the by-elections as a platform for an informal deal in the spirit of Blair and Ashdown ahead of the 2024 election.

“It would make sense to look at each other’s list of target seats,” he said. “They don’t want to be seen doing deals and for the right-wing press to write about it. But the right-wing press will say you’re colluding whether you speak to each other or not.”

A spokesperson for the Tory party said: “Any backroom stitch-ups between the Lib Dems and Labour would be an affront to democracy. While the Conservatives will fight for every vote on a record of delivery, the other parties will clearly try to resort to secret deals.”