Will we see real pacts at next General Election?
NON-APOLOGETIC apologies being suddenly fashionable, here’s one in Johnsonese for the exceptionally abrupt ending of last week’s column headlined ‘‘Keir needs allies to help shift Commons balance’’.
Believe me, I know your anguish and I feel your rage for my leaving you suspended mid-sentence. I offer my heartfelt apologies. All I ask is to be allowed to continue my train of argument so that the full facts can be established.
Fact One: for the first time in ages Labour is indisputably ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls, recently by over 10% – its largest lead since 2014.
Fact Two: Keir Starmer recently emphasised that in the next General Election Labour “will focus on target seats – places where we can and have to win”.
The F-word, ‘focus’, but meaning what exactly? Apparently, ‘holding back’ in Conservative-held constituencies where, say, the Liberal Democrats are established and stand an obviously better chance than Labour of capturing the seat – as in December’s North Shropshire by-election.
But North Shropshire could so easily have backfired, with ‘wasted’ Labour votes enabling a Conservative win. If Starmer is really serious, the strategy must be standing down; holding back won’t cut it.
Nor just for the Lib Dems, but also in any currently Conservative seats that the Greens or, in Wales, Plaid Cymru, stand demonstrably the best chance of winning.
In short, what Labour needs nowadays, seriously to challenge the Conservatives under our massively non-proportional electoral system, are formal electoral pacts.
Pacts similar to those eventually imposed by Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage in the 2019 General Election, which contributed significantly to the Conservatives’ huge 80-seat Commons majority, thereby enabling both parties’ primary objective: an early Brexit.
Only similar because, unlike Starmer, Farage could dictate. With the election campaign under way and the Conservatives rejecting any electoral pact with the Brexit Party, he autocratically withdrew all his candidates from the 300-plus Conservative-held seats to avoid
splitting the ‘Leave’ vote.
Brexit Party support collapsed, intending voters drifting back to the Conservatives. On Election Night the party’s 2% vote won precisely no seats – and Farage was mocked by some commentators.
Who’s laughing now, though, at the man with a far bigger agenda than winning a few seats in a 650-member House of Commons?
It sure wasn’t Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who had dismissed both formal and informal electoral pacts, and even attempts to encourage ‘tactical voting’ – for whichever party’s candidate in a marginal seat was best placed to defeat the defending Conservative and, perhaps even more importantly, to at least delay Brexit.
But that’s history. What about the next General Election? What if Labour, Lib Dems and Greens were prepared pro-actively to, yes, acknowledge the unfair, anti-proportional electoral system they’re currently stuck with, but try to make the very best of it: in the short term for themselves and the anti-Conservative cause?
Longer term… who knows? Maybe a referendum on a genuinely more proportional electoral system?
By happy chance, the independent Constitution Society recently commissioned a poll of 14,000 respondents, testing the impact of precisely such a Labour/LibDem/ Green pact across the currently 573 English and Welsh constituencies.
The seats were allocated to the pact party either currently holding the seat or receiving most votes in 2019. Respondents were then questioned: with the other two parties standing down and asking their supporters to vote for the selected party, how would you vote in this particular election?
And the headline result: Labour would add 36 seats to their current 239; Lib Dems would go from 11 to 25; Greens from 1 to 9. Meaning that the Conservatives would have comfortably, or uncomfortably, lost their Commons majority and be reduced to 307 seats out of 650.
In the West Midlands both Birmingham Northfield and Stokeon-Trent Central constituencies would have switched, or returned, from Conservative to Labour.
Moreover, having fought a General Election as a team, there would presumably be a strong incentive for the three parties to maintain that team as a numerically viable coalition Government – but, especially without Scotland in this particular model, that’s just speculation.
We can, however, envisage how different post-war UK politics might have been under a more proportional electoral system.
Like, for instance, the Single
Transferable Vote (STV), used for some or all elections in, for instance, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Australia, and that, as noted in my previous column, might have been put to the national referendum pledged but undelivered by one of
Sir Keir Starmer’s predecessors as Labour Leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In some fascinating recent research Dylan Difford modelled what results all 21 post-war General Elections would have produced under an STV electoral system, had the actual votes cast and counted been in four-member, not singlemember, constituencies.
In none, of course, did the eventual winning party gain a majority of votes. That last happened in 1935. But nor would there necessarily have been the perpetual instability that critics of voting reform sometimes suggest.
Four elections would have produced single-party Governments with working majorities – 1945, 1966 Labour; 1955, 1959 Conservative – with potential two-party coalitions feasible in most of the others.
Which two parties? Well, with Liberals/Lib Dems averaging 111 seats between 1974 and 2010 – rather than 21 – you’d need to ask them.
December 2019? Conservatives 308, Labour 225, Lib Dems 59, SNP/ Plaid Cymru 34, Others 24 – what’s your guess? And next time? Much, I’d suggest, rests on Keir Starmer’s approach to electoral pacts.
For the first time in ages Labour is indisputably ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls