A thought experiment: though it will never happen, imagine if Labour were to stand aside in Bristol Central, the Greens' best hope for a second seat? What might it mean for the next five years?
The country is desperate to eject the current government, and largely underwhelmed by what's on offer instead. It's unprecedented for an opposition leader to start an election campaign 20% up in the polls and at -20% in his personal approval rating. Though no-one will say it publicly, Labour's strategy clearly rests not on enthusing new supporters, or even buying them with what they want, but simply on disinfecting the Labour brand enough that people that still don't like them very much will nonetheless hold their noses in order to euthanise a Tory vampire.
And even I have to admit that Keir Starmer's political ecdysis is working spectacularly. There's almost no doubt about the red landslide that this unenthused electorate is, paradoxically, going to deliver. I spent yesterday evening door-knocking for Labour in one of the most historically Tory wards in the south-west. We were about twenty miles from the emerald vegan citadel of Bristol, and politically on the other side of the moon. A peri-urban village, by the sea, with an overwhelmingly white and relatively elderly population of homeowners, plus a low-income population of semi-permanent caravan park residents. And even here, perhaps 60 percent of those we spoke to said they were voting Labour. There's a doorstep bias, of course. It also helps that the Labour candidate is local, hugely likeable, hasn't spent a decade as an SW1 hack, and seems to be genuinely driven by a desire to be a champion on the national stage for this decrepit and overlooked town. (I'm tempted to say that this is the sort of candidate that under normal conditions perhaps wouldn't get selected by a party machine for a winnable seat. In this election, ordinarily unwinnable seats have unexpectedly become winnable, and a lot of local party activists who would usually be standing just to make up the numbers are going to get unexpectedly elected. If nothing else, therefore, I'll be voting Labour to support the Campaign for Nicer, More Normal MPs). Nonetheless the scale of the Labour vote in this ward is extraordinary. People's motivations aren't really left or right: they're just a phalanx of dismay and anxiety. About the fact that if your husband has a heart attack, there's no longer any night-time A&E within twenty miles in a population of 100,000 people, nor any chance of an ambulance to take him up the M5 to a Bristol hospital; about their grandchildren having rotting teeth because they can't see a dentist; about migrants arriving on boats and filling up hospital beds; about interest rates, and gas prices, and uncertainty that people can't perhaps even put a name to. They don't like Labour, they don't like tax, they don't like Starmer. All they're really voting for is a candidate who might actually go out and lobby for the town in the metropole, and for a party which might end the current government's jaw-dropping carnival of ineptitude and venality.
But what's happening twenty miles north? It's not just exhausted centre-right voters that will be voting Labour in desperation and against their instincts. Amongst greens, trade unionists, public-sector and third-sector workers in my area, WhatsApp conversations seem to be about voting and mobilising for Labour where they can win, and then 'salving their consciences' by spending an afternoon canvassing for the Greens in central Bristol. In four weeks' time, Labour will arrive in power with a party leader who is already disliked by many of those frantically campaigning for him, and who even now takes every opportunity to insult, slander and mock his own base.
When a young climate protestor was ejected at the launch of the Labour manifesto last week, Starmer couldn't resist the opportunity to convert it into a kick at the left of his own party (with which the protestor, presumably, had no connection): "We gave up on being the party of protest five years ago." (Cue whoops from the faithful in the hall as a slight teenage girl was manhandled out of the building).
Think about that remark for a moment. It’s an insult to anyone who has ever campaigned beyond Parliament for, well, anything. In other words, most of the volunteers knocking on doors in the rain this week wearing a red rosette. The two million people who marched against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Anyone who joined one of the People’s Vote demonstrations, with which Keir Starmer himself marched.
Maybe these mean bits of theatre are necessary to win. But they're certainly made possible by the fact that Labour knows that they're electorally risk-free: left-wing voters will overwhelmingly hold their noses and vote anyway for a party that openly professes its contempt for them.
And so, amidst all this unenthusiastic desperation for change - as the Labour Party, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born - imagine if Labour did something unexpected. Signalled, by helping the Greens to a second seat, that it acknowledged the millions of green, socialist, anti-racist people who will help them into power?
Imagine what an extraordinarily reparative act that would be. After all the factional blood-letting of the last five years. To say: "yes we're tacking to the centre, but there's still a place for alliances with the progressive left". And to gesture at the idea that in properly grown-up, pluralistic politics -- above the playground name-calling that Starmer likes to argue has degraded the political arena -- it wouldn't be so unhelpful to have a marginally larger voice to the left.
We're talking about just one extra seat. (In any remotely representative electoral system the Greens' 7% vote share would net them 45-odd seats). An essentially electorally cost-free act of magnanimity for a Labour Party in pomp, headed for a super-majority. In what historians will come to view as the last UK election before the first major climate tipping-points of the late 2020s, an election in which -- even at this final minute before midnight -- both main political parties are actively campaigning on promises to further shrink spending and resources for already inadequate plans to tackle the basic, growing un-liveability of human life.
What would such a gesture do for Labour? (Aside from the short-term inoculation it might provide against some of the factional attacks that are going to start even in the first hundred days of a Labour government).
Well: the British political class, and its media, likes to forget that the urban lefty elite that Starmer has to shit-talk in order to win back the red wall is actually quite sizeable. Those whose values the Labour leadership openly dismisses include most of the people who live in our overwhelmingly progressive cities - just the four largest of which are home to a quarter of the population. They include a large proportion of the 20 percent of British people who aren't white. For a party leader whose strategy is ostensibly to make the Labour party the natural party of government - the 'political wing of the British people' - Starmer seems strikingly happy not just to ignore but to to belittle and shame the values of these huge sections of the British population, in the pursuit of power that our electoral system regrettably places in the hands of the old, the propertied, and the white.
Indeed, on some issues Labour's unclean are the majority, or nearly so. The 58% of British adults who would like to rejoin the EU; the 48% who supported Labour's £28bn green investment plan; the 52% who back tax increases to fund more public spending. Swathes of the population who support positions that Labour's leadership now paints not only as undesirable but as elite and unpatriotic ("working people can't afford another tax rise").
Labour needs this unclean left to win. It needs them to get anything done when they've won. And, sometimes, if you beat people enough, then however much you tell them with a snarl that they haven't got anywhere else to go, eventually they pack their bags and leave anyway. If Manchester, Birmingham, parts of London were to turn green, yellow, or something else, it would be the kiss of death for Starmer's second term.
And finally: to allow the Greens a clear run at one more seat would be for Labour to decently acknowledge, and express some quiet gratitude, for just how hard the progressive left are pinching their noses. This is a party leadership that re-made their party on the basis of the claim - understandably - that they couldn't tolerate sharing political space with innuendos and allusions in online left discourse that diminished the Holocaust. And now the Labour leadership is asking their left base to vote for them after they actively opposed measures, for months, to bring to an end to what the world court believes may be or may become an actual, ongoing genocide. In the pursuit of a centre-right and transatlantic triangulation. And most of us will. That's how hard the supposedly factional left is pinching their noses.
Of course, Labour will never step aside in Bristol Central, or anywhere else. The mantra beloved of both Labour and the Tories that to be a party of government you have to fight every seat is the electoral version of Britain's crumbling foreign policy insistence on 'sitting at the top table', having an embassy everywhere, keeping our nukes. Meaningless in practice, but essential to the edifice of our self-image.
If you want to diagnose the dysfunction of our politics, it’s not just the spectacle of Reform and the reactive chauvinism of the Tory party. It’s the fact that it is so inconceivable that Labour would give the Greens — who should, in a 'Front Populaire' against the hard right, be an eco-socialist sister party to Labour — a clear run at even one seat they might win. The hypocritical combination of universalism and tribalism that our politics demands from all our political parties, not just from the right.
I will vote Labour at this election. I'll campaign for them. I'll be delighted if they unseat the Tory incumbent in my constituency. But in his obsession with his right flank, I don't think Keir Starmer has thought at all about the friability of support to his left. He shows no indication of having any idea how provisional our votes are. Nor has he measured their indispensability to his own ambitions for the Labour Party.
