Red-Yellow-Green: winning a progressive majority

The Tories are the favourites to win the next election. This is the lucid fact that we must start with. Whether in 2024 or earlier, the Conservatives are starting with a big advantage thanks to the large number of seats they won in 2019. Even a disastrous result could still see them keep their position as the largest party and thus likely to form a government.

Moreover, the Conservatives have a proven ability to reinvent themselves as the opposition to their own governments. May did it to Cameron. Johnson did it to May. And someone else (Truss? Sunak?) could feasibly do it to Johnson. Conservative governments have rarely been re-elected in recent times but the parliamentary party can hold on to power through thick and thin. 

To actually change the direction of government, to move away from the pro-Brexit right and towards a pro-European progressive path? An uphill struggle, to say the least. 

But it is possible. And this week, we saw evidence of just how this could be done.

North Shropshire should be, by any account, a true blue seat. It has regularly elected Conservative MPs, particularly since the Second World War, even when times have been bad. And 60% voted to leave the EU in 2016, a natural boost to the party of Boris Johnson, the man 'got Brexit done'. As recently as the last election, the party won 63% of the vote. More than a safe seat, practically a fiefdom. Any vote here should be a foregone conclusion.

So political journalists went into overdrive from the early hours of Friday morning (and continuing through much of the day) when the results came through that the Liberal Democrats had won the seat in this week's by-election. And not just won it, but pulled off a historic swing, climbing 37 percentage points and beating the Conservatives by around 6000 votes. 

How did they do it? How did progressive, pro-EU liberals knock out a brick from the Blue Wall? There were many factors at play - not least the recent revelations concerning various Conservative politicians and staff holding parties during last year's lockdown - but what enabled the scale of this victory was the informal understanding which operated between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. 

In the last election, Labour won 22% of the vote in North Shropshire. In this by-election, that fell to 10%. This is naturally counterintuitive. At a time when Labour are up in the national polls and the Conservatives are suffering a slew of bad headlines, it seems odd that they should lose votes. But the explanation is simple - the reason Labour didn't capitalise on their previous second place and also draw votes away from the Conservatives is because they deliberately chose not to. Rather than going all out and trying to secure a win for their party, they kept their campaigning to a minimum. There was no official pact or alliance, but it is evident that Labour allowed the Liberal Democrats to become the focus for the anti-Conservative vote. 

Had they done otherwise, had they campaigned hard and sought to win votes themselves, it is entirely possible that the opposition vote could have been split. The Conservatives could then have taken a big hit and still held onto the seat. And at the end of the day, in the UK's all-or-nothing system, that's the only metric that really matters.

Now some people say that this analysis is wrong - the drop in the Labour vote in the by-election would not have been enough for the Conservatives to win if those voters had stuck with Labour. But this misses the point. It's not just a question of Labour voters tactically backing the Liberal Democrats. It's also about Labour choosing not to fight for previous Conservative voters and instead largely allowing them to be won by the Liberal Democrats. It is this - how and whether parties campaign against each other in different seats - which underlines the difference between progressive alliances (whether formal or informal) and mere tactical voting.

But while this is all positive, the Red/Yellow deal in North Shropshire is one isolated case. To be successful, it would need to be replicated across most of the UK and in a number of areas would need to include the Greens. 

This is not something that happens every day. A three-party alliance in a major national election would be a rarity for the UK and some might argue that the differences are too great. But we know that Red/Yellow/Green alliances can work. In fact, not only can they work, they are arguably one of the most viable models for progressive governance today. 

Drawing our eyes away from North Shorpshire, it is in Berlin that we can see an example of this kind of politics escalated to a grander scale and greater ambition. For in Europe's biggest state, just such a coalition of social democrats, liberals and greens has recently come to power. 

The significance should not be understated. This is not just 'the Germans being German'. For our North Sea neighbours too, this is a historic moment.  A three-party coalition is unusual. The conservatives there are now out of power for the first time since 2005. And there was nothing obvious about this alliance, particularly the question of whether the gaps could be bridged between the right side of the liberals and the left side of the greens and social democrats.

Yet they have found common ground, agreeing on a political programme for government that will see them liberalise citizenship laws, advance reforms in the EU, lower the voting age, and substantially invest in both the climate transition and digitalisation. In the end, the progressive liberal forces in Germany decided that the country needed change. They worked together and were willing to compromise in order to achieve their common goals.

There is no point pretending that Germany and the UK have the same political cultures or political systems. Germany has a voting system that more accurately represents how people vote and so favours parties coming together into coalitions in order to hold a majority in the parliament. German parties and German voters are used to this, having known this system for many decades now.

But there was also nothing that forced these different parties to work together. Coalition talks in the past have fallen apart before and they could have done this time too. 

German politicians are not more virtuous - these political leaders simply had the will to get the job done. 

Is it therefore so hard to imagine in the UK? A programme based on fighting climate change, repairing our public services, getting closer to the EU and introducing proportional representation could easily find a majority from Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters. 

And we have seen that, when they apply their minds to it, the leaderships of these parties do know how to make the right calls. They can avoid splitting the opposition vote and they can work together to remove the Conservatives from even the toughest seats - when they want to. 

To win a progressive majority will be a tough fight. But in Berlin there is a vision of a potential future and in North Shropshire we saw that it was possible here too. When the time comes, will the leaderships of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens rise to the occasion? Or will they fall back on tribal politics and, in the process, hand the country over to the Conservatives for many more years to come? Come the time of the next election, if any of these parties want to celebrate something like victory, then the choice should be obvious.

Image via Flickr