Progressive alliances are a dead end approach for the Greens
People are not lego. That’s not an original thought. Yet, to some progressive logic, voters are. So – the argument goes – you can easily put the green and yellow-orangey bricks onto red bricks and make that tower higher than the blue ones.
Yet are they? No.
I’m definitely not the first to question the Progressive Alliance theory – Martin Farley wrote a data based assessment of Greens stepping down for other parties in the 2019 general election, which suggested this approach helped the Tories. Shahrar Ali is the only Green Party leadership candidate to rule it out completely (a stopped clock can be right twice a day). I suppose I’m going to do so differently. I’m going to use historiography, partly to feel clever, partly due to its importance.
A lot of socialists and progressives generally treat history like they treat their favourite band: listening to the greatest hits, mythologising them, and then try and repeat it. ‘Now that’s what I call social progress ‘21!’, so to speak. We forget they were made and done in different times, a different context with different factors, and that how we interpret these ‘proto-Progressive Alliances’ isn’t neutral but part of our perspective, however defined, individual and theoretical that is. By calling them ‘proto-Progressive Alliances’, I have framed them, leading you to perceive them as such already. You could counter that, I want you to. I want you to challenge these constructions.
A problem with the current ‘Progressive Alliance’ is what it’s unified around, even in its current semi-theoretical state. Being ‘anti-Tory’ is many things, but it isn’t well defined. It states what it opposes, clearly, but not much else. If anything, it actually helps the Conservatives. By reinforcing and actually furthering the ‘left/right’ spectrum, we fall into rhetorical traps like ‘coalition of chaos’, in the process alienating some of our electoral base. Contrast this to the 1906 ‘Lib-Lab Pact’ which, openly united behind free trade, managed to result in the first of four ‘not Conservative’ landslide majorities. The contexts again are very different, but the point stands: a ‘Progressive Alliance’ in 1906 overcame the issue of ‘three-cornered contests’ in a society only really familiar with two party politics. 2021, in addition to having (near) universal suffrage, is different. We have a weak main opposition utterly committed to Tory constructions, from the idea of ‘the mainstream, normal voter’ to the ‘red wall’; a press owned almost entirely by Conservative donors, and rather than only two or three parties for voters to choose from, the average is about five per constituency.
‘Progressive Alliances’ and their grandiose appeal, when not using bad electoral maths that infantilises voter intelligence, rely on grand narratives which grandly simplify the electoral landscape. The idea that even the most regressive party on a local level, for local parties pick the candidates usually, is always the Tories is a denial of experience lived by Northern Greens in places like Manchester, where allegations of bullying and intimidation, as well as anti-homeless policies, abound. But that would be inconvenient for the simplistic binary a Progressive Alliance simplistically reinforces.
Nor does 1906 (and onwards), in spite of its success, really provide a stunning model either. The problem with focusing on the Wikipedia page of national election results is that it obscures local dimensions. Electoral alliances in Manchester for example became unsustainable due to the clashing party cultures between Liberal and Labour. Nor is this simply a ‘progressive’ issue. The Unionist alliance of Conservative and Liberal Unionists only succeeded by hollowing out the latter to the extent they were indistinguishable by 1903. Hence why you have a Conservative & Unionist Party today. So either a ‘Progressive Alliance, today tears itself apart, or it means we are absorbed into Labour; the very thing the ecological and social movements of the late 60s and early 70s realised would be the death knell for effective action.
What’s the alternative?
Instead, I propose we combine a positive campaigning spirit and message with pushing the rather terrifying reality of the climate crisis to the fore. If the Conservatives can win elections on an antisocialist appeal to scared potential Liberal voters for the last century, then why not do a more ethical and honest appeal to everyone on the same premise?
What people forget is that one of the most successful Green campaigns (and under FPTP!) of all time, the 1989 European election, was based on appealing to existential fear, rather than hope. Green performance was most strong in what was the Tory rural heartlands. The 1989 party election broadcast saw children talking about the evils of pollution, pesticides, and slime, intercut with black slides with writing, stating how the Greens would address it. Perhaps it’s due to the British electorate being more motivated by fear than anything else. Perhaps it struck home that children were talking rather than those do-gooder politicians.
Perhaps it wouldn’t work as well today. It’d be either parodied on YouTube or GB News would decry how that woke child is being covered in brown slime, and how brown slime is being politicised by those Eco-Marxist zealots. It may not have broken through a media landscape where the spectre of alpacas looms over us more than the IPCC report. I suppose the main takeaway is, fundamentally, it worked: the Tories were so scared of the Green menace that they started talking about the environment. While George Monbiot has rightly stressed the limits of this, and by no means we should green-wash the Conservatives (they do enough of that themselves), it suggests that 1989 was the ‘tip of the iceberg’: that we can scare the big parties into action. So why would we regiment ourselves into a pact with Labour?
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Image credit: Bristol Green Party – Creative Commons
Whether you call it a progressive alliance or something else, the Tories are not going to be defeated without some form of strategic electoral cooperation.
Standing aside for other parties is a very bad idea – we can’t direct supporters how to vote and there is no knowing how they will react. But agreements with other parties about where we are placing our resources is an entirely different matter. Who has the best chance of ousting a Tory in each key seat will swiftly become evident to savvy voters.
Greens have to make sure such negotiations are conducted from a position of strength, and be clear that we do not give anything away for nothing.
Stopped reading at “a stopped clock can be right twice a day”
broke two or Magic Magid’s commandments. 1) Be kind 2) Don’t be a pr*ck.
An interesting discussion. I think an alliance could succeed if it presented an agreed programme and the demand for this must come from the grassroots, especially the Labour Party membership. So we should remain open to it and avoid tribalism.
Without such an approach voters who are frantic about the climate crisis may still have no idea who to vote for in a general election and denialism will win again
This is a very interesting article. Whilst I disagree with most of the conclusions that the author draws from it, I think nevertheless that it raises interesting and astute points about what makes a progressive alliance successful or not.
I would however like to make a point about the article by Martin Farley that is linked to in the article, because it does commit some fairly large oversights in the data in drawing the conclusions that it does. While I am certainly not a professional statistician, I notice that accounting for two factors in the data that Farley does not account for – the size of the Brexit vote in each constituency and whether or not the Green Party stood a candidate in 2017 – would lead to some rather different conclusions being drawn about the relationship between the Green Party standing and the swing from Labour to the Conservatives.
Farley asserts that the constituencies where Magid Magid suggested that we not run a candidate, but where we did anyway, showed less of a swing from Labour to the Conservatives on average than those where the Green Party did in fact choose not to run a candidate, in most cases with the aim of helping Labour get would-be Green votes. This is true, but does not take into account that the former group of constituencies was far less Brexit-leaning than the latter – in the first group of constituencies, for example, just 9 out of 38 had a Leave vote of higher than 60% in 2016, whereas in the second group, 26 out of 48 fall into that category. We do know that swings from Labour to the Conservatives were bigger where Brexit was more popular, and trying to take this into account by dividing the constituencies in each group into four categories – those which voted less than 50% for Leave according to Professor Chris Hanretty’s estimates, those with 50% to 60%, those with 60% to 70%, and those with 70% or more – and then calculating the averages for each of those groups removes the large majority of the disparity in swing. More sophisticated techniques of regression analysis could be used to observe this more precisely, of course, but I’m too tired to attempt those right now and need to go to sleep!
The second factor I noticed as being of high importance is that Farley’s analysis of the Lab-Con swing in relation to whether the Green Party stood in 2019 does not take into account whether the Green Party stood in 2017 in the constituency. If it were the case that the Green Party standing aside for Labour has any effect, positive or negative, on the swing between Labour and Conservative, we might expect that effect to have been ‘banked’ already if the same arrangement had taken place in 2017: e.g. if the effect of the Greens standing aside in an individual constituency was positive for Labour in both 2017 and 2019, this would only have translated into an increased swing for them the first time round in 2017; the second time they would merely be retaining ‘lent’ Green votes. To attempt to take this factor into account, I thus split Farley’s listed constituencies into four groups – those where the Greens stood in both elections, only in 2017, only in 2019, or in neither election, and then averaged out the swings in each group according to share of Leave votes in that constituency in 2016. The results from this exercise paint an intriguing picture.
Out of the four groups, the group of seats where Labour suffered the worst swings against them in 2019 was the seats where we, the Greens, did not stand in 2017, but did stand in 2019. In seats with a Leave vote of less than 50%, the average swing was 2.98%; where the Leave vote was 50%-60%, it was 5.91%; where the Leave vote was between 60% and 70%, the average swing was 9.73%, and where the Leave vote was over 70% – though this was only one constituency, Thurrock – the swing was 11.8%. This would be consistent with our standing down for Labour having a positive effect on the Labour vote share – the hypothesis being that either us standing aside benefitted them in 2017, that our candidacies hurt them in 2019, or both.
However, I also note that in seats where we stood aside for them in 2019 but not in 2017, Labour did actually perform slightly worse than in the seats that we stood in in both elections, despite Magid’s call for us not to do so. In the seats where Leave got less than 50%, Labour suffered an average 1.88% swing against them where we stood aside compared to a 1.36% swing when we didn’t; Leave vote 50%-60%, a swing against Labour of 4.33% where we stood aside compared to 4.21% where we didn’t; Leave vote of 60%-70%, a swing against Labour of 8.06% where we stood down and 6.82% where we didn’t; and in the – again very small – number of seats with over 70% support for Leave, an average swing against Labour of 11.55% where we stood down and 7.85% where we didn’t. In a similar vein, the seats where we stood in neither election saw on average worse swings against Labour than either of these groups, though not as bad as those where we stood in 2019 but not in 2017. These differences are far far smaller than Farley’s article alleges, but the fact that they are still negative rather than positive is noteworthy.
Overall, these results would seem to be consistent with the hypothesis that our standing aside for Labour helped them in 2017, but did not help them in 2019 – my cautious hypothesis being that perhaps many voters who were unable to vote for us in 2017 chose to vote for Labour, but that in 2019 with Labour less popular a far higher portion of Green supporters switched their votes instead to the Liberal Democrats, leaving Labour getting a similar or smaller number of votes from us than the Conservatives were – because of course, while the number of Green voters whose second preference is the Conservatives is small, it is certainly not negligible. Of course, however, it is very difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions from this data without a professional statistician having examined it for potential confounding variables (other factors, like the share of the Leave vote, that might be having an effect on the swing other than the presence or absence of Green candidates), and I would suggest that we not try to do so. Possibly the party would find it worthwhile to bring in an actual professional statistician to do such analysis, though I know we’re not exactly rolling in money! At any rate, it is certainly not conclusive evidence that local parties’ standing down was counterproductive – rather, I believe that it is food for further thought on what makes a progressive alliance successful or otherwise.
Proportional Representation necessarily aligns with progressive alliances.
In Chichester we had one Green target Division in the County Elections – Lib Dems and Labour stood aside helping the 1,000 first-ever Green Majority and elected County Cllr. Greens stood aside in another successful Division result where the tories were out-voted.
Labour have both the policy and the practice of contesting all Parliamentary Constituencies so it has always been clear that a Progressive Alliance is a non-starter.
As we have seen in the General Elections of 2017 and 2019 limited alliances are possible with the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru. But the lessons from these are that they only benefited the Lib Dems in terms of winning a very small number of extra seats.
The writer points to 1989 when “Green performance was most strong in what was the Tory rural heartlands” This is one of a number of indications of where we can increase our parliamentary vote significantly, if not our number of MPs. (And that would give us more clout and more money).
More money because of the system of giving Parliamentary parties money on the basis of their votes. But more importantly more clout because votes taken away from Tory MPS threatens those Tory MPs who will then be more inclined to take the climate emergency more seriously and want to demonstrate it to the public when they see voters turning to the Greens in their constituency.