A Question of Tactics
When it comes to the final weeks of this election, tactical voting and pacts are of little use to Labour - but tactical campaigning is.
Brighton Kemptown constituency, Thursday 8th June 2017. There are hundreds of Labour activists, scattered across the huge Bevendean housing estate. We’re getting the vote out for our candidate, Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
A bunch of us are there from the neighbouring constituency, Lewes, one that has never had a Labour MP. The town of Lewes itself has a somewhat rebellious, bohemian image, from Tom Paine to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group. There’s a booming local Labour membership, many of whom have joined since Jeremy Corbyn became leader. But there’s still no sign of this surge translating into enough votes to win local elections: while the Greens and various maverick independents do well, Labour hasn’t had a councillor in the town for the best part of four decades.
When it comes to general elections, the situation is a tad more complex. Ever since the 1990s, Lewes has been a contest between the Tories and the Lib Dems, with Labour a fairly distant third. In 1997, the Lib Dem candidate Norman Baker, a popular local council leader, finally ousted the Conservative MP who’d held the seat since 1974. Despite the Blair landslide of that year, Labour remained in a distant third place. Norman, as he’s known by everybody in the town, built his success on a significant number of Labour voters voting for him in the greater cause of defeating the Tories.
From 2001 to 2010, Norman got over 50 percent of the vote in every election, before his party’s catastrophic error of forming an austerity coalition with the Tories. Despite his personal popularity, Norman lost his seat to the Tories in 2015, while Labour’s vote doubled from 5 to 10 percent. But UKIP took third place from Labour, at the peak of their rise before the Brexit referendum of 2016.
That helps explain why so many of us from Lewes in 2017 were campaigning in Brighton’s Hove and Kemptown seats rather than our own constituency. With no chance of getting rid of the Tory MP ourselves, our CLP voted to divert most of its campaigning energies to the defence of Peter Kyle’s marginal Hove seat, and to help Lloyd Russell-Moyle win Kemptown. Every Sunday, we’d meet up at Lewes bus station and head off to give as much help as we could muster.
We rapidly became part of two big, bustling campaigns. In Kemptown, we’d sit in draughty community centres for training sessions with ex-staffers of Bernie Sanders in new-fangled conversational canvassing. Over in Hove, the campaign was run with clockwork efficiency. And the result? Peter returned with a majority of almost 19,000. Lloyd turned Kemptown from a Tory marginal into a Labour majority of almost 10,000. Blimey, and we’d been part of it.
Meanwhile, back in Lewes, a non-party “Progressive Alliance” was working hard with perhaps the most ambitious tactical-voting campaign the constituency had ever seen. The Labour campaign was scarcely visible. The Greens had agreed to stand down in favour of the Lib Dems; UKIP didn’t run either. But in spite of this, Labour’s vote actually went up, and the Tory Maria Caulfield won again, with her majority boosted by former UKIP supporters.
The lesson was obvious. Pacts, standing down, tactical voting campaigns don’t work, either because the politics take over — in this case, the popular appeal of Labour’s For The Many manifesto — or because of other factors beyond your control (UKIP standing down was a gift to a hard Brexiteer like Caulfield). The factors you can control – like the Greens standing down – also have unintended consequences, as disgruntled Green voters switched to Labour rather than the rightward-moving Lib Dems.
The only thing we could be sure of was that any campaigning in Kemptown and Hove would be to the best of our ability and benefit Labour. In those two cases, to spectacular effect.
A Demobilising Tactic
An influential group of left opinion-formers have called for an electoral pact, a “Remain Alliance” or, failing that, large-scale “tactical voting” as the route to a Labour government. The case for — and against — this strategy is made fiercely, but usually with no more than a cursory glance at what its practical outcomes might be.
An electoral pact only works if all the opposition parties subscribe to it. For those parties with no realistic ambition of forming a government by themselves, that kind of agreement would be quite easy to sign up to. Things are different for Labour. We can argue the toss over this — in my view, a Labour-led coalition government isn’t anything to get too hot and bothered about — but that’s the reality of Labourism as a parliamentary tradition. True, attitudes among the Labour membership are now much less of the “my party right or wrong” variety. But this was never going to be enough to make Labour signing up to an electoral pact a realistic possibility.
And if it had happened? A party standing down doesn’t automatically deliver their bloc of voters to the intended beneficiary. Green voters may well prefer to vote Labour rather than Lib Dem. If Lib Dems stand down in a Labour/Tory marginal. it might simply hand Tory remainers unable to stomach voting Labour back to the Tories. The possibilities are endless, unpredictable and entirely out of our hands. A tactic of unintended consequences is no tactic at all.
What about tactical voting? There are two problems with this approach, one empirical, the other political. Firstly, the tactical-voting advice for this election has come in two very different varieties. Some tactical-voting advocates use the previous election result, following standard practice: so if Labour came a close second to the Tories for a seat in 2017, the Lib Dems a distant third, the tactical vote will be for Labour. The same applies with any other combination of “Remain” or non-Tory parties (including the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru).
In contrast, others use the 2019 Euro-election results as a benchmark, advocating a Lib Dem or Green vote in Tory/Labour marginals where those parties finished a long way back in third or even fourth place last time around. No British general election has ever matched the result of Euro-elections, where a different voting system is in place and turnout is much lower. The advice given by these sites was either misguided, or simply a partisan effort to favour the Lib Dems.
Of course, some will still favour tactical voting, putting that vital cross against a second-choice party to win where they know their own first preference cannot. But precious few will do this having actively campaigned for their preferred party. The tactic mobilises the vote but demobilises the members, Labour’s most precious campaigning resource.
Tactical voting demoralises too. It means accepting the brutal realities of a rotten electoral system, instead of channelling enthusiasm and belief. And it pits those who agree on the bigger picture — the need for a Labour government — against each other in a feverishly futile argument based on the electoral circumstances of the particular constituency we find ourselves in.
The Tactical Campaigning Alternative
Never mind: since 2017, there’s been an exciting, effective and inclusive alternative. The arithmetic in the immediate wake of 2017 was starkly simple. Labour needed a further swing of 3.6 percent to form the next government. That would translate into 66 gains for the party — assuming that all 19 Labour-held seats with majorities below a thousand votes (known as “defences”) were saved.
The arithmetic has changed a bit since then, with the defection of some Labour MPs, the Lib Dem recovery, and the likely success of the SNP in Scotland (at the expense of both Tories and Labour). But a rough estimate suggests that Boris Johnson won’t be able to form a government if Labour can win its top 35 target seats, while holding its 19 most vulnerable ones. In that scenario, Labour could form a government with co-operation from the other opposition parties.
Focuses the mind, doesn’t it? The target seats are handily listed in order here, and the defences here.
What the target seats offer is the possibility of tactical campaigning. We campaign where Labour can win, not where it can only lose. We are mobilised and enthused: Labour still might not win in all of those seats, but unless we’re the worst canvassers in the world, the only outcome of our activism will be to increase Labour’s chances of victory.
Constituency Focus
Our voting system divides the electoral battleground between safe seats and marginals. The former are impregnable to all but the most momentous of landslides, while the latter are much more likely to change hands. There’s been much talk about the supposed break-up of the two-party system, but this has only really happened in Scotland (with the SNP’s rise producing a virtual one-party system in 2015, and perhaps again in 2019). The other word that gets thrown around a lot is volatility. But the demise of the Brexit Party has made that much less of a factor. The main third-party challengers, Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems, will be lucky to return to parliament on December 13th with more MPs than they had before, as most of the defectors they’ve recently attracted from Labour and the Tories look set to lose their races.
Of Labour’s 262 current seats, 96 would be lost to the Tories on a swing of between 10 and 19 percent. Another 63 would require a swing of 20 to 30 percent. Yes, those seats we’d lose on a swing of between 5 and 9 percent might be vulnerable, but realistically, if Labour is going to lose the likes of Durham North West or Wirral West — 111th and 71st respectively on the Tory list of target seats — our campaigning efforts elsewhere aren’t likely to be crowned with success.
So in the safe seats, while taking nothing for granted — least of all the electorate — it will pay to have faith, and direct most campaigning energy towards the nearest target or defence seat.
Then there’s the difficult issue of the seats that would require a much bigger swing than most of us expect for Labour to win. There are 12 seats that need a swing of up to 5 percent for a Labour victory: depending on local circumstances, that seems achievable. But the 85 seats that require swings of between 5 and 14 per cent look to be out of reach this time around.
Yes, circumstances change, and wins and losses don’t all come in the presumed order (though most will). And some in those Labour constituency parties will argue that it’s really a matter of getting into the position where winning is possible next time. In any case, if Labour abandons virtually all campaigning in those constituencies, this will give the Tories a free run and allow them to deploy their (much smaller) canvassing teams against their own list of Labour target seats. Unintended consequences haunt us once more.
Of the top 50 Lib Dem target seats, Labour holds just seven. With the exception of five constituencies currently held by the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, all the other realistic Lib Dem gains are in Tory seats. My own seat, Lewes, is number 10 on their list of targets: if they don’t win here, they won’t have made any kind of breakthrough. Others in a more realistic list of 20 Tory-held targets for the Lib Dems include Richmond Park, Cheltenham, Southport and Winchester. It’s in these constituencies that the argument for Labour tactical voting will be sharpest. In each of them, there’s a nearby Labour target to tactically campaign in (Putney, Swindon South and Bolton West respectively). As for Lewes, there are three target seats within an hour’s journey to go and campaign in.
A Campaign from Below
On a wet Saturday morning, a group from Lewes Labour are waiting for lifts to East Worthing & Shoreham, Labour’s number three target seat in our county, Sussex. The previous week, it was the number one target, Hastings & Rye; the week before it was Crawley, target seat number two. It’s the week of Labour’s manifesto launch, so there’s a quick-fire 3-question challenge on the key points: get all three right and there’s a red-rose sweetie for our troubles. Henrietta who organises phone-bank sessions aimed at voters in the marginals is there, along with sixth-former Charlie, who’s a first-time canvasser, and Bill, another first-timer who runs the local ukulele club and has around five decades on Charlie. Once everybody’s assembled, we hop in the cars, car-sharing not only to reduce the carbon footprint, but to help generate some camaraderie on the way over.
One carload, was Geraldine, Kit and Judith squeezed into the backseat plus canine canvasser, Emily in the front with driver Emilia. I’m pretty sure if I asked ‘em all five have differing views on tactical voting, yet all the same view on tactical campaigning, it’s well worth it. And in Hastings it certainly was. As for Frida the Chihuahua, she’s been well brought up, Labour thru n thru’.
We make these adventures fun, we’ve (or more strictly speaking, me) christened them ‘Tactical Campaigning Charabancs’. Not too arduous either: a two-hour canvass, then back home. Others who have the time will stay all day, help out during the week, in Lewes on the local campaign, or phonebanking for Brighton Kemptown in Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s defence. There’s no browbeating, or privileging of those who can do more over those who can do less. None of this is factional: unlike some others — on all wings of the party — we don’t choose candidates to help on the basis of what tendency they’re identified with, but because they’re standing in seats Labour can (and must) win.
Best of all, ever since the election campaign ‘proper’ began, we’ve been turning out numbers far in excess of those involved on the peak final weekend of the Kemptown campaign in 2017.
Keeping the Tap Turned On
Labour likes to celebrate its huge deployment of doorstep canvassing teams as a ‘people-powered movement’. While the Tories have billionaire backers, the party stresses, we have the big, diverse audiences at our rallies, the canvassers, the phone bankers, the social-media sharers and retweeters, the small-scale donors. All of that is true, and it’s something to be proud of.
It’s like a tap being turned on, come election time: a great outpouring of Labour Party ranks in all their glory. But if 2017 is anything to go by, come the morning of December 13th, the tap will be turned off again. Deathly-dull branch and CLP meetings with no practical impact, attended by ever-dwindling numbers at ease with this failed organisational culture, will become the norm once again. The few new faces who give it a go will be put off until the next general election by the experience.
Labour is still a party run from the top, whichever side happens to have their hands on the levers of power. A member-led party is as far off as it has ever been. Yes, the manifesto was the stuff of most of our dreams, but there was hardly any meaningful connection between the way it was produced and policy development from the bottom up. The online consultation exercise was nothing more than a stunt, just as it had been in 2017. This is the single greatest failing of Corbynism: to have left the party’s modus operandi barely touched. We may have an army of campaigners, but they remain footsoldiers and little more. Whatever the result is on 12th December, this has to be the terrain that the Left contests. The World Transformed? A better starting point might be, The Party Transformed.
We Can Make History
This election won’t be decided by 650 constituencies — it’ll be more like 150 at the most. If Labour can keep its losses to the Tories at 10 or fewer, then the party only needs to make about 45 gains (provided the SNP mops up in Scotland, Plaid hold firm in Wales, and the Lib Dems can take at least 10 seats off the Tories). That would mean a coalition of some sort, something that nobody in Labour wants to talk about. Needless to say, we’d all prefer a majority Labour government ready to carry out our brilliant manifesto in its entirety, and of course nobody can rule this out. But to get even close to any sort of power, those Labour target seats really do matter, and so does mobilising those who hardly feature in the polls: first-time voters and the people who don’t normally vote.
Worryingly, there have already been reports of hundreds of campaigners descending on key London constituencies: too many for local organisers to cope with, their effort largely wasted. In and around London, there are 9 target seats, from Chipping Barnet to Stevenage, plus two of our most vulnerable defences, Kensington and Bedford. It’s the same for all the conurbations and counties. Labour has to prioritise, and to provide activists with the information they need so they know where they should be heading.
Which brings me back to the Bevendean estate, Brighton Kemptown, mid-afternoon 8th June 2017 and hundreds of us are feeling quite happy. We’re getting out the vote, and it’s looking good for Lloyd. But unbeknownst to us, just along the coast, little more than an hour away, Amber Rudd was on the verge of losing Hastings & Rye to Labour. Somebody somewhere in the Labour machine should have had the figures and shared them. Rudd eventually scraped home after a recount by just 346 votes. While I cannot claim my canvassing patter on its own would have won Hastings for Labour, several hundred of us canvassing there that afternoon almost certainly would.
This time, we need not just the energy of our members, but smart information and communication, targeting our efforts, up to and including polling day, to inflict maximum damage on the Tories. And along the way we might, just, make history.