This feels terminal. The breaches of trust have been so frequent, so vast and so decisive that the votersLabourhas already lost are unlikely to return. In one forum after another, I hear the same sentiments: “I voted for change, not the same or worse.” “I’ve voted Labour all my life, but that’s it for me.” “I feel I’ve been had.”
It’s not dissatisfaction. It’s not disillusionment. It’s revulsion: visceral fury, anger on a level I’ve seldom seen before, even towards Tory cruelties. Why? BecausetheseareTory cruelties, delivered by a party that claimed to be the only alternative, in our first-past-the-post electoral system.
Everyone can name at least some of the betrayals:cutting disability benefits;supplying weaponsand, allegedly,intelligence to the Israeli governmentas it pursues genocide in Gaza;channelling Reform UK and Enoch Powellin maligning immigrants; slashinginternational aid;trashing wildlifeand habitats whileinsulting and abusingpeople who want to protect them; announcing yet anotherdraconian anti-protest law; leavingtrans people in legal limbo; rigidly adhering to outdated and socially destructive fiscal rules; imposingfurther austerityon government departments and public services. Once the great hope of the oppressed, Labour has become the oppressor.
Like many people, I was wary of Keir Starmer.I had limited expectations, but I willed Labour to succeed. So I’ve watched aghast as he and his inner circle have squandered one of the greatest opportunities the party has ever been granted. They seem to despise people who voted for them, while courting and flattering those who didn’t and won’t.
The results? Last week, the polling company Thinks Insight & Strategy found that 52% of those who voted Labour in the 2024 general election areconsidering switching to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. That’s more than twice as many as might migrate to Reform UK. The research group Persuasion UK estimates thatLabour could lose 250 seatsas a result of this flight to more progressive parties (again, more than twice as many as it could lose through voters shifting to Reform). Figures compiled by the progressive thinktank Compass show that Labour would lose its majority on justa 6% swing. Already, while it won a massive majority on a measly 34% vote at the election,it now polls at just 22%.
Labour’s strategy is incomprehensible. Experience from the rest of Europe shows that when centrist parties adopt far-right rhetoric and policies, theyempower the far right while shedding their own supporters.
What explains this idiocy? Labour has succumbed, quickly and hard, to the defining sickness of ourundemocratic political system: the sofa cabinet system of close advisers. Opaque and unaccountable government favours opaque and unaccountable power. Ever receptive to the demands ofrentiers,oligarchs,non-domsandcorporations, Labour’s oh-so-clever strategists are moronically giftwrapping the country for Nigel Farage.
Governments don’t start conservative and turn radical. The cruelty will set like concrete. The likely result is annihilation in 2029. On this trajectory, it might not be surprising if Labour were left with seats in only double figures.
Perhaps it’s a blessing that Starmer has shown his hand so soon, as we now have four years in which to prepare. I’m not a party person: for me, it’s a question of what works. And now we can clearly see the shape of it.
The Compass analysis, published in December, reveals extreme electoral volatility. This is caused by a combination of public fury towards austerity, exclusion,rip-off rentsand startlinglylow rates of wellbeing, and the “democratic mayhem” resulting from a first-past-the-post system in whichfive parties are now polling at 10% or more. Small vote shifts in this situation can cause wild fluctuations in the allocation of seats.
The report points out that the UK is an overwhelmingly progressive nation: inall but one election since 1979most voters have supported left or centre-left parties. Of 15 nations surveyed, the UK has the extraordinary distinction of being both the furthest to the left and the most consistent elector of rightwing governments. Why? Because of our first-past-the-post system, which is grossly unfair not by accident but by design. Labour refuses to change it, as it wants to rule alone. The result is that most of the time it doesn’t rule at all.
The thinktank was hoping to mobilise the progressive majority around a revitalised Labour party, but that moment has passed. What the figures show, however, is massive potential for more radical change. A YouGov survey reveals thatalmost twice as many people want proportional representationin this country as those who wish to preserve the current system. So let’s build a government of parties that will introduce it.
Here’s the strategy. Join the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP or Plaid Cymru. As their numbers rise, other voters will see the tide turning. Encourage troubled Labour MPs to defect. Most importantly, begin the process in each constituency of bringing alienated voters together around a single candidate. This is what we did before the last election in South Devon, where polls had shown the anti-Tory vote evenly split between Labour and the Lib Dems. Throughthe People’s Primarydesigned by locals, the constituency decided to back the Lib Dems. The proof of the method can be seen less in the spectacular routing of the Conservatives (as similar upsets occurred elsewhere) than in the collapse in Labour’s numbers, which fell from17% in 2019, and26% in a pollbefore the primary began, to6% in the 2024election. The voters took back control, with startling results.
Whether you fully support any of these parties is beside the point. This coalition would break for ever the lesser-of-two-evils choice that Starmer has so cruelly abused, and which has for so long poisoned politics in this country. Game the system once and we’ll never have to game it again.
No longer will we beheld hostage, no longer represented by people who hate us. It will be a tragedy if, as seems likely, Keir Starmer has destroyed the Labour party as a major political force. But it will be a blessing if he has also destroyed the two-party system.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist