UK Labour fights over pluralism

Most readers will be well aware of the awfulness of Britain’s electoral system: first-past-the-post in single-member districts. It gave the Conservatives a large majority at the last election with 43.6% of the vote, having given Labour a similar majority in 2005 with just 35.2%.

The same system has been bequeathed to many former British possessions, but in Australia we have improved it somewhat with the introduction a century ago of preferential voting. That doesn’t remove all of the unfairness, but it generally produces more democratic outcomes. It makes it easier for parties that are, broadly speaking, ideological allies – such as the Liberal and National parties, or Labor and the Greens – to compete in a non-destructive way, because votes for one can help the other as preferences instead of being wasted.

That hasn’t stopped the relationship between Labor and the Greens from being poisonous at times, a topic that we’ve discussed on a number of occasions. Low-level sniping is more or less continuous, and occasionally breaks out into a major dispute, as recently over the Albanese government’s housing legislation. But at least the system allows for a measure of co-operation whenever the parties are minded to try it.

The situation in Britain is much more fraught. At the 2019 election, the four main opposition parties (Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish Nationalists and Greens) won a majority of the vote between them: 50.1%, about two million votes ahead of the Conservatives. But they won only 262 of the 650 seats, partly because so many of those votes were wasted by the parties competing against one another.

Since they can’t reform the system from opposition, the obvious strategy is to co-operate as much as possible. That might involve parties agreeing not to contest some seats, or running dead in them, and allocating resources in such a way as to maximise their shared opportunities and minimise destructive competition. But while the Lib Dems and Greens have shown themselves open to such arrangements, Labour has always resisted the idea because it still hopes to win a majority on its own.

Now, with the polls showing it very much on track for that majority (although still with less than a majority of the vote), Labour seems to be doubling down against co-operation. That’s the message sent last week by the move to discipline long-time member Neal Lawson, head of the progressive think-tank Compass, allegedly for a tweet from 2021 in which he called for “grownup progressive politics” – endorsing electoral co-operation between the Lib Dems and Greens, and implicitly with Labour as well.

Lawson has been given 14 days to show cause why he should not be suspended or expelled, in a move that provoked outrage among much of the party. It’s normal for political parties to have rules against advocating a vote for a rival party, but to extend that to banning support for genuine cross-party co-operation seems perverse. In the words of Labour MP Jon Cruddas, “It is also stupid, counterproductive and reveals a lack of self-confidence.”

The wider context is that since Keir Starmer became leader, Labour has been trying to purge itself of the far-left influence that brought it to disaster at the last election under Jeremy Corbyn. No doubt that was a necessary step, but it seems to have given the leadership a taste for repressing dissent more generally – a strategy that rarely ends well.

Lawson is no Corbynite, and there’s nothing far-left about political pluralism or working for a more democratic electoral system. Labour may well be able to win next year without any help from other parties, but without doubt there will sooner or later come a day when it will need them – and need the very skills of working together that it now seems determined to punish.

And if Labour’s selfishness and intolerance prove to be its undoing, that’s a lesson its Australian counterpart could take to heart.