The case is often made by Labour’s soft left that electoral salvation for the Labour Party lies in assembling a progressive coalition of left-wing voters. They deny the reality that Labour has most successfully assembled that progressive coalition by parking its electoral tanks firmly on the centre ground, and that that’s what delivered convincing parliamentary majorities in all of Labour’s paltry haul of four General Election wins in the last half century: 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2024.
Instead, they offer two possible solutions, or a combination of both. First, to shift the party’s policy and leading personnel sharply towards their own soft left instincts and politicians, offering catnip to Labour’s “new core vote” of younger, highly-educated voters in big cities and university towns, whilst writing off Labour’s “old core vote” – the white working class in post-industrial “Red Wall” areas, as well as traditional swing voters. Second, a formal electoral alliance with the Greens, Lib Dems, and presumably Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Your Party, based on the flawed assumption that the votes for all parties on the left and centre-left are interchangeable behind a single agreed candidate.
Pleasingly for the advocates of these strategies, they involve moving towards exactly the policies, personnel and rhetoric that they have always personally wanted. The presumption is that there is a majority in the country for “progressivism”, if you ignore the actual behaviour of the Lib Dems in government in 2010-2015 and just add up the total votes for every party except the Tories and Reform.
This conveniently ignores the First Past the Post electoral system the UK has, where the concentration of radical voters in heavy numbers in a small range of constituencies, and their relative absence in vast swathes of England, renders the national vote totals a lot less useful even if you could bolt them together.
One recent poll suggests an even bigger fly in the ointment. There may not actually be a majority of voters who favour the combined progressive parties. More in Common’s first 2026 poll, taken on 2-5 January, has the following vote shares: Reform 31 per cent, Conservative 23 per cent, Labour 19 per cent, Lib Dem 12 per cent, Green 10 per cent, SNP 2 per cent.
In other words, that is a combined Reform and Conservative vote share of 54 per cent against a combined Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP vote share of 43 per cent. Even with Labour in third place below 20 per cent there is not much support for other progressive parties either. The Lib Dems on 12 per cent would get almost exactly the same vote as in the last general election and the Greens on 10 per cent are only up 3 per cent on their 2024 score.
This kills two commonly believed myths. The Reform vote cannot mathematically have come only from the Tories when Reform is up 16 per cent from 2024 and the Tories are only down 1 per cent. Labour’s lost 16 per cent of voters since 2024 cannot all have gone to our left when the Lib Dems haven’t gained any votes and the Greens are only up 3 per cent.
There is therefore no “soft left” road to recovery for Labour where we retreat into a comfort zone of policies and voices that appeal most to the instincts of our own members and hold hands and sing kumbaya with the Greens.
That doesn’t mean that we ignore voters to our left. They are part of the coalition we need to build. Everything we are doing as a government is founded in our social democratic values and ought to appeal to anyone on the left. Our core mission is about creating a fairer and more equal society. And we have always appealed for tactical votes when we are in constituency head-to-heads with a right-wing party, and will do so again whether the opponent is Reform or the Tories, as will the Lib Dems and Greens appeal to Labour voters in the far smaller number of seats where they are best placed to beat the right. We know from 2024 and all the subsequent polling that there is a huge openness to tactical voting, particularly between Labour and Lib Dem voters.
But the total numbers and the distribution of progressive votes mean you can’t build a parliamentary majority for Labour without all three elements of the coalition I mentioned above (the urban left, the Red Wall working class, and traditional swing voters). That means we also have to win back votes lost to Reform since 2024 and to a lesser extent to the Tories in recent months.
They won’t be tempted by left-wing rhetoric, although working class Reform voters do want objectively left-wing action to address the industrial, economic and social decline of the left-behind towns of Britain. We can only win by delivering on what every poll and every canvassing session says are voters’ concerns: tackling illegal immigration and the cost of living and tangible improvement to the economy and public services, whether that’s the NHS, schools or policing.
[Further reading: Has Labour’s soft left won?]
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Subscribe here to commentwhy are you printing this drivel. He cannot add up. The Reform votes he speaks of are not coming from Labour. Reform voters HATE Labour. The votes are coming from people who did not vote in 2024 and mostly voted for the Tories in 2019. But luckily the way to tempt the illusory Labour curious Reform voters exactly matches his preferred racism
While I understand the writer’s math and overall point, I’m a little confused by the conclusions. He says that Labour has only won elections by staking out the center. That may be true, but how would he characterize this current government? The centrism that has supposedly proven so electorally successful is the same centrism that sees the current Labour government floundering in third or even fourth place in the polls, hemorrhaging votes in every direction, but most research has the bulk of the losses going to left parties. The writer even acknowledges the left as a core voting constituency for Labor, but seems to just glide past the fact that this left leaning constituency is the one that needs shoring up the most, saying that Labour’s program should be attractive to left leaners. Well, it isn’t! Pretending it is won’t bring those voters back to Labour, only a major shit in tone/direction will do that.