Hang Together or Hang Separately?
Green wins and the Makerfield by-election have reignited debate on the potential for a “progressive alliance” to stop a future far-right government. Now is the time to make it happen argues Tom Scott
The recent local election results and the Makerfield by-election have reignited debate on the potential for a “progressive alliance”. Without electoral reform, this may be the only way to avoid a far-right government – and thinking around this can’t be left till the last minute.
The idea that parties on the left and centre-left should work together to prevent the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system delivering a right-wing Government on the back of a relatively small share of the vote first loomed large ahead of the 2017 general election.
It was championed most vocally by the Compass campaigning group, which describes itself as “an umbrella grouping of the progressive left” but at that time was seen as broadly aligned with Labour. Compass saw it not just as a shortcut to winning, but as “a deep commitment to changing the culture and structure of our political and democratic system – built from the grassroots up but aided by national leaders.” For the anti-Brexit movement, it was, potentially, a way to prevent a Conservative Government from pushing through a hard Brexit of a sort that lacked a popular mandate.
The idea gained considerable traction in the Green Party of England and Wales, reflecting the fact that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn appeared to be more aligned with the Greens than under its previous leadership. Green MP Caroline Lucas became one of the most eloquent advocates, and when she stood for co-leadership of the party with Jonathan Bartley in 2016, under the banner “The Power of Working Together”, the promise to work towards “a less tribal politics” was central to their platform.
But despite many Labour members and a handful of Labour MPs backing the idea, the Labour Party leadership proved wholly uninterested. In the event, the general election of June 2017 saw what could best be described as a partial, informal and largely ineffective alliance between the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, with each party agreeing not to stand in a small number of seats where the other looked more likely to have a chance of winning.
Some local Green parties and parliamentary candidates made individual decisions to stand aside for Labour, and many tactical voting sites sprang up to advise people on how best to cast their vote to defeat the Conservatives. This may have helped reduce the number of seats won by the Tories, but it failed to stop the election of a minority Conservative Government that went on to rule (chaotically) with support from the Democratic Unionist Party.
A more formal “Unite to Remain” alliance between the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru was patched together ahead of the 2019 general election, but without Labour’s participation this proved incapable of preventing a Tory landslide; Boris Johnson swept to power with a majority of 80 seats on a vote share of 43.6%.
Many Greens felt, with good reason, that these experiments in cross-party collaboration had damaged the party’s overall vote share to little purpose and made it more difficult for the Green Party to distinguish itself from Labour. As Rupert Read put it in 2017: “Greens were taken for a massive ride. Greens were considered as expendable, and were expended.”
At the party’s 2024 spring conference, members voted to stand a candidate in every constituency and, where no local candidate was in place, for the national party to run a selection process to find one.
A Political Landscape Transformed
This history might seem to bode ill for the formation of future electoral alliances. However, the UK’s political landscape has changed almost beyond recognition since 2019. Green Party leader Zack Polanski was not exaggerating when, in the wake of May’s local elections, he pronounced the two-party duopoly that had dominated British politics for the previous century “dead and buried”.
Polanski’s assertion that “the new politics is the Green Party versus Reform” is more questionable, though.
A more sober analysis was offered by the eminence grise of psephologists, Professor Sir John Curtice: “Frankly, none of the political parties have the support of a substantial section of the public.” With support for Reform running at around 26%, it was “hard to get a cigarette paper” between the vote shares of the Greens, Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems. “The crucial point is the results confirm the fragmentation of our politics,” Sir John observed.
It may be that support for Reform has peaked. But Farage’s party is clearly now a serious electoral force, backed by a seemingly limitless amount of billionaire money. And if support for other parties remains more or less equally divided, a vote share of as little as 26% could well be enough to deliver a Reform government, or a Reform/Tory coalition led by Farage.
Britain is thus faced, for the first time in its history, with the real prospect of a far-right government taking power. The consequences would be grim: mass deportations of migrants by methods comparable with the cruelty and violence of Trump’s ICE agency; withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); massive cuts in public services to finance tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy; a complete reversal of (anyway inadequate) efforts to decarbonise the economy. It also seems highly probable that Farage would set about demolishing the UK’s somewhat flimsy legal and institutional barriers to authoritarian rule, in the same way as Orbán did in Hungary and Trump is doing in the US.
All of this would be the polar opposite of everything the Green Party stands for, and in that sense, Polanski’s positioning of the Greens as the strongest and most principled opposition to Reform is both convincing and politically canny.
Of course, it’s not impossible that the Green Party will continue to build on the remarkable momentum of the past year to emerge as a force capable of winning an outright majority at the next general election. It’s also more than possible that Reform will falter under the weight of scandal, infighting and maladministration at Reform-led councils between now and 2029. But while hope is a force to be reckoned with, and one that Polanski has proved more than capable of inspiring, it is no guarantee of success. And Reform’s core vote seems as impervious to clear evidence of corruption and incompetence as are Trump’s supporters in the MAGA movement.
The fragmentation of UK electoral politics makes the need to reform our archaic first-past-the-post system seem even more glaringly obvious. But even when this system has stopped working for its historical beneficiaries and left Labour looking at likely electoral wipeout, this is something that the current Labour leadership still refuses to contemplate. That could change, but it is nevertheless highly unlikely that the next general election will be held under a proportional system.
Positive Cooperation: The New Popular Front in France
For all these reasons, there is now an urgent need to start thinking constructively about how a progressive alliance could work more effectively than it has in the past, and I would argue that Greens should be playing a leading role in that process. In this, we have a promising example to look to in the part played by France’s Green Party, Les Écologistes, in the formation of the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front populaire, or NFP) to successfully confront the far right at the French parliamentary elections in 2024.
This happened in no small part thanks to the efforts of Marine Tondelier, leader of Les Écologistes. Her party was at the top of the list of signatories to the joint memorandum of June 2022 that laid the ground for the NFP, calling for a coming together of “all humanist, trade union, community, and civic forces on the left [… ] to promote a programme of social and ecological change, build an alternative to Emmanuel Macron and combat the racist agenda of the far right”. Other signatories included La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and several smaller parties of the left and centre-left.
The original name of the initiative that grew into the NFP was the “New Ecological and Social People’s Union” (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale) and the key to its success was not simply that it offered a pragmatic way to avoid progressive votes being split across parties. The NFP succeeded in developing a common platform as a positive basis for cooperation in a way that recalls the initial aspirations of Compass and the Green leadership in 2017, but that was never fully elaborated in the UK.
This comprised a “legislative contract” of 150 measures, including taxes on the ultra-wealthy, much greater investment in public services, a massive increase in the social housing budget, an increase in the minimum wage, a freezing of energy prices, electoral reform, a new law on energy and climate to promote a shift to “ecological planning”, the creation of a public investment bank to direct savings towards social and environmental priorities, a ban on bank financing of fossil fuel extraction, a diplomatic push to secure an international law on ecocide, and a national climate adaptation plan.
It was on the basis of this platform, endorsed by France’s largest trade unions and by anti-racist and environmental NGOs including Greenpeace, that NFP candidates confounded predictions of a victory by the far-right National Rally in France’s 2024 parliamentary elections, winning 180 seats against the National Rally’s 142.
The barriers to agreeing such a common platform were no less formidable in France than they are in the UK – political tribalism, personal ambition and the vanity of small differences being just as prevalent in French politics as in our own. And the NFP alliance has not been without its difficulties since 2024; forming a stable and lasting coalition government has proved extremely challenging. Yet as Dr Johnson remarked: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
The imminent prospect of a virulently far-right party taking control of government made it clear to the French left that if it did not hang together, it would hang separately.
But the groundwork that went into the forging of this alliance had started more than two years before the NFP’s platform was announced. French Greens were instrumental in this process – and in ensuring that environmental action was central to the NFP’s platform.
Shifting the Centre of Political Gravity
Previous attempts to forge a progressive alliance in the UK have foundered on Labour’s recalcitrance, and it is certainly hard to imagine the current Labour leadership agreeing to such cross-party collaboration under any circumstances. But Keir Starmer is unlikely to lead the Labour Party into the next election, and at least one of those most likely to succeed him is seen as much more open to this possibility.
The botched and partial electoral alliances of 2017 and 2019 reflected the fact that the Greens’ relatively low level of electoral support compared with Labour – and even with the Lib Dems – gave them very limited negotiating power. The situation now is very different; with polls consistently showing the Greens ahead of both Labour and the Lib Dems, the party can now negotiate from a position of considerable strength.
To some, this might suggest that the way to go is a maximalist strategy – competing hard in every seat where there is any chance of winning, with the aim to obtain as many MPs as possible in a coalition government. The risk attached to this approach is that it would actually deliver fewer Green seats and open the door to Reform. And even with its hugely expanded membership and accompanying greater financial resources, the Green Party would still find it hard to resource winning campaigns in every potentially winnable seat.
A meaningful progressive alliance should not be seen as an alternative to winning as many Green seats as possible; it could, I believe, enhance that potential – as was the case for candidates of Les Écologistes who ran as part of the New Popular Front at the French parliamentary elections of 2024. And, just as importantly, it would also be an opportunity to push the positions of other parties that formed part of this alliance in a more radical direction.
Much of the NFP’s platform in 2024 was strikingly similar to the Green Party’s 2024 manifesto, and polling indicates broad support among the UK electorate for many of the policies common to both, including a wealth tax and much stronger action on climate and environment. There is also strong public support for a move to a proportional electoral system, which would undoubtedly be a threshold condition for any alliance. And, as climate-driven disasters continue to hit the UK and the world between now and 2029, a common platform with action on climate and extreme inequality at its heart is likely to be an increasingly compelling proposition.
A number of cross-party organisations, all with strong support from unions and from social and environmental NGOs with mass memberships, might well be willing to help broker a common platform against the far right. These include the Together Alliance, Make Them Pay and HOPE not hate. As Emmanuel Bodinier, programme director at Les Écologistes wrote of the role played by such organisations in the success of the NFP: “While we as political parties played our part, we could never have achieved the result we did on our own. Numerous trade unions and associations and civil society groups got involved by directly supporting the New Popular Front, whereas they are usually far removed from partisan politics.”
France’s two-round system for parliamentary elections does make it easier to determine, after the first round, which candidates have the best chance of winning. The mechanics of any electoral alliance in the UK would need to take account of first-past-the-post, perhaps using polling to determine the relative strength of parties to the alliance in each constituency. And there is much discussion to be had about the exact scope of such an alliance. It may be, for example, that – as Green House’s Jonathan Essex argued in 2016 – “a sub-regional approach to working together under a progressive alliance could also lead to stronger shared ownership of fighting for local issues across parties.”
But if we are to avoid a far-right government led by Nigel Farage, we cannot leave this until the last minute. Greens should be in the forefront of developing a shared platform that could form the basis for such an alliance – one that comprehensively rejects the neo-liberal policies that have fed the growth of Farage’s brand of Trumpian klepto-fascism, and that is centred around meaningful action on the climate and ecological crises. Previous attempts at forging an electoral agreement failed to do this, but – as the French example shows – that does not mean that it is impossible.
Stopping the Far Right Now the Most Urgent Priority for Many Voters
And what, one might ask, do the Greens have to lose from advancing such a proposition? If it were to be rejected by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, this is more likely to reflect badly on them rather than on the Greens in the eyes of the very large numbers of voters for whom preventing a Reform-led government is now an overriding priority.
When the Makerfield by-election was called, Caroline Lucas commented: “There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy and counter the dire threat of a Reform UK government elected on a minority of the vote.”
My own feeling is that if Andy Burnham wishes to attract votes that might otherwise go to the Greens, he needs to convince voters that he will push Labour in a much more radical direction, that his commitment to electoral reform is more sincere than that expressed by Keir Starmer in 2020, and that he will follow through on it. So far, he has failed to do this, let alone to make a compelling case for the Greens to stand aside.
That failure could mean him losing to Reform in Makerfield. But that would not weaken the case for a progressive alliance further down the line; in my view, it would strengthen it by providing a powerful object lesson in why this is so urgently needed. But a progressive alliance can only work with credibly progressive allies.
Taking a longer historical view, it’s worth bearing in mind the words of Kasper Braskén, a leading historian of Popular Front movements against fascism in the 1930s:
“The Popular Front today is primarily remembered as a defence mechanism against fascism and the far right, but it should equally be seen as a powerful means to pull the political centre to the left. In this way, the idea of the popular front can provide relevant answers to that ongoing ‘longing for unity’ across the Left, but only if simultaneously linked to tangible visions for economic and social justice in a cross-border, democratic framework.”
Facing, as we do now, even worse catastrophes than those that befell Europe in the 1930s, agreement on climate action needs to be an essential building block in the formation of any progressive alliance against the far right. Greens can and must play a vital role in ensuring that this happens.
This piece was originally published by Green House Think Tank.
Tom Scott is a writer and campaigner based in Cornwall, and was Campaigns Coordinator for the Green Party of England and Wales between 2021 and 2025.
Brilliant piece. Will the political parties rise to the challenge?
Excellent article. Thank you.