This month, an anti-Brexit Labour MP (David Lammy) raised the prospect of a new anti-Brexit party splitting off from the Labour Party and contesting elections in its own right. Lammy, bizarrely, said that any split would be Corbyn’s fault. Setting aside the ridiculous suggestion that the people who stay in the Labour Party are more responsible for splitting the party than those who actually leave it, the idea of a new centrist party is worth examining.
The idea of a centrist-led split in the Labour Party has been repeatedly suggested ever since Corbyn’s first campaign for the leadership in 2015. We’re not going to dwell today on why a new centrist party might be formed. Instead – assuming that it is formed – we’re going to examine what impact it might have on British politics.
“I Don't Wanna Be a Loser”: people vote for the Labour Party, not their local MP
If a new centrist party is formed, it will almost certainly be composed of incumbent MPs from the Labour Party who will then seek to be re-elected as their new party at the next general election. This was the tactic of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a centrist party that split from Labour in 1981, and some news outlets have speculated that this would also be the strategy of a new centrist party. There is a problem with this plan, however: when MPs leave their parties, they have a terrible track record of getting re-elected in their constituencies under a new party label.
Since 1950, of 33 MPs to quit their parties and re-stand in the same constituency as a different party or an independent, 27 lost. Just 6 were re-elected, 2 of them in Northern Ireland, which has a different party system to Great Britain. Labour MPs have an even worse track record: of 21 Labour MPs since 1950 to leave the party and stand for re-election in the same seat, 18 lost.
The difficulties that MPs have faced in getting re-elected should not be surprising. Polling conducted by YouGov in June 2017 showed that just 6% of Labour voters supported the party primarily because of their local candidate or MP, compared to 28% who voted for the 2017 election manifesto and 15% who voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Even more recently, polling in October 2018 showed that just 1% of current Labour voters are voting Labour primarily for their local candidate or MP. Given that only 22% of voters can name their local MP, this is not surprising.
In short: Labour MPs who leave their parties historically find it very hard to win re-election. Barely any Labour voters back the party primarily because of their local MP. And very few people even know who their local MP is.
So without a local membership willing to campaign for them, without a large base of supporters in their constituency and without the resources of a major political party, an MP is almost certain to lose if they leave their party and stand for re-election on behalf of a new political party. This makes it very unlikely that any MP would risk leaving their current party and losing their seat. And yet, unless any new party attracts significant numbers of MPs, it will not be taken seriously, nor will it be able to attract the publicity or resources necessary for the party to succeed.
“I Can't Make It Without You”: you can’t wish First Past the Post out of existence
One inescapable reality that any new political party always has to confront is that Britain uses a single-member plurality voting system (“First Past the Post”) to elect its MPs. Winning 5% of the national popular vote, which would guarantee you around 5% of seats in countries that allocate their seats in Parliament proportionally, means nothing in British politics. In Britain, if you want to win seats in Parliament, you have to win the most votes (usually 35-40%) within a specific constituency. This is particularly challenging for parties that only represent a small minority of public opinion, such as the environmentalist Green Party, because most environmentally-minded voters are not concentrated in a single constituency but are instead distributed across 650 different constituencies. This particular problem has also affected centrist parties in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, as well as the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party before them, have struggled to win significant numbers of MPs even whilst winning substantial numbers of votes.
The tables below show the election performances (% of votes and % of seats) of all parties other than Labour and the Conservatives since 1945.
As you can see, third parties (and others) can receive millions and millions of votes in British elections (reaching an all-time high of 10.4m votes in 2010) and yet only win a handful of seats in the Commons. UKIP found this out firsthand in 2015. The party won an impressive 3.9 million votes (12.6%), an increase of 9.5 points from their 2010 result. But they only won 1 seat out of 650. By comparison, the SNP achieved a total of 1.5 million votes (4.7%) and won 56 seats. Even the Lib Dems have only ever managed to win a maximum of 62 seats (in 2005).
Yes, the Greens managed to win 1 MP, after over 30 years of trying. Yes, UKIP managed to win lots of votes very quickly after 25 years of existence. And yes, the SNP won a landslide majority of seats in Scotland (after 70 years of existence). But a new centrist party would aspire to govern, or hold the balance of power, in the next general election. That would require a new party, starting from scratch, to win dozens or even hundreds of seats. That simply has never been done before in modern British politics.
“Back Together”: Conclusion
When the Social Democratic Party was established in 1981, its founders declared that “the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced”. British politics did indeed re-align as a result of the SDP’s creation, but their much-hoped-for centrist realignment never arrived. Instead, the relative success of the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the 1983 election (25% of the vote) only had the effect of splitting the opposition vote and enabling Margaret Thatcher to increase her Parliamentary majority from 43 seats to 144 seats. Thatcher’s overwhelming victory, achieved because the opposition vote was split evenly between Labour and the Alliance, allowed her to not only carry out her policies in the 1980s but also define British politics for the next 30 years. As she famously declared in 2002, her greatest achievement was “Tony Blair and New Labour”.
A new centrist party is incredibly unlikely to succeed, if we define “success” as wielding any kind of formal power (i.e. governing or holding the balance of power in a hung Parliament). But it would almost certainly split the opposition vote just enough that Labour could lose a close election that they might otherwise have won, leaving the Tories in charge. Would that lead to a realignment of British politics? Absolutely – but it wouldn’t be the centrist, pro-EU future that a new anti-Brexit party might want. Instead, the Tories would be fully in control of a post-Brexit UK, with the left marginalised and centrism totally abandoned.
Is that really what centrists want?
Shouldn't an anti-Brexit centrist party (either a new party or the existing Lib Dems) be concentrating all its fire on the Tories, particularly in areas which both voted Remain and are too affluent to vote Labour (much of which are in the M3/A34/M40 triangle)?
ReplyDeleteWhy do your comrades attack Labour more than the Tories?
ReplyDeletePurity is all well and good, but surely you need to convince the floating voters and fence sitter?
Appreciate your clear statement that you will vote for a Corbyn-led Labour regardless of whether the party embraces Remain.
ReplyDeleteAs part of the debate on what policy Labour should adopt, my principle issue with your article is that it makes no reference to the actual results of the EU elections:
- Despite having 1.7 million extra votes, Remain only had a majority in 3 out of 10 regions in England and Wales.
- In 7 out of 10 regions Brexiteers outnumbered the combined Remain vote.
- Had Labour been a Remain party it would have only had a majority in 2 regions in England and Wales and possibly a 3rd (Yorkshire and the Humber, but only if all Remainers had voted for Labour).
Likewise, the Peterborough by-election is completely ignored:
- Within weeks of a humiliating thrashing in the EU elections, Labour defied all predictions to defeat a triumphant Brexit party in a finely balanced marginal seat.
Indeed, you don’t appear to have accounted for Ashcroft’s post-EU election polling.
- According to this poll the majority of 18 to 54 years olds (i.e. predominately Remain) who participated in the 2019 EU election intend to vote Labour at the next general election.