‘Industrial-scale’ tactical voting sparks calls for Labour-Lib Dem electoral pact

‘Don’t rest on your laurels’: Keir Starmer and Ed Davey urged to work together after by-election wins

Labour and the Liberal Democrats were urged to forge an electoral pact to remove the Conservatives at the next general election after “industrial-scale” tactical voting saw Boris Johnson’s party lose two by-elections.

Labour’s win in Wakefield by around 5,000 votes, a 12 per cent swing from the Tories, saw the Lib Dem candidate Jamie Needle lose his deposit with only 1.85 per cent of the vote.

Similarly, the Lib Dems’ extraordinary triumph in Tiverton and Honiton, which saw a swing of 30,000, saw the Labour candidate lose her deposit with just over 3 per cent of the vote.

Matt Singh, pollster at Number Cruncher consultancy, said the results from Wakefield and Tiverton amounted to “industrial-scale tactical voting and it’s a big deal”.

Naomi Smith, chief executive of the Best for Britain group campaigning for an electoral pact, said the majorities “could not have been overturned without tactical voting and an unofficial electoral pact”.

Urging Starmer and Davey to collaborate, she added: “Labour and the Lib Dems mustn’t rest on their laurels, repeating this success will be much more difficult in a general election. Our polling proves they will need to collaborate to defeat the government.”

Both parties have dismissed the idea of any deal done during the campaigns. But Labour did not put significant resources into Devon, while the Lib Dems did not campaign so heavily in west Yorkshire.

Alastair Campbell, the New Labour-era spin doctor who worked at No 10 for Tony Blair, said he backed the idea of electoral collaboration following the stunning by-election results.

“I actually think it would be a good thing if Labour and Lib Dems co-operated even more closely,” he told Sky News on Friday.

Best for Britain analysis of a recent Focaldata survey shows that Labour could win up to 351 seats by working with both the Lib Dems and Greens at the next election.

The group warned that without electoral pacts, much of the so-called “red wall” seats won by Mr Johnson in 2019 in the north and Midlands would stay blue and Labour would struggle to win the election outright.

Research by King’s College London professor Andrew Blick suggests Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens could secure a majority of more than 300 seats in parliament if they agree to a full electoral alliance in Wales and England.

Polling guru Sir John Curtice said the Conservatives were now doing as badly in by-elections as the John Major government in the early 1990s – and said the party should be worried by widespread tactical voting.

But Prof Curtice warned Labour that the result in the red wall seat of Wakefield did not suggest “any great enthusiasm for the Labour party” – pointing to the fact that the slump in the Tory vote was twice as large as the rise in the Labour vote.

Speaking to BBC Today programme, Sir John said: “There still seems to be a question about the extent to which voters, many of whom clearly aren’t happy with the Conservatives, are necessarily as yet bought into Labour as an alternative.”

Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov said the best thing Mr Johnson could do to revive Tory party fortunes was to “resign” – saying voters “mostly dislike him”.

The respected pollster told Sky News: “The animus towards Boris Johnson will trump all those Conservative arguments. A different leader, a new leader who doesn’t have that baggage, has some chance … of getting through.”

Mr Kellner raised of a Labour minority government supported by the Lib Dems and others. “There will be arrangements of some sort. We could be in for an interesting period of non-Conservative government.”