Electoral reform is not the way to defeat the Tories – it’s a dead end

A Lib-Lab ‘non-aggression’ pact, with a view to proportional representation, is a nice idea but bad politics

Keir Starmer and Ed Davey ‘get on and they speak pretty regularly’ (Getty/PA)

The one time Britain really could have had a “progressive alliance”, the Liberal Democrats threw their lot in with the Conservatives. Let “2010” be the starting point for any discussion about Lib-Lab electoral pacts.

Contrary to the assumptions at the time, a Labour-Lib Dem government was perfectly possible in 2010. It wouldn’t have been as simple as the Cameron-Clegg coalition, and it would have relied on the acquiescence of Scottish and Welsh nationalists, who had just six and three MPs in that parliament. But those MPs would not have wanted to enable a Tory government, while the Lib Dems agreed with many more Labour policies than Tory ones.

The real reasons it didn’t happen were personal. Nick Clegg found David Cameron easier to work with than Gordon Brown; Brown failed to step aside quickly enough, and neither David Miliband nor Alan Johnson stepped forward.

So the real significance of this week’s kerfuffle in the “progressive alliance” dovecot is not the reports of a non-aggression pact between Labour and the Lib Dems, but the reminder that Keir Starmer and Ed Davey “get on and they speak pretty regularly”, as Andrew Marr put it in his new column as New Statesman political editor.

The non-aggression pact itself is a description of the obvious: that the Labour Party will focus its resources on Con-Lab marginal seats, while not trying to compete in seats where the Lib Dems are in second place. What is more notable is the willingness of Davey’s advisers to talk to the Financial Times about it.

More notable still is their openness about the terms of a possible deal in a hung parliament, learning the lessons of 2010. A “senior adviser” to the Lib Dem leader is quoted by the FT as saying: “I don’t think we could sell a coalition to our party.” Instead, the Lib Dems are “trying to get Labour to think about” a confidence and supply deal in return for a change in the voting system. That would mean Lib Dems wouldn’t be ministers, but would agree to support a minority Labour government and its budgets “for a price – and that has to be electoral reform”.

What the adviser didn’t mention, though, was learning the other lesson of 2010, which is that the Lib Dems don’t want to go to the trouble of asking the British people for their view in a referendum on changing the voting system. Much better to legislate – without a referendum – for a system of proportional representation for the following election.

In 2010, Brown offered Clegg the Alternative Vote system without a referendum, but it was too late, and Clegg naively assumed that he would win the referendum that Cameron had already offered. The Lib Dems are not going to make that mistake again. They never liked the Alternative Vote much anyway. It is not a proportional system: it simply allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, which would benefit the Lib Dems as they would tend to pick up the second preferences of main-party voters.

But they also know that they lost the 2011 referendum because the “No to AV” campaign ruthlessly deployed an image of a newborn baby: “She needs a maternity unit, not an alternative voting system.” The effectiveness of the “No” campaign had nothing to do with the details of AV, and would have worked just as well if not better against a proportional system.

Even so, it would seem a bit undemocratic to impose a new voting system on the country without a referendum – especially if it were suspected that the change would be defeated. Hence the importance for the Lib Dems of persuading Labour to commit itself to proportional representation now. If both parties fight the election on manifestos promising to change the voting system – preferably to the same system – the argument for avoiding a referendum would be stronger.

That, I suspect, is why Davey’s adviser spoke so freely to the FT: to try to focus Labour attention on post-election scenarios. Davey knows that Starmer knows that the best he can realistically hope for at the next election is a hung parliament – a Labour majority would need a bigger swing than Tony Blair achieved. Davey also knows that Starmer blocked proportional representation at Labour’s annual conference last year, using the trade union block votes to crush the overwhelming vote of party members.

The trouble for Starmer is that his members think that electoral reform is a shortcut to defeating the Tories over the long term. Starmer presumably takes the more cynical view, which is that, in the long term, it can only weaken Labour. It is all very well Davey cosying up to him now with promises of the sunlit progressive uplands, and saying, as he did in September, that the Lib Dems would not facilitate a Conservative government at the next election.

If that is so, Starmer might say to himself, Davey will have no choice but to facilitate a Labour government, and I need not concede proportional representation as the price. After all, proportional voting would mean permanent hung parliaments, and permanent influence for the Lib Dems – and look what they did in 2010.