Inside the left-wing plot to stop Farage entering No 10

A tactical voting strategy is already being planned for the next general election to rally support around progressive candidates best placed to beat Reform UK in every part of the country, The i Paper can reveal.

Work has already begun behind the scenes on what “resourcing and messaging”, including websites, will be needed for progressives to cast effective tactical votes to block Nigel Farage’s party.

MPs in Labour, the Liberal Democrats and other centre-left parties believe that voters lending their support to candidates who aren’t their first preference could play a key role in locking Farage out of No 10 at the next election.

Such a progressive alliance is likely to be informal, taking the form of parties being “judicious” with where they target their resources rather than entering into formal pacts, which would see them stand down candidates in certain seats to give other parties a clear run.

The Lib Dems and Labour were presumed to have a similar unofficial deal during the 2024 general election, helping the Lib Dems to a record seat haul of 71, and Labour to a landslide victory with 411 seats and a majority of 174.

At the 2024 election, a host of websites were launched to provide people with advice about how to cast the most effective anti-Tory tactical vote in their constituency.

A Lib Dem MP told The i Paper that work was already under way to marshal anti-Reform tactical voting in the same way at the next election, which is expected in 2029.

Last month, The i Paper revealed that the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Zack Polanski, is open to an election deal with Labour to stop Farage becoming PM – but only if Sir Keir Starmer is ousted as leader.

Reform and Tories could form their own alliance

However, pollsters have said that progressive tactical voting could come to little if Labour’s unpopularity continues to grow, or if Reform and the Tories forge their own alliance.

Reform has topped every UK poll since April, with Farage’s party currently holding a healthy lead over Labour.

The consistency and size of the polling lead has delighted Reform supporters, but sparked horror among progressives, who for the first time are seriously contemplating the prospect of prime minister Farage.

However, the result of a Senedd by-election in South Wales in October has given the left hope that they may still have a trump card for beating Reform.

In Caerphilly, Plaid Cymru won with 47 per cent of the vote, compared to 36 per cent for Reform, and only 11 per cent for Labour – a humbling result for a party that had dominated the political life of the town for 100 years.

Plaid’s comfortable margin of victory, the relatively high turnout (above 50 per cent), and the negligible share of votes that went to other progressive parties (the Lib Dems and the Greens only polled 1.5 per cent apiece) led pollsters to conclude that anti-Reform tactical voting had played a critical part in the result.

Caerphilly by-election gave the left hope

Patrick English, director of political analytics at YouGov, said at the time that the by-election was a “stark reminder for Farage and Reform that the constituency of voters who don’t want them to win is orders of magnitude greater than those who do want them to be successful”.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid’s leader, told The i Paper that Caerphilly showed the “appetite on the progressive side of politics to defeat the populist right”.

It meant that while Labour MPs were dismayed by the decisive loss of a former bastion, many found a silver lining – if such tactical voting was repeated at the general election, it might be enough for Labour to hang on to power.

A Labour MP told The i Paper that they believed the threat of Reform would allow them to squeeze voters in their constituency who might otherwise vote for the Lib Dems or the Greens. “I do think there will be quite a lot of tactical voting,” they said. Another Labour MP said that voters were “better informed” than ever about how to vote tactically.

As well as Lib Dem and Green voters lending their support to Labour incumbents, the expectation is that traditional Labour supporters will return the favour in other seats.

A senior Lib Dem MP told The i Paper: “Definitely there is appetite out there to stop Reform.

“I’m picking that up on doors all the time, I’m getting asked about it all the time: ‘the question is, how do we stop Reform?’”

“Tactical voting is going to be massive at the next election, and I am aware of several groups – some of which are the ones we know about, but also many other groups – that are trying to co-ordinate to make sure that resourcing and messaging in all sorts of different ways can get out to the electorate to help them make the decision about who it is they’re going to vote for.

“There’s several tactical voting groups and alliances. The sense I’m getting is that they’re all readying themselves to do this all over again.”

The MP said that the anti-Brexit Best for Britain campaign group would be one of the groups likely to be launching a website.

Best for Britain told The i Paper that no decision had been made and that its campaigning activities would depend on the situation at the next election.

‘Common sense’ for parties to target resources

When it came to what centre-left parties would do themselves, the Lib Dem MP said it would involve party HQs being highly selective in where they focused their resources.

“What we always try and do – and a lot of this is just common sense – we target our resources and everyone understands that,” they said.

“We’ll target heavily and people will know when we are contenders or not. To an extent, parties get out of the way for the other where they see that there is a more credible challenge… it will be fairly common sense.”

They said there was little chance of formal deals where some parties would withdraw candidates to help their rivals, because such an approach had been experimented with at the 2019 election but had failed to stop Boris Johnson winning a large majority.

“What I don’t think is going to happen is any kind of stepping down for anyone,” the MP said. “Those days are gone. We tried that once, it didn’t work and actually I think the electorate over the years has got even more savvy about tactical voting, so I suspect it will be more that.

“That step aside for each other deals thing, I just don’t see it happening at all.”

As well as the experience of 2019, they said that turnover of MPs since the Brexit years had reduced the appetite for formal alliances. “Many of the longer in the tooth MPs who used to do a lot of cross-party working have moved on… I’ve never seen cross-party working so poor,” they said.

A Labour MP agreed there would be no official pacts. They said that such arrangements always proved deeply unpopular with local activists. “You lose your membership,” they said. “We would never do that.”

Formal alliances are also complicated by the intense rivalries which exist between some parties on the left. As The i Paper reported earlier this month, the Greens have said they are open to a deal with Labour – but only if Starmer is forced out and replaced with a more left-wing candidate. The fact that the Greens’ top target seats tend to be Labour-controlled urban constituencies may make it difficult for the parties to reach a non-aggression pact.

Similarly, Plaid’s huge victory in Caerphilly – and the party’s hopes of winning May’s Senedd election – means that it is reluctant to give way to other parties in Wales.

Ap Iorwerth said: “It’s difficult to identify exactly where or how actual formal alliances can work, especially in a position where Plaid Cymru is now being seen more and more as the party in the driving seat in Wales.”

He echoed the Lib Dem MP in saying that careful decisions would be made about targeting resources.

“In the first-past-the-post system, you’re always judicious about where you put your resources in,” he said. “We focused our resources very well at the last election and got our best ever UK general election result. That will always be the case for every party.

“But one thing I would perhaps ask people to reflect on is that what those target seats have fundamentally changed now in light of the collapse in Labour support and the growth in support for Plaid. There are areas of Wales, in the South Wales Valleys and Caerphilly and others, which have now clearly become target seats for Plaid whereas they wouldn’t have done in the past.”

Tactical votes could lead to a coalition

If progressive tactical voting works and the parties of the left end up with the most seats in a hung parliament, it would tee-up a coalition government or a looser confidence and supply deal.

“I think it’s very important that we give signals that we will co-operate post elections with other progressive parties,” ap Iorwerth said.

The Lib Dem MP said Sir Ed Davey’s party was “preparing for all eventualities”, but added: “We’ve done the coalition thing, it hurt us massively. We’re not about to be doing anything like that lightly.”

However, progressive tactical voting could be scuppered by two things.

The first is the sheer scale of Labour’s unpopularity. Louis O’Geran, research and communications associate at the More in Common think tank, said Starmer’s party had “become increasingly hated since the summer”.

“While progressive voters still say they’d vote against Reform above all else, a growing minority of left-wing voters want to vote against Labour,” he said.

In November, More in Common polled people on “If you could vote against one party in a general election, who would you vote against?” – 38 per cent of people chose Labour compared with the 29 per cent who went for Reform.

The second – and related – impediment to progressive tactical voting is if some sort of deal emerges between Reform and the Tories – a prospect that both parties publicly deny but which Farage has reportedly talked about in private.

In the More in Common poll, only 8 per cent identified the Tories as the one party they would vote against.

O’Geran said that the proportion of Reform voters who would vote against Labour has risen, while the proportion who would vote against the Tories had more than halved, suggesting “Reform anger toward Conservatives is dissipating”.

Tactical voting ‘crucial’ at the last election

“Overall, I think it just shows that Labour cannot take tactical voting for granted. In part because it cannot rely on disillusioned progressives to switch back, but also because there may be potential for right-wing tactical voting, as Reform voters become less anti-Tory and more anti-Labour.”

Others agree that progressive tactical voting could be neutralised by a Reform-Tory alliance.

Best for Britain’s anti-Tory tactical voting website at the last election received more than six million hits, and the pro-EU campaign group thinks that without tactical voting, Labour would have ended up with 62 fewer MPs, the Lib Dems with 29 fewer, and the Tories with 91 more. It has warned that such an approach might not yield the same results this time around.

Naomi Smith, Best for Britain’s chief executive, said: “Tactical voting played a crucial role at the last general election, but it may be insufficient to avoid disaster next time round – particularly in the face of a likely Reform-Conservative pact to stand down candidates similar to the one Farage led in 2019.

“The next general election could be more than three years away and the circumstances very different, but as of today, parties who want to keep Farage out of power should seriously consider the consequences of fighting a stand-aside sledgehammer with a tactical-voting pillow.”