Lord Ashcroft: Can Starmer negotiate the left’s coalition of chaos?

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com

Last month I analysed what my polling revealed about whether and how the Conservatives can “unite the right” in a fragmented political landscape.

Now we look at the other side of the fence.

With debate raging over Britain’s role in the Middle East conflict, Shabana Mahmood’s migration reforms and the implications of the Gorton & Denton by-election, what is the state of the left-of-centre voting coalition under the biggest Labour majority for nearly 30 years? With Reform ahead in the polls, can the left mobilise to keep the right out of office?

In my latest poll we asked people whether they would, in the event of a hung parliament, prefer a coalition between the Conservatives and Reform or a coalition between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Those who preferred the latter (43 per cent of all voters) were asked whether they would be willing to vote tactically to prevent a Conservative or Reform candidate winning. Nearly nine in ten of them said they would, with no significant difference by current voting intention.

At face value, this augurs well for uniting the left. Assuming that left-leaning voters can always identify the tactical anti-right candidate their own seat (quite a big assumption), 87 per cent would back this candidate. With the combined vote share for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens on 47 per cent, this implies that over 40 per cent of voters would vote tactically for a “left bloc” candidate. By contrast, as we also found, the combined vote share for a Conservative-Reform alliance is in the mid-30s.

But can we take it this face value?

To find out, we asked one further question: whether there were any parties that people would be unwilling to support, even as a tactical vote. Here we begin to see the dents in left-of-centre solidarity. Just over half of Green and Lib Dem supporters, and just under two thirds of Labour supporters, say they would be prepared to vote for any of the others. But a quarter of Lib Dems and three in ten Greens say they wouldn’t vote Labour; a fifth of Greens wouldn’t vote Lib Dem; and almost as many Labour supporters say they wouldn’t vote Green.

The chart below breaks down current Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters into three categories:

• Flexibles, who prefer a Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition and who are willing to vote tactically for any of these parties
• Selectives, who prefer a Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition but are unwilling to vote for at least one of these parties
• Splitters, who say they would vote for one of these three parties but do not prefer a Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition (they either prefer a Conservative-Reform coalition, or don’t know which they prefer)

About two-thirds of current Labour voters are Flexibles, compared with about half of Green voters and just over two-fifths of Lib Dem voters. This resistance to tactical voting amongst Lib Dems might seem surprising. In the first place, a significant minority of them do not prefer a left-wing coalition government in the event of a hung parliament (though only 19 per cent of Lib Dem Splitters actually prefer a Tory-Reform coalition). This echoes the dilemma the Lib Dems faced in 2019: neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Boris Johnson were acceptable Prime Ministers to sizeable chunks of their voter base, leading to the ill-fated decision to try positioning Jo Swinson as the next PM rather than a moderating influence in a coalition government. A second factor is that the Lib Dems gained 60 seats from the Conservatives in 2024 on the back of concentrated tactical voting; many of their supporters have already identified the Lib Dems as the tactical vote in their constituency.

Many Green voters resent what they regard as Labour’s move to the centre under Keir Starmer, as well as those who have not forgiven the Lib Dems for entering a coalition with David Cameron. Just 72 per cent of Green voters who prefer a left coalition would consider a tactical vote for Labour; 82 per cent would be prepared to vote Lib Dem. Green Splitters prefer both Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch over Keir Starmer, which may well represent a visceral disapproval of Starmer rather than any positive endorsement.

Labour voters, meanwhile, are the most flexible of the three, as the party found to its cost in Gorton and Denton. While the sample among Scottish respondents is too small to be more than indicative, the same analysis for SNP voters suggests that fewer than one in five are flexible – unsurprising, given the nationalist/unionist divide.

Looking specifically at the willingness to vote Labour, only 37 per cent of voters are prepared to back Labour as either their first choice or as a tactical vote against the Conservatives and/or Reform. If the acid test for tactical voting is in the willingness for people to vote for an unpopular incumbent, this is an unconvincing result. Could this be a manifestation of disappointment with the government which will soften with proximity to the election as voters face a starker choice between left and right?

Our political map shows the position and proximity of various important voter groups, including the dispersed and fragmented parts of a putative coalition of the left. The size of the group is proportional to the size of the group it represents:

Even if these three parties could between them secure a parliamentary majority, maintaining such a coalition government would involve keeping on board very different kinds of voters. A coalition between just Labour and the Lib Dems would cover quite a compact and coherent area of the map. But a coalition of all three parties would mean retaining not only the groups on the left-hand side, but Lib Dems at the “12.30” position and Green voters as far round as “4.30”.

Other questions help to illustrate the problem. Majorities of Labour and Lib Dem voters prioritise growth, jobs and lower energy prices over climate change; a bigger majority of Green voters do the reverse. Labour and Lib Dem voters are much more sceptical about the benefits of immigration than Green voters, and more than twice as likely to say more should be spent on defence at the expense of welfare and benefits.

While there is common ground between the three parties’ supporters, these are more profound differences which would not disappear with a change of Labour leader or a finely crafted campaign message. One of the causes of this government’s travails is that the broad but shallow backing it received in 2024 requires it to maintain support from opposite areas of the political map – a feat which would challenge far more able administrations.

If this is difficult with a parliamentary supermajority, achieving it with a tripartite coalition – which may well have a slender majority or even no majority at all – would be a formidable challenge. Keeping the right out at the next election is the easy part; governing would be another thing altogether.

Full data tables at LordAshcroftPolls.com