4 in 10 people who voted Labour in July are either not a very strong supporter of the party or not a supporter at all and voted for tactical or protest reasons, new polling reveals, amid concerns that Labour’s landslide victory, while broad, is fragile and could already be falling apart.
The report by Compass, titled Thin Ice, argues that Labour should be less worried about losing 2024 voters to Reform UK and the Conservatives than to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, arguing this is the greater electoral risk.
This data demonstrates that Labour Together was wrong when it argued in its recent report that the greatest threat to Labour is from parties to the right.
Instead, Labour’s prospects are threatened by losing its existing electoral coalition to other progressive parties and independents after failing to sufficiently change the country.
New analysis today shows that Labour’s landslide victory in July, while substantial, disguised a fragile mandate, with Labour still weak in the ‘Red Wall’ seats and reliant on tactical voting in many Southern English constituencies. The report shows Labour is particularly vulnerable to any move of Green and Liberal Democrat voters away from the party.
Labour could fall prey to a pincer movement losing votes to its left, most notably in the shape of the Greens, and to alliances between the Conservatives and Reform.
There were 202 seats where a progressive won, but the combined vote for the Conservatives and Reform was greater than the number of votes cast for the winning candidate. A private deal between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, just like the one between Labour and the Lib Dems could see a massive seat haul to the right.
But there is an alternative, Compass argues: Labour can appeal to the latent progressive majority in the country and win with a mandate for sufficient change – not by leaning to the right, but by working closely with other progressive parties and putting in place the building blocks of reform that will steadily spread wealth and power to more people.
To mobilise progressive voters and parties, Labour has to support proportional representation as the basis for the long term structural changes the country needs to see.