It is tempting to regard last week’s general election result as a belated tribute to the late David Marquand, the influential public intellectual who coined the term the ‘progressive dilemma’.
Marquand, who sadly died earlier this year, famously diagnosed the dilemma as the split between liberalism and the Labour tradition in British politics, an historic fissure that prevented the formation of a centre-left coalition sufficiently broad to defeat the Conservatives. In stunning fashion, British voters overcame this fissure last Thursday. Highly efficient tactical voting between Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters effected an electoral union of the centre-left, while the Conservative vote collapsed.
This can be clearly seen in the following graph from JLP pollsters. The Liberal Democrat vote share rises sharply when the Labour vote share falls below 25%, but dips when it is above it. Labour lent votes to the Liberal Democrats where it couldn’t beat the Tories and the favour was returned. The Liberal Democrat vote share fell where Labour was best placed to win.
The progressive alliance delivered disproportionate seat gains to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but it did not embrace the Greens or the SNP, the two other parties often considered part of an anti-Tory bloc.
The Greens took vote share from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats amongst younger voters and competed directly with Labour in much of urban Britain, coming second to Labour in 39 seats. Meanwhile, Labour annihilated the SNP across the Central Belt of Scotland and on the far right, Reform took chunks out of the Conservative vote, bringing swathes of seats within Labour’s reach and raising the prospect of a ‘regressive dilemma’, as the Economist dubbed it.
Labour’s electoral coalition
Labour strategists are already turning their attention to how to hold together their new, widely spread but shallow electoral coalition. In this finely observed piece by Keir Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, there is an intriguing reference to the party’s recognition of the importance of cooperation with the Liberal Democrats:‘There are hints, too, that even with his vast parliamentary majority, Starmer may have to consider a closer working or even electoral relationship with other centrist parties such as the Liberal Democrats if he is to build a stable coalition from a volatile electorate.’
For Marquand, the progressive dilemma spanned ideas and worldviews, as much as electoral strategy. One of his key questions was how progressives could construct ‘a broad-based and enduring social coalition that was capable not just of giving a temporary majority in the House of Commons, but of sustaining a reforming Government thereafter.’
This required what he called a ‘marriage of Tom Paine and William Morris’, a union of the ‘communitarian, participatory and decentralist strands’ of both liberalism and socialism.
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Marquand’s thesis had an important influence on New Labour, although he was to come to renounce any allegiance to the party and shifted increasingly towards civic republican concerns in the Blair-Brown years. After Labour’s 1992 General Election defeat, Marquand’s arguments appeared more prescient and compelling than ever, and helped ferment the dialogue between the Liberal Democrats and Labour on democratic and constitutional reform that took place in the 1990s.
The size of Labour’s majority in 1997 rendered these talks otiose – or rather, gave the conservative, Labourist tradition an excuse to sideline any talk of cooperation. Only towards the end of the New Labour government did such dialogue return, by which time it was too late. British liberalism had taken its fateful Orange Book turn, one which delivered it into coalition with the Centre-Right, followed by an electoral oblivion from which it has only now recovered.
The 2024 platform
The Labour Manifesto of 2024 contained little of the reforming ambition that animated the radical proposals of its 1997 programme on devolution, the Human Rights Act, Freedom of Information and other measures.
It largely reverted to constitutional conservatism. Unsurprisingly after the sleaze of the Johnson era, the manifesto had strong commitments to ethics and integrity in public office. In other areas, such as House of Lords reform, its proposed reforms were modest. But on constitutional and democratic reform, the door could open to wider change in the second term of Labour’s mooted ‘decade of national renewal’, in which case some of the foundations for cooperation with the Liberal Democrats would need to be laid now.
One the key lessons of the New Labour period is that political and intellectual dialogue between liberalism and social democracy will not succeed if it is left until late in a term of office, driven largely by the imperative of electoral survival. Moreover, for Marquand, the marriage of Paine and Morris did not need ‘official blessing’. Wider movements in civil society, think-tanks and the press need to undertake the spade work of ‘sustaining a reforming Government’, just as Charter 88, the Scottish Constitutional Convention and others prefigured the 1990s reforms.
Despite their distinctive social class and geographical bases, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters have much in common on policy, as polling from YouGov published during the general election campaign showed. One area of shared concern is reform of social care, where successive governments have failed to achieve even partial, let alone politically stable reform.
Social care reform is primarily a political-economic, not policy challenge, and the scope for lasting change in this area depends heavily on whether an electoral coalition of support can be marshalled for a model of care based on collective insurance, funded by progressive wealth, property or inheritance taxation.
If reform is resisted by middle aged and older voters in the asset-rich South of England, it will fail. That is a reason why the task cannot fall to Labour alone. The Liberal Democrats promised cross-party talks on care in their manifesto; the Labour government should take them at their word.
This article was first publised on the University of Bath Institte for Policy Research site and has been republished on LabourList at the permission of the author.
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