‘Labour action on extreme poverty can stop voters going Green’

Gorton and Denton is a grim vision of the future for our Party. Angeliki Stogia was a great candidate, with the right message: “unity not division”. Yet her appeal was not enough to hold back the tide in progressive Gorton. 

The Green surge hurts us beyond our urban strongholds. By splitting the Labour vote everywhere, it could usher in a catastrophe for progressive politics. We have to show we share values with Labour voters tempted by the Greens. And we can do so, as New Labour did, by acting to help end extreme poverty.

 Labour’s electoral challenge

 Picture this. Labour has just lost 326 seats. Nigel Farage stands on the steps of Downing Street, hands aloft. It’s May 4th 2029. This result is what recent polls predict would happen if an election were held today. It goes without saying, this would set back progressive politics for a generation. It would usher in the most extreme, nativist government in the era of universal adult suffrage. And why? Because Labour couldn’t hold on to our base. Too many of Labour’s progressive voters stayed at home or peeled off to support the Greens, while our traditional, working-class voter base didn’t believe Labour were bold enough to meaningfully improve their lives. Our coalition didn’t hold.

READ MORE: ‘Why I left the Green Party and joined Labour’

 One in five of Labour’s 2024 voters are going Green – more than twice the number going to Reform – and 14% are going to the Lib Dems. It’s easy to think that lost votes to the Greens means Labour’s losses are confined to seats like Gorton and Denton. And surely a Green MP would back a Labour government in any case?

 Lost votes to the Greens absolutely puts metropolitan seats, like Gorton and Denton, at risk of going Green. But votes lost to the Greens easily hand seats in places like  Rochdale, Swansea, and Walsall to Reform. These seats are not bastions of liberal metropolitanism, but places where slim Labour majorities can be eroded through a split progressive vote. On current polling, 93 Labour seats – around a quarter – would be won by Reform because of voters going to the Greens.

 The top reason motivating Labour voters to vote for other progressive parties is that Labour are seen as “not Labour enough”. The second reason is that we are seen as “too right wing”. Reaching out to Labour voters tempted to vote Green requires us to connect with them on their values – of tolerance, fairness, and compassion. This Government is acting at home to make a values-driven appeal to our progressive voters: lifting the two-child benefit cap was a case of this. But we can act abroad to do so too, by acting on global challenges that are squeezing living standards both at home and abroad.

Labour cannot win the next election by trimming at the edges or chasing Reform alone. We win by rebuilding our progressive coalition – and that means proving we are still the party of moral purpose. If voters think we are “not enough”, we must show them we are.

This starts by reclaiming an issue that has defined Labour at its best in previous decades: the fight to end poverty.

Action to end extreme poverty can help win voters back

 Ending extreme poverty has been a clarion call for our Party for decades. It was a Labour government which created the Ministry for Overseas Development in the 1960s. It was New Labour which trebled aid and cancelled debt, putting ending poverty around the world at the heart of its agenda. If we want an issue to appeal to our progressive voters, who are leaving us because we are “not Labour enough”, putting this Government firmly within this proud legacy can help.

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We are not saying action on international development is a silver bullet to Labour’s electoral woes – it’s not. But it can form part of a wider strategy to win back the voters that are leaving us. There is a strong precedent for this. David Cameron’s Conservatives raised aid to 0.7% of GDP not because they were a great friend of the global poor, but as a part of a hard-nosed (and highly effective) electoral strategy to win over progressive Lib Dem voters.

Action on international development has traditionally been one and the same as the aid budget, but this doesn’t have to be so today. The aid we send is hugely effective. Thousands of children have lived happy and healthy lives because of our generosity. But the world has changed: it isn’t the mid-noughties anymore. In times of fiscal consolidation, such as today, it is difficult to justify increasing the aid budget, because every pound spent on aid is one either cut from elsewhere or raised through increased taxes. Aid spending is not a vote winner in a zero-sum world.

We should spend more on aid because it’s the right thing to do. But the good news is that the aid budget isn’t the only tool in our box. We don’t need to spend more to meet the voters that are leaving us to the Greens on their values, because there are actions the Government can take which have no impact on public spending.

Take the high amount of debt faced by many countries in Africa. The average African nation spends nearly a fifth of its government revenues paying down debts – fifty times more than it received in UK aid, even before the cuts. For 32 of them, this is more than they spend on healthcare or education. At a time when extreme poverty is rising on the continent, this is deeply worrying. But the UK can act, unilaterally, to reform debt renegotiation processes so that nations can reduce their debt burden. And this would not cost a penny of taxpayer money.

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We are looking at an electoral abyss. In a world where we lose a third of our voters to progressive parties, we will not win the next election. But if we appeal to voters tempted to leave Labour based on our shared values of fairness and fixing a broken global system that is failing ordinary people both at home and abroad, we can win some of them back. Acting to help end extreme poverty is not only important because it means fewer children die a premature death. It is a hard-nosed strategy to help Labour win the next election. It can help us avert a catastrophe for progressive politics.

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