On a picturesque bridge beside Harvey’s brewery in Lewes, Steve Coogan, local resident and lifelong Labour man, stood surrounded by Liberal Democrat campaigners and many Labour supporters. It was the middle of last year’s general election campaign, and supporters of both parties cheered Coogan’s message: “Where the main contenders against the Tories are the Liberal Democrats, that’s what people should vote. Vote tactically to get the Tories out!” Around the country, millions did. John Curtice, still working on the estimates, says he reckons tactical voting may have delivered Labour up to 100 extra seats, and stacks of Lib Dem gains. The spirit of the election was a country determined to punish the Conservatives.
On the bridge that day was Lewes Labour member and film-maker Tony Dowmunt, filming Coogan to put his message on social media, urging progressive voters everywhere to vote tactically to oust the Tories. But Dowmunt and fellow Lewes Labour member Paul Wafer, who was holding the microphone that day, have both been expelled from Labour. “Your membership of the party stands terminated. You are no longer entitled to attend any party meetings or to exercise any other rights associated with membership of the party,” said their letters from Labour HQ, unsigned – merely from the “Disputes Team”.
The claim is that the two ousted members “demonstrated the type of support for the Liberal Democrats that is incompatible with chapter 2, clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour party rule book”. In principle, that’s a necessary rule: members can’t back parties standing against Labour, or the multitude of prohibited anti-Labour groupuscules. But, as Wafer wrote to party officials in his defence, many had “worked together during the election campaign to do everything we could locally to help secure a Labour government, by ridding the country of as many sitting Tory MPs as possible. In Lewes, Labour couldn’t win, but the Tories could lose. Getting the Tories defeated in Lewes made a direct contribution to Labour’s victory in July.”
Labour HQ had rightly written off Lewes anyway. In an unspoken electoral alliance, Labour and the Lib Dems laser-focused their respective campaigning on plausibly winnable seats. Lewes Labour people like Dowmunt went canvassing in Crawley and Worthing West, where they helped eject Tories from both seats. Labour’s selective targeting was so overt that LabourList published a list of 211 “non-battleground” constituencies: of which Lewes was one. When the results were counted, Labour came in fourth behind Reform with just 6.7%. But someone snitched on these two members to Labour HQ for breaching the rules; Labour even contemplated throwing out Neal Lawson, the director of Compass, for his organisation’s tactical voting campaign. What madness is this? Keir Starmer often says, “Country first, party second”. But this puts party tribalism well ahead of everything, as does his rejection of electoral reform.
What happened in Lewes is a small local matter, you may think, but its implications for progressive government are profound. With the right in power most of my lifetime, despite the left and centre-left clocking up most votes in virtually every election, Labour’s high command sticks to bone-headed tribal obduracy on electoral reform. In doing so, it is responsible for preventing British politics from matching that of its citizens. That’s despite the party at large voting in favour of electoral reform in 2022, and despite the dozens of new Labour MPs who support it. The latest polling shows voters backing proportional representation (PR) over first past the post (FPTP) by 49% to 26%. Frequently cheated itself in the past, in 2024 it was Labour that benefited grotesquely from FPTP, winning more than 60% of seats on a third of the vote. The Electoral Reform Society chief executive, Darren Hughes, called it one of the most disproportional election results the world had ever seen.
It is all the more frustrating that Labour could be using its ill-gotten stonking majority to bring in reform – at least for one election initially, with another confirming vote in parliament afterwards. A system devised for two parties has become dangerously fragile and unpredictable with four to five parties competing. The smallest voting shift causes seismic shocks. “A breath of wind can change everything,” Prof Rob Ford tells me. “Just one in 50 voters changing their minds can make the difference between triumph and disaster.” Between the 2019 and 2024 elections, Labour gained only 1.7% more votes, but that gave it 32% more of the total seats. That same dysfunction could blow Reform into power on a small increase: FPTP now causes fickle precarity, not stability and certainty. With such fine margins, Elon Musk’s millions really may swing an election, says Ford – another good reason to clear big money out of politics at the same time.
Turbulence at home and abroad makes election predictions pointless: Starmer got a bounce this week from YouGov, with 48% thinking he is handling the Ukraine crisis well, against 32% who don’t. But in a few days Labour’s standing may plummet again, if its benefit cuts are too harsh. The crunch spending review later this month will define Labour: iron-fisted fiscal rigour with severe cuts could alienate progressive voters, without attracting the right.
Voting systems profoundly influence everyday politics. FPTP focuses all effort on wooing a few mercurial swing voters, who are likely to be more tax-averse. “Under PR, politics becomes more progressive,” Ford tells me. “PR prevents extremes; you’d never get a Thatcher government again. Coalitions moderate policies.” Then why didn’t Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems moderate the ferocious austerity of David Cameron and George Osborne in the 2010 parliament? “They got run over: they’ve learned their lesson.”
Next time Labour may well be in coalition, and electoral reform will be the price. As Ford warns them: “Be nice to people when you’re on top, as you’ll need them on your way down.” Treating near-allies as the enemy looks arrogant. Lewes’s sensible tactical voters are not Labour traitors.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
