The Obstacles to a UK Progressive Alliance

It’s not impossible. But it’s extremely tricky under the current system. And it can’t just be wished into existence.

A lot of sensible commentators these days say Britain just needs a “progressive alliance” (PA) to stem the far-right tide and sort out the mess we’re in.

I understand why. The stakes are high: the radical right is falling in behind Trumpian anti-migrant, pro-trillionaire politics. The left and centre are brittle, more divided than ever, and liable to get steamrolled under First-Past-The-Post unless they find a way to work together.

But if wish-casting alone was going to make the PA a reality, we’d have one by now. People haunted by premonitions of Nigel Farage in No. 10 ask: why shouldn’t Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems, Plaid, the SNP, Sinn Féin, Gaza independents and the rest toss aside their petty differences? They all have an interest in stopping Reform.

The received wisdom is that the barrier is stubbornness driven by hard-headed strategy. There’s truth to that. Labour rejects standing down for any other party on principle. The Greens have been burned before, standing down for Labour and getting nothing in return: they’ve scaled back campaigning in the Makerfield by-election, but they won’t be stepping aside. For all of the progressive parties, it’s almost like nuclear disarmament. Even if you’re convinced that relinquishing your candidates is the path to a better world, you can’t rely on your opponents to do the same.

But the deeper barrier isn’t tactical. It’s that these parties don’t agree on why the far-right exists in the first place.

Diagnostic Differences

They agree the far-right is bad. They have radically different theories about where it comes from and how to beat it.

Labour increasingly sees the far-right as a product of valid concerns around migration and social cohesion. Its strategy follows directly: compete with Reform for voters in former industrial towns, and prove its credibility on immigration and border control. Andy Burnham seems likely to continue this approach, at least in part.

The Greens diagnose the opposite. For them, immigration and identity are proxies for deeper frustrations around stagnant living standards, housing shortages and failing public services. So they won’t fight Reform on its own terrain. They go after non-voters and former Labour supporters who have lost faith.

The others vary. Lib Dems treat populism as a symptom of institutional decline and target specific seats with pragmatic fixes. Plaid and the SNP don’t really separate the far-right from their broader disdain for Westminster, which leaves them with the elegant solution of simply leaving the Union.

Under FPTP, this is fatal. You cannot agree who is best placed to take which seat when you can’t agree on the objective, or even on where the battlefield is. The Greens won’t lift a finger to help Labour chase Reform, because chasing Reform is precisely what they think is killing the country. And Labour isn’t thrilled about having its former voters hoovered up by people who call its government a betrayal.

Vision Deadlock

This is the biggest obstacle, and it runs deeper than strategy. These parties have drastically different visions for the country beyond beating Reform, and they increasingly see each other as irredeemable. Labour and the Greens above all.

Starmer copies Farage’s homework and calls the Greens “sectarian” and “extremist”. The Greens frame Labour as sell-outs who let their voters down and enabled the far-right. They don’t want to ally with Labour. They want to replace it.

What turned disagreement into contempt was Gaza. For a great many progressives, the failure to act, combined with the crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors, was a moral litmus test that Starmer’s cabinet simply failed. Winter fuel, benefit cuts and draconian immigration measures then confirmed the verdict rather than caused it. The point isn’t that progressives have a list of grievances. It’s that these particular failures function as disqualifiers: they make any future coalition feel less like compromise and more like collaborating with the enemy.

Despite some under-reported progressive wins, especially on solar energy and tenants’ rights, a lot of progressives now look at Labour as a party that no longer speaks for them. And in fairness, Starmer told them as much: if you don’t like the changes we’ve made, the door is open, and you can leave.

That exodus is the lifeblood of Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Even when Burnham takes the helm, many Greens will hold on to their contempt. He could conceivably win some of them back with genuinely radical policy, an olive branch. We have no idea whether he’ll extend one.

A progressive alliance needs the Greens to see Labour as a flawed ally in a shared fight. Right now they see Labour as the thing they’re fighting.

The mechanical version

Here PA advocates have a fair objection. An alliance doesn’t require love, or even agreement. It requires disciplined, seat-by-seat tactical withdrawal: you stand down where I’m better placed, I stand down where you are. That mechanical version has worked before, in council pacts and the odd Westminster seat. No shared vision required, just arithmetic.

True. But notice that even the mechanical version has largely stalled, and ask why. Tactical withdrawal still needs someone to decide who stands down where, and that decision smuggles the diagnosis back in. Labour and the Greens can’t even agree which seats are winnable for whom, because they don’t agree on which voters are in play or what those voters want. The arithmetic looks clean until you realise both sides are using different numbers. The mechanical alliance is easier than the visional one. It is not as easy as its champions claim.

Finding Unity

None of this makes a Progressive Alliance impossible. It means its advocates have to be honest about the size of the job.

France’s New Popular Front is the obvious lesson, and usually the wrong one is drawn from it. The takeaway is not that ideological differences melt away in the face of a common enemy. The French left spent years attacking each other. They came together because they faced an immediate, existential threat two weeks out from a far-right landslide, agreed on one narrow objective, and shelved everything else to meet it.

Britain’s progressives are nowhere near that point. They are still arguing over who should lead, which voters matter, where the battleground is, and what caused the rise of the far-right to begin with. Many don’t merely disagree. They see each other as the obstacle.

Maybe Farage’s rise will eventually deliver the same shock the French right delivered, and force the same reckoning. But if that day comes, it won’t be because a progressive alliance was the obvious or inevitable answer. Coalitions don’t assemble themselves out of shared dislike. Somebody chooses to build one, pays for it in concessions and trust, and earns it from rivals who feel they’re owed it. That choice is available now. So far, nobody has made it.