UK election map 2015: Wikimedia
In recent days, the idea of Labour forming an electoral pact with the Green Party has come under renewed scrutiny, thanks to Caroline Lucas MP calling for one in the pages of The Independent. Such a pact has been occasionally discussed since the election, which saw the best Green result in a general election, but one thing often missing from the discussions is a sense of what such a pact would look like in practice. Which seats would be targeted? How many Green candidates would have to stand down? And what are the winnable seats where the Green Party should be pressing for a free run?
In establishing this, it is possible to draw on Labour’s own history, something I had occasion to read about recently in a very good book by Martin Pugh called “Speak for Britain: A New History of the Labour Party”. As he relates, one often-forgotten aspect of the long march to Labour’s role as a party of government was the pre-WW1 electoral pact that the Labour Party formed with the then-dominant Liberal Party. This pact enabled Labour to elect 29 MPs in 1906 on just 4.8 per cent of the vote, and 42 MPs in December 1910 with just 7.1 per cent. It also enabled the Liberals to win a landslide in 1906 (with 397 MPs to the Tories’ 156, the Irish Nationalists’ 82 and Labour’s 29) and to become the largest party in Parliament both of the elections in 1910, despite only having a small lead over the Tories in 1906 and despite the Tories having a 3-point lead in 1910.
