LONDON (Bywire News) - In an unsurprising move, Labour has said it has entered an electoral pact with the Lib Dems for the next general election. This unholy alliance will aim to reduce the Tories’ majority and increase the other parties’ MPs. You could say it’s all a bit ‘CRAPP’: ‘Centrist Remainers Against Progressive Politics’. #CRAPP if you wish. But this insipid pairing might actually be the parties’ undoing in the long term.
The Financial Times (FT) reported that this Lab-Lib agreement called a “non-agression pact” would see Starmer’s party fight ‘minimal campaigns’ in the Lib Dem’s top 30 target seats in 2024, and vice-versa. The parties have formed CRAPP to “topple” the Tories. As it wrote:
“The informal Lib-Lab non-aggression pact taking shape would leave the Lib Dems to lead the anti-Tory fight in many southern seats, while Labour would focus on winning back “red wall” seats in the north and midlands”.
It cites the Lib Dem’s recent by-election wins and Labour’s current lead in the polls as a reason why CRAPP makes sense. Both parties will be looking to overturn seats where the Tories have slim majorities. Unnamed sources were out in force to provide the FT with meaningless soundbites. A Labour one said:
“If both parties put resources into where they are most likely to win, you end up with more Labour seats and more Lib Dem seats”.
While a Lib Dem one noted:
“If Labour and the Liberal Democrats spend all their time and money trying to beat each other it’s really not good for progressive politics. We need to fight in the areas where we can win and that is the overwhelming priority”.
Yes, you read that right. This person thinks that Labour and the Lib Dems are “progressive”. Never mind all the evidence to the contrary – like Starmer recently out-beating the Tories’ drums of economic war on Russia or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey’s fawning over both the EU and the monarchy. A brief comparison of the parties’ policy positions shows this further. For example, the Lib Dem’s committed [p10] in 2021 to an above-inflation pay rise for NHS workers while Labour stalled at 2.1% - both well below the 15% trade unions and campaign groups call for.
This CRAPP direction of travel, with the final destination being a “confidence and supply deal” if parliament is hung, was always going to happen.
Starmer’s well-documented purging of the radical left within Labour has been ruthless. The Lib Dems are – well, the Lib Dems. So, the parties informally uniting against the most right-wing government in recent years is not surprising. But all of this works on the basis that 2010 Tory-enablers, the Lib Dems can be trusted, of course. And CRAPP also works on the flawed assumption that Labour is leading in the polls because of Starmer – not because of the public’s contempt for Boris Johnson.
Moreover, the CRAPP agreement is typical of Westminster bubble politics – where parties are more concerned with getting votes from their opposite numbers than dealing with the systemic disenfranchisement that led to 39% of the electorate not voting in 2019. Also, CRAPP and its members’ middle-class agendas ignore the more entrenched systemic disenfranchisement of the poorest people (social grades DE), of whom 47% didn’t vote in 2019.
Their approach put simply is, ‘Let’s win over Tory voters by being just a little less Tory!’
But there could be a glimmer of light amid all this CRAPP. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have hinted that if the former got a majority, or parliament was hung in 2024, then electoral reform could be on the cards. If this took the form of proportional representation (PR) where votes properly matched seats, then smaller truly progressive parties could actually gain some power.
In contrast to the CRAPP, England currently also has PAL: the People’s Alliance of the Left. It’s an electoral agreement between smaller, left-wing parties – currently Breakthrough, Left Unity, the Northern Independence Party and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC, which also has former Labour MP Chris Williamson’s Resist under its banner).
Much like CRAPP (but without leaving a shitty taste in your mouth), PAL will work to make sure that the parties don’t stand against each other in elections they could win. They’ll also be looking to do policy development and ways of working collaboratively. It’s early days but already Breakthrough, for example, has a handful of councillors and a mayor.
So, if CRAPP gets into power and does indeed bring about PR – then PAL could stand a real chance of winning seats and ultimately influencing national politics.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. For the time being, there’s a lot of CRAPP to deal with. A Lab-Lib pact will do little to actually progress things in the UK for the poorest people. Nor will it do anything to prevent the Tories from returning to power in a few parliament’s time. It’s once more a case of Westminister gravy-trainers thinking of their own careers. And most of us are pretty sick of this CRAPP.
(Writing by Steve Topple, editing by Klaudia Fior)