You’ll choke on your Greens, Sir Keir, if you lurch to the left

It's not just Farage's Reform on the right giving Labour the jitters; Zack Polanski's Greens on the left have doubled their support. But it would be a disaster if the PM drove the party in their direction to appeal to old-school Labour voters, warns John Rentoul

British politics could soon be “Reform and Green and nothing in between”. Since the election, Nigel Farage’s party has doubled its support, and in the past two months, the Greens have increased their support by half.

Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, used to be a hypnotherapist, and his powers of suggestion seem to be working on the voters. Even he might admit that the Green surge owes more to disillusionment with Labour than to his charismatic leadership, but his ambition to replace Labour as the main party of the left seems suddenly more plausible now than it did during the Green leadership campaign in the summer.

The Greens are still fifth in a five-party system, but the four non-Reform parties are all in the mid-teens in the opinion polls, and with a hellhole Budget coming up, there is nothing to stop Labour’s support falling further and the Greens continuing to rise.

So it seems obvious to many Labour supporters that Keir Starmer should move to the left to win these voters back. But it may seem obvious only because that is what they want Starmer to do anyway. For most of this parliament, Labour has been losing support and Reform has been gaining it, but those Labour supporters did not advocate moving to the right.

In my view, a move to the left would be a disaster. Even if it worked in bringing voters back to Labour, it would risk losing voters from the other end of the see-saw to Reform and the Conservatives. At which point the move-lefters point to studies showing that more Labour defectors have gone to parties of the left, or to non-voting, than to parties of the right.

But Labour needs to worry more about defectors to the right for two reasons. One is that they count double. Where Labour is fighting Reform, a Labour voter switching to Reform means the Labour vote goes down and the Reform vote goes up. A defection to the Greens means that the Labour vote only goes down by one.

‘If defectors to the Greens can be persuaded that their vote will let Farage in as prime minister, some of them will come back’ (PA Wire)

The other reason is that defectors to the right cannot be squeezed. If defectors to the Greens can be persuaded that their vote will let Farage in as prime minister, some of them will come back. There is a difference between complaining to an opinion pollster about the Labour government now and actually enabling a Reform government when the election comes.

That is the tactical centrist argument, if you like. Elections are won on the centre ground, and for Labour to move to the left would cede that ground to Reform.

But there are more important arguments of principle. The first is that moving left would not work. Those who were upset with the Labour government for cutting the winter fuel payment for pensioners did not return to the fold when the decision was reversed. There is nothing that Starmer can realistically do that would persuade disaffected voters that he was a proper socialist leading a proper socialist government.

The really important argument, though, is that moving to the left would be the wrong thing to do. When people say that they want more “authentically Labour” policies, what they usually mean is higher public spending, paid for, if they are honest, with even higher taxes than the higher taxes that Rachel Reeves is about to impose.

The other thing they want is for Labour to stop going on about immigration and the boats. The code for this is that Labour “should not try to out-Reform Reform”. But Farage does not have a monopoly on concern about immigration. Most Labour voters want to stop the boats and believe that there must be fair and compassionate ways of doing it.

So I do not think that the easy answers of the so-called left are the right answers to the nation’s problems. Taxes have to go up, and the burden has to be spread fairly according to ability to pay, but the idea that decent public services can be paid for simply by levying a wealth tax on “the rich” is a fantasy.

As for the notion that no one would care about uninvited immigration across the Channel if ministers didn’t mention it – well, I admit that is a caricature, but not much of one.

So, no, I do not think that trying to out-Green the Greens is the answer, any more than trying to out-Reform Reform. Labour should do what is right for the country – with a tactical eye on the concerns of the median voter if necessary – and let the votes fall where they may.