My starting point for thinking about organisation is to consider what a desirable but plausible future might look like and work back from there. In a parliamentary democracy, the question of political leadership and new political outcomes necessarily includes elections. The left has reason to be confident.
The 2024 election results were sensational: they provided the biggest vote and parliamentary representation for the non-Labour left in British history. At the height of its success, in the late 1940s, the Communist Party wasn’t able to match the nine MPs returned in July 2024, when some four million voters were prepared to break with Labour for left candidates. Gaza was the solvent for Starmer’s Labour. The miserable record of his party in office will only expand that pool of discontent.
We should be thinking in terms of winning 30 or more left MPs in a hung parliament – the kind of parliamentary bloc that, combined with the broader movements, would be enough to seriously pose a political realignment in Britain, splitting Labour and opening up the prospect of a genuine left government. But achieving that will require an electoral campaign focused on genuinely winnable seats and collaborative working among the Greens, independent MPs and others.
We have no L’Angleterre Insoumise and may never get one, but starting with the same strategic focus on the possibilities clarifies the next steps
This will require unity around a broad political programme. The left in England is divided between a growing Green Party, now with four MPs and second place in 39 constituencies, and a more diffuse, non-party left that may never join that organisation. The five independent left MPs are a potential harbinger of the kinds of local campaigns that may break through in smaller towns and cities of the kind Reform is targeting.
Breaking Reform’s growing appeal will mean keeping one step ahead of its populism nationally, seizing the initiative on issues such as price rises in the way that Don’t Pay UK managed to, developing practical local initiatives like supporting food banks and anti-cuts campaigns, and above all keeping away from tired tropes of left moralising and nostalgia, whether for the miners’ strike or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership. The stakes are high: get this wrong and it will be Reform, not the left, who prosper.
The far right halted
Fortunately, France’s New Popular Front provides a glowing example of another European country, also with a first-past-the-post system and an insurgent radical right, facing the decay of its traditional social-democratic party and with a legacy of deindustrialisation, in which the tribes of the left were able, at incredible speed, to assemble a workable coalition with a model programme for addressing the crisis. That coalition – primarily between the radical left France Insoumise and the French Greens but also pulling in elements of the Socialist Party – came first in the 2024 legislative elections. It halted – for now – the far right’s forward march.
Crucially, from our perspective, this was not merely an expedient lash up, like earlier coalitions. Its Socialist Party supporters have proved f ickle, but the red-green core has remained united around the programme, which should be a model for future left realignment. It has immediate demands to address the cost-of-living crisis that correctly put it in the broader context of ecological collapse and capitalist failure. And it has a second, longer part with a detailed programme for longer-term transformation.
We need this in England. We have no L’Angleterre Insoumise and may never get one, but starting with the same strategic focus on the possibilities clarifies the next steps. Work on a programme to address the immediate terms of our crisis – the pressure on living standards most obviously – that both the red and the green of our future coalition can agree should begin as soon as possible. Serious conversations about winnable seats need to take place now. The future could be ours.
