By-elections invite panic. Turnout drops, narratives harden fast, and parties start talking as if politics is a single emergency in which only one “responsible” outcome is acceptable. The coming Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester is already being framed that way. In the i paper, Vince Cable is reported urging Liberal Democrat supporters to vote Labour, and leaning into an “Operation stop Farage” style argument.
I understand the instinct. First Past the Post encourages defensive voting, and Reform thrives when an election is reduced to a binary contest. Many liberal voters will look at the race on polling day and decide that they want to block Reform. That is their right, and it is their decision.
The problem is not tactical voting. The problem is senior figures trying to choreograph it.
When voters are told where to park their ballots, it turns citizens into pieces on a board. It accepts the most corrosive lesson of First Past the Post: that politics is about managing fear rather than choosing a programme.
Liberal Democrats should be arguing against that distortion, not modelling it.
Worse, it hands Nigel Farage the story he is always trying to tell. Populism thrives on the claim that there is a single political club, an establishment, and that outsiders must break it up. Cross-party nudges to fall in behind Labour make that claim easier to sell. Even when the intention is sincere, the optics look like a stitch-up; they validate the “they are all the same” posture that Reform uses to recruit protest voters.
The i report captures the awkwardness. A Liberal Democrat source described the seat as “a big safe Labour seat”, then pointed to the elephant in the room: reciprocity. Liberal Democrats are often urged to be the grown-ups, to make space, to stand aside. Labour is rarely asked to do the same for us. When we benefit from tactical voting elsewhere, it is usually because we have earned trust locally and persuaded voters directly.
That asymmetry matters. Labour is not the whole centre, and it is not healthy for voters to be trained into thinking that it should be. The Liberal Democrats are not a delivery mechanism for Labour majorities; we are part of the infrastructure of democratic competition. We provide representation where Labour is weak, we pressure Labour where it is dominant, and we keep alive liberal arguments about power and decentralisation.
There is also a practical cost. If Liberal Democrats normalise the idea that our first duty is to instruct supporters to back Labour whenever Reform looks threatening, we shrink over time. That does not leave voters with more power; it leaves them with fewer credible choices. And in a culture where “change” is made to look like a choice between the government and an anti-system insurgency, Reform benefits from the vacuum.
So what should we do instead? Fight every contest with a positive liberal case, including in seats we are not expected to win. Be honest about how First Past the Post distorts behaviour, and argue for replacing it. Trust voters to make their own decisions tactically if they wish, and treat them as adults.
Tactical voting is a voter’s tool. Our job is to persuade, to organise, and to offer an alternative. If we want to beat populism, we do it by putting power back into the hands of the people, not by dictating from above.
* Jack Meredith is a member of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and an active campaigner and canvasser with Swansea and Gower Liberal Democrats. His writing focuses on democratic reform, social justice, trade unionism, economic democracy, and the institutional foundations of effective government. He has written for the Fabians, Lib Dem Voice, Liberator, Nation Cymru, Bylines Cymru, and Centre Think Tank.
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29 Comments
Absolutely right. Sadly Vince has form for this kind of sloppy thinking
This would all be fine if Reform were simply another bunch of crooks but they aren’t. Reform are a Faschist Party, not just Nasty but Nazi.
Now, I have argued against panic, Reform are in slow decline but if they won in Manchester they would get a boost which would help them in May.
Defeating Faschism does require some sacrifices & losing Our deposit is a pretty small one. If I was in Gorton & Denton I would be voting Labour.
The impending Gorton & Denton by-election reminds me of when my old friend the late Michael Steed polled a remarkable 37% in the neighbouring Manchester Exchange by-election over fifty two years ago.
Serious questions need to be asked about how and why the modern party appears to show so little interest in these type of seats outside what it’s Leader has described as ‘Middle England’. I’m sorry to say that unless the Liberal Democrats begin to show an interest in areas outside ‘Middle England’ then it reduces their moral right to take part in a future UK government.
Incidentally, a look of the map reveals that Manchester (with good road, rail and air links) is in the middle of England.
It’s likely that the outturn for this by-election will be Reform first, Green second, Labour third. Plenty of ex Labour voters will go Green. In which case being told to vote Labour rather than LibDem to stop Reform would be counter productive.
@Paul Barker
Just to be clear, I have no issue with tactical voting. But when it is published in a national newspaper, with a party grandee calling on voters to do so, at a time when Reform UK is claiming parties like Labour and us are “the establishment” and that MSM is not to be trusted, it all plays into Farage’s hands and legitimises his dogwhistling.
I wouldn’t dream of predicting any result in Gorton and Denton from a Yorkshire perspective! There all sorts of ways in which we have to combat the heirs and successors of the people who put my father in a Nazi prison camp for five years and we have to do it with clarity and honesty and fidelity to the preamble to our constitution. However, suppose Labour were to lose the by-election they could respond in various ways. The most frivolous would be to blame Lib Dems for campaigning too hard and/or not telling the relatively small number of voters who supported us last time to vote Labour. Jack Meredith warns us of the arrogance that this would represent were we to attempt it. Another completely different response would be for Labour members and some MPs to put more pressure on the leadership to call a constitutional convention on the way the Westminster parliament is elected.
Well said Jack. Voters aren’t pawns who do as party grandees tell them to. It is the voters right to make their decision based on the information available. We should always stand a candidate in every election. How much we campaign is up to us.
So far we have only 2 solid bits of information about this By-election, The results in 2024 & the changes in average Polling since then, put those together & we get roughly
Labour 35%
Reform 27%
Greens 20%
The only reason to believe Reform are first is that its what “everybody” says.
People can donate to Jackie’s campaign at
https://www.mcrlibdems.uk/gorton-denton-by-election
Tactical voting makes sense – and has often helped the Lib Dems – when it is clear what the best tactical option is. The problem with Gorton and Denton is that it isn’t, yet.
But the current betting odds offer a good guide. Roughly, they are: Greens 6 to 4 on: Reform 6 to 4 against: Labour 8 to 1 against: everybody else nowhere.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/gorton-denton-by-election
The voters can and should wait to see if these odds change before election day. But as things stand: Vince is right to advocate keeping Reform out. But he is wrong to choose Labour. Here, it’s the Greens who can beat Reform.
We aim to stand a candidate in all constituencies (except against the Speaker) to give people the ability to vote for us if they want.
However we have limited resources, and trying to fight every seat to win is completely unrealistic at present. Our chances of winning Gordon & Denton are negligible and I see no point in spending limited resources there.
Once it is clear who is best placed to stop Reform, I hope voters will coalesce around that party. Be realistic – that party is not going to be us in this constituency this time around.
@ Mohammed Amin “that party is not going to be us in this constituency this time around”.
Oh, dear, it’s not Gordon (in the Highlands of Scotland) but Gorton, Mr Amin.
And, why do you think the good people of Gorton and Denton would find nothing to induce them to support the Lib Dems ? Are the Lib Dems a national UK party with a message and ambitions or just a cosy middle class Home Counties party with nothing to say to the people of Gorton ?
Words like Fascism & Nazi banded about really doesn’t help whatsoever. It debases those words from the millions who suffered terribly under Fascist regimes in the 30s. To equate the two is plainly wrong. Too often it’s labelled at opponents with differing views. Reform have led the polls for over 18 months, the progressive left would be better concentrating on why that is.
I don’t believe I am “Bandying about” Words without thinking about them. Of course Faschism Today doesn’t look like Faschism in the 1930s, they have enough nous to adapt. Actually Faschism in the 1930s wasn’t all the same either & The Nazis didn’t start off killing Millions, they worked up to it slowly.
Most people like to think that Faschism isn’t British but it is, Moseleyism never went away it just hid & waited for better days.
@: Big Tall Tim, “How much we campaign is up to us”. Yes, it certainly is, Tim, but don’t you think there’s an obligation (indeed, an unwritten contract of trust with the electorate) to make more than a token effort ?
I felt this deeply when I witnessed and still remember a very aged gentleman walking in with a grin on his face to vote for me in a February snow storm by-election when I was a Lib Dem candidate in a rural Cumbria by-election.
P.S. was elected and managed to get him a lift home.
Well put, Jenny,
The only “constituency poll” that had been published is now severely out of date, and is certainly overtaken by (a) the refusal to allow Andy Burnham to be the Labour candidate and (b) the fallout over the Mandelson fiasco, and Starmer’s refusal to face facts. Labour support, I have heard, has been dropping like a stone in recent days. As I have pointed out to Mark Pack, on current levels of opinion polling, Gorton & Denton is one of some 13 seats nationwide which would be gained by the Greens in a hypothetical general election (look at electoral calculus figures) and they are certainly winning the poster battle locally. This is why the betting odds favour their victory so strongly, and why they are the clear choice to prevent a Reform gain on 26th February. Urging a ‘tactical’ vote for Labour is a disastrous policy.
Momentum is important in politics (what American politicians call ‘The Big Mo’), and Labour have a high degree of negative momentum at the moment. There are still a few seats where Labour are the logical ‘Stop Reform’ vote, Gorton and Denton isn’t one of them. For Vince to advocate a tactical vote for Labour in Gorton at this time is (to put it kindly) out-of-touch.
Great post Jack, totally correct. And Rif is probably right too, in the current context Labour do not deserve anyone’s support, however unfortunate the consequences are for the Liberal Democrats. I’m afraid that the Greens are doing a far better job than we are in getting a clear, hopeful, message out there. Zach’s latest video was genius, and could have been done by us had we a more ambitious leadership. If I was in G&D I’d be voting Green.
The elephant in the room is that tactical voting is what the voter resorts to when deprived of preferential voting, by which I mean is any system which allows the VOTER to record HIS/HER preferences for candidates by numbering the list. Tactical voting is where the best the voter can do is first to guess who the top two contenders are (which may be wrong) and then votes for the one he/she finds less repulsive. First Past The Post on its own can easily elect a winner heartedly detested by a majority of the voters, and tactical voting modifies this by guessing what the support for these candidates is compared to the voter’s favourite. FPTP distorts the vote and leads people to make incorrect assumptions about the actual support for the candidates.
It’s an interesting situation in Gorton and Denton and one that could put the Lib Dems in an extremely difficult position electorally if the Greens win. Over the last couple of years, I have very strongly argued that the one big reason the Lib Dems did so well in 2024 was not that the top team had us organised to messianic levels of efficiency (despite what the Farron Review said), but instead was much more simple.
We won four by elections in the term from the Conservatives.
And we did that because massive numbers of long standing activists turned out from all over the country because they knew we had to win – Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, Tiverton and Honiton, and Somerton and Frome won us all of those 64 gains.
And because we won, we massively raised our profile across the country, so when the election came people knew we were the party to vote for in their area to beat the Tories. As Nigel Ashton has said, momentum is important and we had it.
Now Starmer is a spent force and Zac Polanski’s overt populism, despite its total absence of substance, is propelling the Greens ever closer to what could be their Chesham and Amersham moment, and if it comes about, we will need the expertise of our top team, MPs and the absolute dedication of our activists to make sure we maintain our relevance in the eyes of the electorate.
The article raises many valid points. However, having followed the career of Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate, for several years, I would certainly be voting Green if I lived in Gorton and Denton.
Incidentally, Gorton and Denton features in the latest episode of John Harris’s excellent “Anywhere but Westminster” series: Why this Manchester byelection is a lesson in 21st century politics. The entire series offers valuable insight into how the UK’s political landscape has evolved over the past 15 years and is well worth a look.
A Green victory will mean they will sweep London and the large Cities. Some of us have warned and warned again about the Greens, notwithstanding their nutty policies but have been largely ignored. With 72 MPs we should have been doing much more in areas such as Gorton, Hell this was one of our best bets getting 35% of the vote pre coalition.
Geoff Reid: My memories of the Manchester Exchange By-election (apart from never knowing who had been sleeping in our house when I woke up in the morning, and hardly seeing my wife for the campaign while she was in the campaign office) is of Labour’s outrage that we had invaded their ‘Territory’. Labour Councillors went round Council flats reminding people who put up Liberal posters that their names were on the housing transfer list, and needed a friendly nudge to move to the top. I almost punched a Labour Councillor at the count, he was being so aggressive. Old Labour has always wanted to push the Liberals (now the LibDems) aside, not to recognise where we share interests.
Paul Barker,
‘Labour 35%
Reform 27%
Greens 20%’
You haven’t said how you get to these figures.
The 2024 result was:
Labour 50.8%
Reform 14.1%
Green 13.2%
The difference in opinion poll rates (based on the average of 6 polls) are:
Labour -19.5
Reform +14.33
Green +7.67
Applying these changes results in:
Labour 31.3%
Reform 28.43%
Green 20.87%.
David Raw – Unlike the halcyon days of the wonderful Michael Steed, we’re now not the only recipients of voters looking for alternatives to the Lab/CON duopoly. What is the point of making more than a token effort in G&D? If we do do more, it should be picking 1 Ward or at most 2 Wards and really pile into it/them to build it/them, so it is/they are winnable at the next local elections.
If we are to win in seats countrywide – and yes that still means some targeting – then we need policies and messages that apply to the whole country. At the moment, the messages are very much skewed to London, the SE – Middle England to quote Ed Davey himself.
As a tactical move to hold onto existing seats and attract a few more soft Tory voters that is understandable. But it’s not very ‘Liberal’. And we should not complain when we dont get much national media coverage if we dont have offerings that apply to the whole country and tackle their concerns.
Also these are many of the areas that voted Brexit and did so driven to a considerable extent because they felt neglected by a Southern centric Westminster and City. Decisions, power and resources centralised. More so than any other developed country. If we behave as though those areas do not matter, we are part of the problem.
There is potentially a very Liberal message about decentralising power and resources, which is different to both Tories and Labour. Combined with industrial policies, especially green, to invest in those left behind areas. Investing in the infrastructure needed such as transport. But that means challenging those concentrations of power, both in Treasury and private sector finance.
I feel it necessary to stress that the point of this article, along with my own view, is not to argue against tactical voting, but against politicians dictating what voters do on election day.
I feel it necessary to stress that the point of this article, along with my own view, is not to argue against tactical voting, but against politicians dictating what voters do on election day. It was tactical voting which gifted us such a magnificent result in 2024, but I cannot support telling voters what to do with their vote, as doing so would be illiberal.
Not a massive fan of promoting tactical voting. Not least because there appears to be a belief that is is solely the preserve of Liberal/Progressive parties. Right wing parties such as Reform/Tories just as capable of tactical voting too. Don’t want to put it in peoples minds.