Among the many electoral subplots emerging ahead of the next UK general election, one in particular is occupying the minds of Liberal Democrat strategists: how to persuade a glut of new Labour supporters to vote tactically.
What the Lib Dems are calling a “Labour squeeze” tactic could help shape the result in a dozen or more constituencies, and potentially remove a series of Conservative big-hitters including Dominic Raab and John Redwood. But, it is fair to say, this is intricate stuff.
As an election gambit, it takes in several moving parts, including a long-term demographic shift as people move out of cities into commuter towns (a trend recently accelerated by Covid) and the recent stellar poll ratings for Keir Starmer’s party.
It is no secret the Lib Dems have high electoral hopes in a string of Conservative-held seats in what has become known as the “blue wall”, a term that hit prominence 18 months ago when the party overturned a 16,000 Tory majority in a byelection to take the commuter belt seat of Chesham and Amersham.
Lib Dem strategists are targeting a number of similar constituencies, seats where the party came second to the Conservatives in the 2019 election and where the Tory majority was smaller than or similar to the total Labour vote.
A particular source of Lib Dem optimism is the seemingly embedded disaffection among more traditional Conservative voters under Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss, which helped propel the Lib Dems to a series of recent byelection wins.
There is, however, a complexity. Many of the target seats, whether near London, like Raab’s Esher and Walton seat and Redwood’s Wokingham constituency, or adjoining other increasingly packed and expensive cities such as Brighton, are changing.
In recent years there has been a gradual move by many younger voters to commuter belt areas, often coinciding with starting families and wanting a more affordable home or good schools. And if you are a 30-something couple from London, the chances are you support Labour.
One Lib Dem strategy paper, seen by the Guardian, sets out 2023 as “the year of the Labour squeeze”, in which the party must persuade these suburban new arrivals that the only way to remove a Tory MP is to lend it their votes.
Zoe Franklin will stand for the Lib Dems for a third consecutive election in Guildford. In 2019, she came within about 3,300 votes of taking the seat from the Conservatives, when Labour, in a distant third, took 4,500 in total.
“We’re really aware of this shift of people moving from London,” Franklin said. “They would normally vote for Labour, but now found themselves in Surrey, and one of the things we really need to get across to them is that they really need to vote tactically.”
A planned flurry of canvassing will present wavering voters with not only the 2019 result, but also the makeup of the local council, where the Lib Dems co-run it with a local residents’ party, while Labour hold just two seats.
Inevitably, this being a Lib Dem electoral push, there will be leaflets and the leaflets will have bar charts. Franklin says: “We do make sure they are completely accurate in terms of measurements. But bar charts are a really great visual way to explain that this is a race between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.”
Another complication is that local Labour parties will often disagree, pointing to earlier election results that present them as better placed, especially given the party’s current polling numbers.
Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at Bristol University, said that while voters were becoming gradually more used to tactical voting, likely tensions over who is the main challenger could be further complicated by boundary changes, amid a nearly completed shake-up of Commons seats.
“It’s also not helped by this blue wall narrative, because it assumes all the seats in the south are the same, and they’re not,” Surridge says. A better term, she argues, for places such as Guildford, Wokingham, Esher and Walton, and other targets such as Cheltenham and Lewes, is “affluent remain seats”, which tend to have an existing Lib Dem tradition and a supply of slightly older, better-off voters.
Also going into this mix are the arrivals from nearby cities, who “tend to be a bit younger and less economically established”, Surridge said, and thus more likely to back Labour.
She does, however, point to one clear boon for the Lib Dems with their Labour squeeze – the next election is shaping up to be one, like 1997, defined by anti-Conservative feeling. Surridge explained: “That does bring this sort of tactical voting to the fore. They might not necessarily agree on who to support, but they all know who they want to get rid of.”
