Next general election outcome – Best one for proressives?

As a Social Liberal I’ve always looked upon Labour as being to the right of me (and far too authoritarian) on the UK political spectrum. However, it seems, if polls are to believed, that Labour are likely to be the largest party after the next election. Should that be the case, and Labour does not have an overall majority, then I’d prefer them to be dependent on the SNP to form a government. In my view a Labour majority government would change little that’s wrong with our broken political system and they’d simply hand power back to the Tories who’d reverse anything they'd done which was progressive. That’s assuming Starmer’s Labour Party does anything progressive, of course!

Now yes I know, the SNP have been doing a pretty good self-destruct of recent times so there’s more than a possibility of them coming unstuck at the next election, but bear with me.

Labour and the SNP just don’t get on and there’s a child-like my dad’s bigger than yours relationship between them. Having said that it’s debateable whether the Lib Dem-SNP relationship is any better i.e. very school playgroundish. However, despite this my view is that Starmer stuck with the SNP may well be in the interests of progressives as they’d certainly hold his feet to the political fire and blunt the right-of-centre agenda that a Labour-led administration would seemingly be tempted to push on with.

But why not a Labour administration dependent on left-of-centre Lib Dems I hear you say? Well, having been a Liberal and Lib Dem member since 1980 I think the Lib Dems, who’ll likely have a new crop of inexperienced MPs, need a spell as a left-of-centre opposition to a Starmer-led administration. However, they should in such circumstances, be a constructive opposition which backs either a minority Labour or Labour/SNP administration but ONLY when it does progressive things. I’m recalling here Charles Kennedy’s ‘constructive opposition’ approach.

Looking at the present political landscape it can often be a bleak view for radicals, progressives and Liberals as our politics in general has been dragged predominately centre-right; a direction Starmer seems content to follow. The trouble is we don’t know much about Starmer’s political history as there’s not much of it to look at. Yes, he was a prominent part of Corbyn’s Labour leadership but then under his leadership Corbyn was chucked out of Labour.

Labour is ‘popular’ not because of what it stands for (because we really don’t know what it stands for) but because the Tories are so desperately unpopular. But a telling point for me is that right-leaning voters seem to like Starmer, Reeves and Streeting and I guess that’s because they say things that Tory voters can warm to? So I think it realistic to say that Labour won’t be a radical or progressive in government. They’ll just try to be more competent and that shouldn’t in any way be difficult based on the madness that has emanated from No.10 over recent years.

Starmer says he won’t reverse Brexit, that he’s not keen on electoral reform and he seems to be rowing back on much of what he said he stood for when he was running to be Labour leader. On that basis radical and progressive policies will need to come from parties that are progressive of instinct i.e. SNP, Lib Dems and Greens.

So, should we end up with a Labour-led government propped up by the SNP, with the Lib Dems as a radical/progressive opposition then I think such an outcome would be interesting. Will it happen? Not if the SNP continues to shoot itself in the foot it won’t, but just imagine Starmer waking up each morning and having to do battle over pretty much everything with the SNP. Surely he’d be forced into all kinds of progressive areas, especially with radical Libs giving him grief too, that he’d rather not pursue. It could just be the major shake-up our broken political system really needs.