Farage and the Tory right will unite because they want power. Will the left just stand by? | Neal Lawson

The right always does unity and solidarity better than the left. While real difference exists between liberals and social conservatives, or between globalisers and nationalists, the right has a stronger sense of self-interest. It is much less likely to allow perfect to be the enemy of good.

It is by understanding this that you can see past Nigel Farage’s denial of comments that he expects Reform to do an election deal with the Conservatives, as reported by the Financial Times. Particularly since this denial is caveated by his statement that he won’t work with the Tories “as they are”. Likewise, reports in the Times that senior Reform figures are appealing to Farage to secure the defection of Robert Jenrick and appoint him as chancellor after an election victory may be rejected by Jenrick. But whatever their individual ambitions, both will surely concede to the emerging consensus: to unite the right, at whatever cost.

It is easy for Farage to deny these claims for now, riding high as Reform has been since the general election. But despite doubling its support, it has seemingly hit a ceiling in the low 30s in the polls. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have stabilised in the mid-teens. With no knockout blow looking likely from either side, there is immense pressure from party funders and the rightwing press, the Daily Mail in particular, which wrote a strident leader column in September calling on “all the talents on the Right to come together to sweep away this lamentable excuse for a government”.

It is not hard to see why. Analysis conducted by my organisation Compass shows that at the last general election the combined vote of Reform and the Tories should have won them 202 extra seats but they cancelled each other out. Avoiding this in 2029 could take many forms, from an outright merger, an alliance or simply what Labour and the Liberal Democrats did before the last election, which is to agree in private which party went for which seat. This last arrangement has the benefit of being deniable and doesn’t require any detailed public negotiations.

But progressives will probably not have the easier luxury of strategic integration. While the regressive bloc is divided in two, the progressive side splinters into four in England if Your Party gets itself election-ready, alongside Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, but not forgetting assorted independents. That number rises to five in Scotland and Wales with the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru. This potentially disastrous fragmentation of the party-political scene has been a long time coming. A world of two polarised upper and lower classes and two TV channels, BBC and ITV, has given way to far more nuanced identities and multiple options and platforms in almost every aspect of life. A two-party politics was never going to survive this huge culture shift.

As in 2019 and 2024, a party can be handed a majority if there is a polarising issue of the day such as Brexit or the desire to be rid of the Tories. But the underlying fragmentation means that even with respective majorities of 80 then and 180 in 2024, governments have no electoral and civil society foundations for the long-term management of the country on a single-party basis. Labour’s 2024 victory was the lowest in terms of quantity of vote and arguably quality of support. It is little wonder chaos has ensued.

Labour strategists know all this. But their answer isn’t to embrace the fragmentation and the pluralist politics such differences demand but double down on control and coercion. They will try to frame the next election as a clear choice between whoever is the Labour prime minister and Nigel Farage. In this it mirrors the strategy of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who keeps pushing to the centre right to build the non-far right majority in the belief that voters have nowhere else to go.

But the harsh truth is that this strategy is doomed to fail. First because progressive voters are increasingly unprepared to hold their noses and vote for what they perceive as a non-progressive option, even if it’s the least bad. France saw the rise of the New Popular Front, while in the UK voters are backing the clearest progressive alternative to Reform, like they did in the recent Caerphilly byelection to the Senedd where Plaid Cymru won, and Labour went from first to a very distant third.

But more importantly, this coercive strategy simply papers over the cracks of a politics in which the Overton window moves steadily towards the hard right and the likely big victory of the party that represents a full-fat rather than semi-skimmed version of national populism.

Cold electoral logic suggests the right will unite in some shape or form. On the left the ball is in Labour’s court in two crucial respects. First it must become once again a clearly progressive choice for progressive voters. Waging war on asylum seekers and stripping back the jury system are the very opposite of what’s needed. Instead, what’s needed is a fundamentally different fully throated economic approach to re-making Britain in the interests of greater equality, such as wealth taxes.

The second shift is to pluralism and the recognition that only by mobilising progressives can a mandate for meaningful transformative change be won. That “new system for a new society” starts with a commitment to proportional representation and the benefits of an alliance-based politics that, because it is agile, establishes a long-term consensus for change. It is high time the left doesn’t just preach unity and solidarity, but practises it.

• Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass