In the recent general election, Compass York and North Yorkshire endorsed both Luke Charters, the Labour candidate in York Outer, and Tom Gordon, the Liberal Democrat candidate in Harrogate and Knaresborough. Our call for tactical voting in favour of these candidates, having assessed that they were each the best-placed challenger to defeat the sitting Conservative MP in their own constituency, was designed to address the fundamental unfairness of the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system.
We were also influenced by the 2019 general election results in both these constituencies, which clearly showed the risk that Conservative candidates might again have won under FPTP if opposition votes were significantly divided.
We therefore warmly congratulate both Luke and Tom for their ground-breaking wins. They were two of the 41 candidates that Compass local groups endorsed (35 of whom were elected as MPs) across England and Wales as part of the national cross-party Win As One campaign to tackle the inequity of FPTP. It was for their progressive political stance and commitment to proportional representation (PR) that Compass York and North Yorkshire supported their campaigns by encouraging tactical voting.
An unspoken ‘vote swap’ brought wins for Labour and Lib Dems
We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Green Party for their principled and pragmatic stance in Harrogate and Knaresborough’s general election contest, where they decided not to actively campaign in that constituency, while supporting tactical voting to help beat the Conservatives. Instead, they focused their efforts on campaigning for Cllr Arnold Warneken, the Green Party candidate in the new Wetherby and Easingwold constituency.
The Labour Party in Harrogate and Knaresborough, less publicly but just as pragmatically, also accepted that many Labour voters would tactically vote for the Liberal Democrat candidate there, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated by significant numbers of Liberal Democrats and Greens in York Outer, where Labour was actively campaigning to get Charters elected. Here, tactical voting by Liberal Democrat and Green voters was crucial to Labour’s success.
This strategic campaigning strategy – in which parties focus their resources where they can actually win – effectively amounted to an unspoken quid pro quo or ‘vote swap’ arrangement that delivered Labour and Lib Dem MPs in York Outer and Harrogate and Knaresborough respectively.
Thanks are also owed to those Labour, Lib Dem, Green and non-aligned voters who this time round ‘lent their votes’ to candidates who may not have been their preferred choice. By doing so, they helped to overcome the risk under FPTP of a majority vote against a party still failing to count if that majority is split between several candidates.
Tactical voting creates winners, but largely at Green voters’ expense
Beyond the emotion and celebration of such wins, it is also important to recognise that the Green Party’s vote share did not collapse but was loaned in large part for the common good of ousting Conservative MPs from both Harrogate and Knaresborough and York Outer. Similarly, tactical voting may have contributed to other progressive election successes, including Labour’s win in both Selby and Scarborough and Whitby, demonstrating that collaboration between progressive voters from different parties can help to achieve the political change the country needs.
However, there are clearly also losers from tactical voting. In the 2024 general election, Green Party candidates topped the poll in only four English constituencies. But across the UK, the Green Party’s vote share was approximately 7%, so in a proportional voting system that should have resulted in the election of around 45 MPs (out of 650), not just four hard-won election successes.
Under the current voting system, Green voters are therefore not only denied their fair share of representation, but this is exacerbated by other progressive parties repeatedly asking them to vote tactically.
The democratic pluralist case for reciprocal tactical voting
In return for the votes we believed that Green Party supporters were prepared to lend to the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates, respectively, in York Outer and Harrogate and Knaresborough, Compass York and North Yorkshire felt that it was important to acknowledge and reciprocate such generosity in order to demonstrate our own commitment to fair representation and the value of pluralism in our politics.
Because we also recognised the fundamental injustice of our dysfunctional and unrepresentative FPTP voting system, we therefore endorsed Arnold Warneken of the Green Party as our preferred candidate for Wetherby and Easingwold. Like the other candidates we endorsed, Warneken takes a progressive political stance and is personally committed to PR.
That candidate endorsement was also made in the context of the Labour Party having declared Wetherby and Easingwold amongst its 211 ‘non-battleground seats’ for the general election. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats had confirmed that they would not be actively campaigning in that constituency and would be concentrating their electoral efforts in Harrogate and Knaresborough. In the interest of mutual fairness and reciprocity, we therefore felt that it was reasonable to urge Labour and Lib Dem supporters to lend their votes to the Green Party candidate in Wetherby and Easingwold.
National support for Greens seriously undermined by non-reciprocal tactical voting
What actually transpired locally was exactly what was indicated by a YouGov poll on 1 July. In that poll, 30% of those asked said that they would like to vote for the Green Party, but instead were tactically redirecting their support to another party. It is therefore the Green Party that is most damaged by this strategy, losing more than half of its voters to other parties for tactical reasons, but attracting almost no tactical voters from those parties elsewhere in return.
The damage done by tactical voting to the Green Party’s vote share is illustrated by what appears to have happened in Wetherby and Easingwold, where there was a surge of tactical voting, urged by numerous polls favouring the Labour Party candidate. This was despite the fact that, by designating this constituency as a ‘non-battleground seat’, the national Labour Party had effectively acknowledged that it was unlikely to be winnable by Labour under FPTP.
Wetherby and Easingwold: tactical voting was both harmful and ineffective
As with the national polls throughout the general election campaign, Labour’s anticipated vote share in Wetherby and Easingwold was widely overstated, and the actual election result saw the party secure a significantly fewer votes than predicted. But the effect of constant daily polling, giving what appeared to be confirmed predictions of a Labour win, seems to have influenced voting behaviour, particularly by those who may otherwise have voted Green. This has been confirmed anecdotally by various individual electors reporting that Warneken would have secured their vote had they not prioritised getting the Tories out.
Despite this, pro-Labour tactical voting in Wetherby and Easingwold only succeeded in lifting Labour’s vote share to 30.1% (against 39.4% for the Conservatives), while limiting the Green Party to a 8.7% share – so, even if the Green Party candidate had not stood and all Green Party votes had transferred to Labour, that constituency would still have elected a Tory MP.
Disproportional representation: the wider impact of tactical voting
It was also clearly unnecessary for Labour to gain such seats as Wetherby and Easingwold in order to win an overall House of Commons majority, let alone to remove the Conservatives from government in a hung (or balanced) parliament scenario. Widespread anti-Conservative tactical voting, applied on a comprehensive basis (rather than just in the seats where it was most needed), therefore exaggerated the scale of a massively disproportional overall result – in which Labour won more than 63% of the seats with less than 34% of the total votes cast, at the expense of electorally disadvantaged parties such as the Greens.
As ever, the ultimate losers in this FPTP lottery were the British electorate who, while obviously keen to get rid of the Conservatives, generally did not positively endorse Labour and were again denied the genuinely representative and balanced parliament they actually voted for.
Addressing FPTP’s electoral injustice: the campaign for PR
Experience shows that, however magnanimous and well intentioned, tactical voting is not always effective. But, crucially, neither is it the strategy needed to address the electoral injustice of FPTP. On the contrary, tactical voting further compounds that injustice by depressing the Green Party’s national vote share while in many cases (as, for example, in both Harrogate and Knaresborough and York Outer) also causing them to lose their election deposits.
For this reason, Compass York and North Yorkshire will continue the wider campaign to challenge the fundamental unfairness of FPTP and to change the electoral system for good, so every vote carries equal value, wherever and for whomever it’s cast, and no one will ever feel forced to vote ‘tactically’ again.
We will continue to be active across York and North Yorkshire in developing the alliances, ideas, and grassroots support that will be essential in the fight for a fairer electoral system in which the proportion of the total votes cast for each party matches the seats won. We want to banish the need for tactical voting forever.
True democracy needs PR.
Christine Gledhill and Celine Barry are writing on behalf of Compass York and North Yorkshire
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