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Science | Citizenship | PSHE

UK heads for biggest election in 50 years

Does English politics need a new progressive alliance? As Labour prepares for the worst in tomorrow’s elections, some think the Left will never recover unless it learns to pull together. It has been dubbed Super Thursday. More elections will take place tomorrow than on any day since 1973, the year today’s local councils were created. Over 5,000 council seats and 145 councils are up for grabs, as well as 13 mayors and 39 police and crime commissioners. When they head to the polling booths, some people will fill in as many as four ballot papers. Additionally, Scotland and Wales will both vote for their national parliaments. The vote in Scotland could determine whether or not the country becomes independent in the next few years. In Wales, 16 and 17-year-olds will vote for the first time. But the contest everyone is talking about is also the smallest of tomorrow’s elections: the parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool. In the last few weeks, journalists have poured into this north-eastern coastal town, and the prime minister and the Labour leader have each made three visits there. The reason why Hartlepool is so important is that it is one of the last Labour fortresses in the so-called Red Wall: the slew of seats that were once solidly Labour-voting, but switched to the Tories in 2019 to gift Boris Johnson the biggest Conservative majority since 1987. Experts think Labour has to hold seats like Hartlepool if it is ever going to return to government. But some recent polls suggest that the party is on course to lose it tomorrow. If Labour cannot win elections, that is a problem for British democracy. Experts all agree that it is important to have a strong opposition that can hold the government to account. That is why some argue that if Labour cannot win alone, it needs to ally with other liberal and left-wing parties to present a united front against the Conservatives. English politics is unusually unbalanced. There are three major left-leaning parties – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – meaning that the left-wing vote is split. In contrast, the Conservatives are the only significant right-wing party in most elections, so they take almost all the right-wing votes. Moreover, left-wing voters are generally concentrated in cities, while right-wing voters are more evenly spread across the country. So while Labour racks up big wins in places like London and Manchester, there are not enough seats in these places to win a majority in the House of Commons. But if Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens agreed not to stand candidates against each other, they could pool all of their votes against Tory candidates. Between them, they could get enough seats to form a coalition government. Others, however, think that it is too early to write off a Labour election victory. Instead of allying with other parties, they argue, the party should reinvent itself to become more like the Democratic Party in the USA. That would mean focusing less on northern post-industrial towns like Hartlepool, and more on winning over young people and ethnic minorities living in cities and suburbs. Does English politics need a new progressive alliance? Passive-progressive Yes, say some. Labour can no longer win a majority by itself, because the people who used to vote for it have divided into two opposing camps: older, Brexit-supporting, socially conservative manual workers, and younger, Remain-voting, liberal service workers. Labour cannot appeal to either one of these camps without alienating the other. It can only win by allying with other left-leaning parties. Not at all, say others. Left-wing voters should be able to choose between different left-wing parties: it would be undemocratic to force a Green supporter to vote Labour because there are no other left-leaning candidates in their constituency. It would also be counterproductive because that voter is likely to see the election as a stitch-up and simply refuse to vote at all. KeywordsHartlepool - A seaside town in northern England.

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