The next election is a race to be the most effective anaconda: both Labour and the Conservatives know that victory will belong to the party which can most effectively squeeze the smaller outfits trying to outflank them.
Kemi Badenoch’s push against Reform UK is now underway. After months of Nigel Farage suffering a slow puncture in his polling, and a series of bad news stories forcing his party onto the back foot, she used her Conference speech in Birmingham to stake a claim to the whole right-of-centre vote. “We are not uniting with that,” she announced, to a standing ovation.
Andy Burnham has been more successful in putting an early squeeze on his rivals to the left. Early announcements critical of Israel were followed by crowd-pleasing policies on nationalisation and a heartfelt conference speech about his democratic socialist roots.
The target of each measure is Zack Polanski’s Green Party of England and Wales, which made ground on Labour after August 2025 with a neo-Corbynite pitch to disaffected socialists, people furious about Gaza, and others who were sick of Sir Keir Starmer.
The new Prime Minister is making progress in his push to reunite the left. The Greens were polling around 14 per cent when he entered Downing Street, and they’re now down to the 9 per cent or so they were sitting on back in the summer of 2025.
Labour’s efforts on that front are aided by the most offensive victory yet for the hardline entryists who are now in control of the Greens. A party which was once all about the environment is now in full crank mode, thanks to the radicalising influence of its newest members.
The “Zionism is racism” motion which they adopted at their conference last month commits the party to deny the universal right of democratic self-determination solely to Israelis, branding a view held by the majority of British Jews racist. The same conference rejected a clarifying amendment protecting Jewish members from disciplinary action for attending a synagogue deemed “Zionist”. That Polanski, supposedly the bold leader, failed to take part in the vote makes it worse.
Labour’s decision to condemn this is morally justified, and politically sensible. The Prime Minister called the policy antisemitic – a view shared by the Board of Deputies of British Jews – and his party has given Green councillors a week in which to reject it, or Labour will withdraw from 18 local power-sharing arrangements.
The effect is to further clarify how far Labour has come from the dark days of its own antisemitism scandal, and to press the Greens further on a point of political weakness. Most voters do not like weirdos, and further coverage of the rise of this tendency within the Green Party can only play to highlight Burnham’s own projected image of being pretty normal.
The agenda for both major parties is therefore clear: squeeze the insurgents, reunite their respective wings under the traditional established banners, crush the Liberal Democrats in the middle and restore the dominance of two-party politics. We’re still a long way from returning to the days when they shared more than 60 per cent of the vote between them, but it’s not impossible to achieve.
All of which makes me wonder why, given his success so far, Burnham intends to make it all for nothing. By promising to introduce Proportional Representation (PR), he has opened the door to an eternity of coalition government, in which Labour would struggle to govern on its own ever again.
What has become of the Green Party in recent weeks is the most stark warning against such a system that one could imagine. Currently, Labour is free and able to vocally reject their rivals’ antisemitic new policy, even to the point of collapsing council-level power-sharing agreements over the issue. In a PR system, they would instead be at constant risk of having to swallow their principles and strike deals with just such a party, having to contemplate bringing such a policy into government rather than rejecting it outright.
The same goes on the other side of politics. Kemi Badenoch was full-throated in her rejection of Reform’s messages on, for example, the question of whether her mixed-race children could be considered English. She even made clear that she would prefer another election over a possible coalition with Farage. Under PR, she would instead be compelled to find a way to win him over.
This explains why Burnham faces opposition to abandoning First Past the Post from within his own Cabinet – reportedly including Louise Haigh, the Deputy Prime Minister and his closest ally. Similar concern has been voiced in the past by other prominent figures, like Chancellor John Healey and Communities Secretary Angela Rayner, who referred to herself in 2022 as “a First Past The Post girl”.
If you’re a Labour politician, then you want Labour to win power and to govern, to do the things that Labour believes are right for the country. Crushing the Greens and reuniting the left is a key step to achieving that goal. But switching to PR would undo it all overnight, condemning every future Labour manifesto to be renegotiated post-election with rivals who were unwilling to sign up to it before polling day.
Burnham’s colleagues, who are conservative on this with a small C, see the danger to their party and country coming. Whether they can convince their leader is a battle yet to be fought.