The Prime Minister’s advisers believe that when push comes to shove most progressive voters will have no real choice but to vote Labour, and they may be right.

Ok let’s take a deep breath and run a final autopsy on last week’s elections. The long and short of it is this, Labour by its own actions is squandering the opportunity it secured last July. Yet despite this, it is still the single party most likely to win the next election.

As Labour follows a strategy of ‘we need to be like Reform, but don’t vote for Reform’ a national populist like agenda is being legitimised and embedded, such that any Labour ‘victory’ is only secured on soil contaminated by national populism. Reform might still be defeated at the polls, but they will have won hearts and minds and set the national agenda.

Superficially Labour is in a bind.  It is losing some votes to Reform but a bigger percentage to the Greens and Lib Dems, which could electorally be more damaging.  You might argue here that the best course of action is therefore to go with what you believe in, namely a more progressive approach to climate, liberty and social justice, rather than a more authoritarian and populist stance.

But Labour’s leadership feel they don’t have to choose, and avoid opening up the biggest threat they believe they face – the revival of the left in UK politics and their grip on Labour.

On this they have an ace up their sleeve. The electoral system. All the time we have first past the post (FPTP), then the electorate are presented with a distasteful but compelling choice; do you want Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage to be the next Prime Minister of our country? No matter how bad Labour is, how little it delivers and how unsavoury some of its policies around poverty and immigration are, voters are presented with an unavoidable dilemma – to vote with their head or their heart – for Labour or Reform?

This is what is going to happen. Governing and policy failures will open the space to challenge Labour internally and externally on issues like net zero, child poverty, wealth taxes and more. The seeming fragmentation of the political system will exacerbate this challenge.  Some victories will be secured, but ultimately the searing logic of our binary FPTP system will come irresistibly into play. Forget all your progressive whining, we will be told – when push comes to shove who are you going to vote for – Starmer or Farage?

Some will hold out and vote for alternatives despite the fact it dices with Reform like death. Many others will exclude themselves from the democratic process – a plague on everyone’s house in which the choice is either Reform or Reform lite – the later almost feeling worse because it’s prosecuted by people who claim to know better. But the majority of progressives who vote will do so for the least bad option. I know this and you know this.

More importantly Labour’s cold, cynical and ruthless strategists know this. It’s why they will never entertain a shift to proportional representation because to do so breaks their monopoly stranglehold on the progressive side of the British electorate. For them it would be an act of existential self-harm. And the bigger the threat of Farage, the more extreme he becomes, the more powerful the pressure to go with the lesser of two evils. With ‘nowhere else to go’, you start to see why Labour’s leadership are heading in a deep blue direction.

And talking of cold and cynical ruthlessness, just look how Reform are switching to back first past the post, a good British voting system, over that complicated proportional European nonsense. Why? Because they now spy a majority of House of Commons seats on less than a third of the vote.

Of course, alternatives exist. In Scotland people have the choice of voting SNP, and in England and Wales Plaid Cymru, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, plus Independents and any new effective left party. The revival of the SNP in Scotland will damage Labour but not deeply. Meanwhile, Labour and the Liberal Democrats no longer compete in urban seats, so the Lib Dems will turn their attention to Blue Wall Tories, not to challenge Labour from the left as they did under Charles Kennedy. Meanwhile the Greens are under-performing, and it will be interesting to see if Zack Polanski can win the party leadership and establish a more potent left environmental project.

But regardless of all these options, the logic of the voting system will exert its gravitational pull, to coalesce otherwise highly reluctant voters, to back Labour.