Labour diverts activists away from Lib Dem target seats

Labour is directing its activists away from Conservative-held seats targeted by the Liberal Democrats into constituencies far from their homes, a strategy that is likely to maximise Tory losses in the south of England.

Volunteers in Somerset have been told to travel more than 80 miles to Plymouth, while London activists have been advised to ignore Lib Dem targets in the capital’s south-west, data from the Labour campaign website shows.

The data suggests Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has diverted his party’s army of door knockers away from roughly 80 Tory-held seats that the Lib Dems have focused on trying to take at the July 4 general election.

The effect is that the two opposition parties have minimised the resources they spend fighting each other and focused their energies on inflicting losses on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.

Since the start of the election, Labour has asked volunteers online for their postcode and then told them where the party would like them to go. Earlier in the race, Labour used the tool for campaigning but now it prepares volunteers for “get out the vote” activities on election day.

Data from the site as of June 24, analysed by the Financial Times, provides a window into how Labour is running its ground campaign of door knocking and leafleting as it tries to regain power for the first time since 2010.

It shows that the party is not sending Labour activists from its strongholds in London to Tory-held Wimbledon, a wealthy suburb in the south-west of the capital, though polls suggest Labour could vie with the Lib Dems to take the constituency. Labour won the seat in its 1997 landslide victory. The party advises only activists from Wimbledon itself to campaign in the seat.

In the Lib Dems’ traditional west country heartland, Labour activists in Bridgwater, north Somerset, are being sent to Plymouth, an 83-mile journey that means passing at least four other constituencies.

Labour is also asking activists from nine seats across Surrey and Hampshire to campaign in the strong Tory seat of Aldershot. If the army town in Hampshire had the same boundaries back in 2019, the Conservatives would have won 57 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 22 per cent. The seat is not on the Lib Dem target list.

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Aldershot is the most ambitious Tory-held constituency that Labour’s website currently targets.

Labour and the Lib Dems have long denied that they are engaged in any kind of electoral pact as they battle to unseat the Tories after 14 years in government, with Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey explicitly ruling out any such deal in September last year.

But their focus on different Tory-held seats may mean that Labour and Lib Dem votes are extremely efficiently distributed this year — meaning they need fewer voters to prevail in their target seats in the UK’s winner-takes-all electoral system.

David Cutts, a professor of political science at the University of Birmingham, said he did not believe there was any kind of formal agreement between the two parties, but there did appear to be a “nod and a wink in terms of working together” to achieve their ambition of “killing the Tories off”.

There are some exceptions. Labour activists in one Labour-held seat in Sheffield, in the north of England, are being sent to fight the Lib Dems in neighbouring Sheffield Hallam, the only seat where the two parties are directly competing. The Labour-held seat was once occupied by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem former deputy prime minister and now Meta executive.

There are also three seats in Scotland where the Lib Dems are fighting the Scottish National party, and where Labour is telling local activists to stay and campaign: Mid Dunbartonshire, North East Fife, and Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. The latter two are currently held by Lib Dem MPs.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems denied there was any electoral pact between them, tacit or otherwise.

Labour said: “Our decisions are made based on the data and where we think we can win.”

The Lib Dems said there was “no need” for a pact because it was “super obvious” to voters in almost all seats which party they needed to vote for to oust the Tories.