Labour should be looking to Israel for lessons on winning

The screams of “sell out” and betrayal have been deafening at times. Left wing politicians have become complicit with a state that labels Palestinian charities as fronts for terror organisations. The Israeli security service provided extra bodyguards to right-wing politicians, after Bibi Netanyahu railed against them as homespun “spies” — the traitors who had served and then betrayed him.

Netanyahu binds them together. He undermined Israeli democracy by making loyalty to the state synonymous with loyalty to him. Removing the country’s longest-serving prime minister and stopping the descent into corruption and power worship were more important to the opposition than any of its divisions.

When questioned by the press about the apparently opportunistic alliance, Lapid replied: “The real political fight is between populists and responsible leaders.” I have heard Turkish politicians fighting to remove Recep Erdogan and Hungarian politicians trying to end the reign of Viktor Orban use identical forms of words and follow identical tactics. In both countrie,s opposition parties have formed common fronts to unseat autocrats.

Back home in my world of the British liberal-left, it is axiomatic to describe Boris Johnson’s administration as our equivalent of a strongman regime. I know we can be afflicted by paranoia at times, but honest conservatives should admit that a government which unlawfully suspended parliament, purged dissenting politicians, mounted a continuous and abusive assault on broadcast journalism and the judiciary, and packed the quangocracy provokes it. Liberals warn of the corruption of a Conservative party that has been in power for too long. On the left, Tories are hated with a burning intensity. They are “homophobic, racist, misogynistic … scum,” in the words of Angela Rayner, who is the deputy leader of the Labour Party rather than a gobby online troll.

The question remains: what do they intend to do about it? Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes and Labour being unable to form a government on its own after the next election. A majority of one would require the greatest swing to Labour in its history: larger than in 1945 or 1997. Only a coalition administration in one form or another can possibly replace the Conservatives and stop them enjoying a fifth term.

But ask opposition parties to help make the chances of an anti-Conservative coalition forming in 2023 or 2024 better and they react with horror. It’s not as if they would have to work, as Israeli and Hungarian politicians must, with opponents they would otherwise abhor. The liberal campaign group Best for Britain used exhaustive modern polling methods to show that if Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens put forward unity candidates in 154 English seats they could leave the Conservatives 40 short of a majority.

Labour would need to step back in only 26 seats where the Liberal Democrats have greater support. Nominally, the Lib Dems would have to make a greater sacrifice. But given that the party has the resources to put up a hard fight in a few dozen seats, they would in reality only be required to withdraw spoiling candidates. Not much to ask of either party, you might think.

The Liberals won’t have it. Their annual conference passed a motion designed to make cooperation with other parties as hard as possible. Keir Starmer’s people look at the polling evidence with interest but won’t do anything with it.

You could say that Britain’s parties are being principled. They are certainly refusing to compromise. But I do not think you can say they are led by serious men and women who mean what they say. If they believed their denunciations of the Conservatives, they would imitate their contemporaries in Israel and Hungary and do whatever it took to end one-party rule

As it is, they are willing to talk, but not to act: the definition of the dilettante throughout the ages.