I had some free time today so played around with the 2019 General Election data available from the House of Commons website.

I found some interesting insights in the data which support a future Electoral Pact / Friends with Benefits relationship between Labour and the LD

1/

If you add the Labour and Lib Dem vote, there are 44 Conservative seats which would have fallen to a Labour / Lib Dem pact

Johnson’s majority at the General Election was 80 seats

Therefore a pact would have had an excellent chance of preventing a Tory Government

2/

In the seats where Labour came second, the Conservatives came first in 275 seats, the SNP 26 and the Greens and Plaid together took 2 seats.

The Liberal Democrats took no seats where Labour came second

In the seats where the Liberal Democrats came second, the Conservatives came first in 80, Labour 9 and the SNP first in 2

Conclusion: there is little or no electoral competition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. They complete for different voting bases against the Tories

For example, of the 44 seats where a Labour / Lib Dem pact would have defeated a Tory winner, the 31 Labour seats including 22 that voted majority Leave in 2016 and 9 that voted Remain

The 13 Lib Dem seats included 11 Remain and 2 Leave seats

5/

Conclusion: Labour are the more effective competitor to the Tories in Leave seats and the Liberal Democrats have the edge in Remain seats which returned Tories with narrow majorities in 2019

6/

To bring this to life, here are some of the Tory MPs who would have been defeated by this Labour / Lib Dem pact:

Bim Afolami (my MP)
Dominic Raab
Stephen Hammond
Alok Sharma
Theresa Villiers

7/

So in summary, the 2019 data tells me two things:

1. Some kind of pact / understanding between Labour and the Lib Dems is a winning strategy for the 2024 General Election

2. Restating our commitment to Rejoin will maintain trust with our core vote in our target seats

END