The Green party conference opened with a radical act – electing two leaders instead of one and those leaders had a radical suggestion: that political parties of a progressive nature have to start cooperating with one another. Caroline Lucas has long held this view, so it was unsurprising to find her co-star Jonathan Bartley espousing it too (“we are two leaders, with one set of policies,” they told journalists, like Father Ted explaining perspective to Dougal).

I was in Birmingham to chair a panel on the possibility of a progressive alliance – with Lucas and transport spokesman Rupert Reed extending green tendrils, and Wigan MP Lisa Nandy speaking for the Labour party. The idea of a progressive alliance is problematic at every level, from every angle: its name sounds wholemeal and mockable. And yet it occupies that vexed space in political discourse where it’s just well enough known that it can’t be replaced, not well enough known that any normal person has heard of it.

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At a practical level, it doesn’t help that both Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith are explicitly opposed to cooperating with any other party, despite Corbyn being so similar to Lucas in outlook that he shouldn’t just consider an alliance with her, he should join her job-share. But as we know, coalitions of any sort are messy, slow and difficult. Alliances that claim to be about the love of humankind, between people who find nothing more energising than the hatred of one another’s small differences, are even messier, slower and more difficult.

I’m not talking exclusively about hatred between Greens and Reds, incidentally, though the guy standing outside the Green party conference saying “another mouth to feed” in a self-righteous monotone every time anyone walked past did remind me how much there is to distinguish between environmentalism and socialism. All progressives prefer to debate their own fine distinctions than the glaring ideological chasm that separates us from the real foes. On dark days, I think this is because purity is part of the mind-set, and the smaller compromises that would create the swell are harder to make than a peace with failure. And on bright days, I think this is because we are simply the more intelligent group, and the work of pointing out what’s wrong with Theresa May – all the meanness of Margaret Thatcher with none of the frankness or ambition – is too obvious to hold our attention. Either way, it bodes ill for meaningful togetherness.

But there is something about this particular conference season, some flickering between tenacity and despair, that makes the alternative of not cooperating – of not building a concrete electoral strategy based on a shared platform – look impossible.

The main obstacle to forging alliances was always defensiveness

Party conferences have always had a ritualistic, disconnected atmosphere: the cheers seem disproportionate to whatever’s been said; the voting, for parties whose delegates still vote on policy, looks predetermined; conversations between milling members have a stagey feel, as though they know they’re being filmed for an educational broadcast on what being a member of a party is like.

But in the past, it was a ritual everyone understood. There was a party of power, and their conference existed to give them emotional legitimacy, to prove they still had real live passionate loyalists and that they weren’t just faceless technocrats. There was a party of opposition, whose conference was to find a singularity of purpose and perform for the (hopefully, occasionally) watching world their staunchest outrage at the party of government.

There was a minor party of opposition, whose conference was nominally freer, being less focused on electoral majority; in reality, by 2010, the Liberal Democrats had picked up the language of winning as part of the rubric, and the improbability of the event didn’t seem to trouble them. And there were even more minor parties, who spent conferences bemoaning first-past-the-post and promising certain victory once electoral reform had been achieved, too polite to mention the obvious flaw in that plan.

The Green conference was the first, but hopefully not the last, to admit that those norms are over. They are the only party with a sense of urgency in their DNA – social justice could come in 10 or 50 years, while the climate crisis won’t wait – and the plan of having one MP and waiting an eternity for another is like planning to put out a fire by hoping some light drizzle will turn into a shower. They aren’t a party in a meaningful parliamentary sense; but they are a movement, and they know that their survival lies in acting like one, finding allies by insisting on shared principles, until their case is irresistible.

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Meanwhile the Lib Dems stagger towards their conference in a completely new world, having gone from minor to niche. They cannot possibly meet the energy of their membership, which is at its highest in a decade, with the promise of holding on to eight MPs. They can neither describe themselves nor plan their future as a parliamentary force. And yet they know they give voice to some vital principles in British politics – internationalism, social justice, environmentalism. That’s why their membership surged post-Brexit: people who believe in these things didn’t simply disappear because Nigel Farage ran a better campaign than Will Straw.

Labour is in the most interesting position of all, though is too transfixed by its own divisions to discuss it. There is no realistic prospect of taking Scotland back from the SNP. If the boundary changes strip the party of another 30 seats, their prospects for a parliamentary majority won in the old-fashioned way are slim. This is true regardless of who the leader is, which makes the savagery of their infighting look absurd.

The main obstacle to forging alliances was always defensiveness. No party could allow any threat to its seats, which turned their natural allies into their most dangerous enemies. This stance is no longer warranted: none of the progressive parties has enough to defend, electorally speaking. If they could actually admit this, they might liberate themselves from the antiquated adversarialism that lost them their towering advantage: the fact that many people in this country oppose the Conservatives and always will; but the Tories are only ever beaten when we pull in the same direction.