UK politics is approaching a tipping point where the failing duopoly that has governed Britain for many decades finally comes to an end.
UK politics has been slowly but steadily unwinding from a two-party to a multi-party system for decades. Just like going bankrupt, things in politics change gradually and then very quickly. Is our political system about to enter a new era? In an important piece for Prospect magazine, veteran pollster Peter Kellner argues that we could be at the tipping point. What’s going on, why and what’s it likely to mean?
If Kellner is right, and I suspect he is, then this long-time coming paradigm shift is going to have some very peculiar impacts, as a system purposely designed to create a two-party duopoly gets warped into a multi-party reality.
Back in 1951 Labour and the Conservatives secured 98% of the vote between them. By 2024 that figure had dropped to 59%. The latest polls put Labour and the Conservatives on less than 50% between them. There have been blips along the way, most notably in 2017 and 2019 as Brexit shaped the landscape and the appearance of a two-party tradition was momentarily maintained. But the underlying trend is towards fracture and fragmentation.
Kellner is right to argue that much of this is down to one simple word: class. In the past the two parties largely mirrored the two-class structure of society, with the battle over who could command the middle ground and enough of the middle class vote.
A three-decade long negotiated truce between labour and capital led to unprecedented growth and the greatest level of equality the country has ever known. This broke down in the 1970s as control over inflation was lost and capital gained the upper hand in a world where technology and globalisation trumped local union organising power. Instead of a broadly agreed settlement, an elite group of winners moulded the world in their image and their interests. Even that was OK while capitalism could provide consumer baubles to keep enough voters happy, but when this fatally broke down in 2008, as capital without constraints always does, then the outcome was always going to be messy.
At the same time the shift from a society in which we knew and understood ourselves and each other as producers, to society in which we knew and understood ourselves predominantly as consumers, was always going to raise fundamental questions about a political system which only offered a political choice between product A or product B. In a multi-platform, multi-channel world who was going to settle for just the BBC or ITV? Especially when neither of the two main parties seemed any longer able to deliver enough growth, to enough people, enough of the time.
The fact that the dam hasn’t burst before now is only down to the electoral system, first past the post. By rewarding parties only based on who wins the most votes in any seat, massive structural barriers are raised against new party entrants who can’t compete in enough places to a sufficient degree – but can still win millions of votes that go ‘wasted’. This led to the lazy and cynical assumption that voters had nowhere else to go. But generations of party loyalty were slowly worn down by disappointment and disillusionment. People may not switch party immediately but first stop bothering to vote at all. And then something happens which sparks a shift to voting for someone else. In Scotland it was Labour campaigning alongside the Conservatives to stop independence that opened the floodgates to the SNP. In England it was Labour being seen to stall or deny the Brexit vote, which saw the loss of the Red Wall.
Versions of this kind of fracturing ricochet around. At the last election millions of Muslim voters, triggered by Gaza, but with longer running concerns of being ignored or worse, voted for independents. And of course, the Liberal Democrats secured a post war record number of seats while the Greens continue to make in-roads at council and Westminster level. With Reform second in 98 seats and now marginally ahead of everyone in the polls, and the SNP set to once again dominate Scottish politics, the fate of the duopoly has never looked more uncertain.
That doesn’t mean that events like another pandemic, war or a climate catastrophe won’t squeeze voters back into the two-party fold. But it won’t be willing and will therefore only ever be temporary. And even when the steam-punk system delivers big parliamentary majorities, like the last two general elections, it can’t deliver stability because support isn’t just a cross on a ballot paper, but what you feel deeply and what you are willing to do to make change happen or not.
So, the question isn’t whether a fragmented multi-party politics is now the norm, it is. The question is what we do about it? Of course all this suggests and demands the shift to proportional representation, but also to a more consensual and long term form of politics and the institutions and cultures which support multi-party politics as set out by Frances Foley at Compass here. Westminster and Whitehall are going to have to be remade.
And to my friends who feel themselves to be further to the left of me who worry about the word ‘consensus’ and think it means ‘selling out’, look at how Germany has just shifted its entire post war attitude to debt, or the way that countries under systems of PR invariably enjoy more progressive outcomes than the UK, even when they have supposedly more right wing governments. More importantly this fracturing does not and cannot mean we avoid negotiating and therefore compromising with others with whom we don’t fully agree. This, after all, is the art of politics.
Instead of the stultifying and suffocating charade that the tired two-party system reflects the richness of the political landscape of our country, or the forlorn claim it can offer strength and stability if not representation, we need to embrace the richness, complexity and diversity of a culture that is never going to go back into the grey box of 1951. Let’s let the colour back into our politics.
This article first appeared in the Byline Times on 23rd April 2025.