For more than a century, British politics has been a contest between two parties. That could end with Thursday’s local and devolved elections.
Reform UK is currently leading on 25%, said Politico’s poll of polls on 30 April, with the Conservatives and Greens tied on 18%, and Labour on 17%. The Liberal Democrats are just a few points behind. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party is hoping to secure an overall majority in Holyrood, while Plaid Cymru is on course to lead the devolved government in Wales.
“We’re going to see records tumble. We are living in unprecedented circumstances,” the UK’s leading polling expert, John Curtice, told The Times. “The basic assumptions of British politics – there isn’t enough space for a party to the right of the Tories or the left of Labour – have gone.”
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The fracturing of the electorate was already evident at the last general election, but has been turbo-charged over the past two years as “binary tribalism has been replaced by retail politics”, said The Times in an editorial. Voters are “more promiscuous in their favours” and, following a decade and a half of stagnant living standards, “they are prepared to take a punt on insurgent parties without kicking the tyres”.
The result is that a “nation that has long prided itself on moderation and stability” is now experiencing an “anti-establishment revolt of the sort that has gripped countries from the US and Argentina to Germany”, said Irina Anghel for Bloomberg. Reform and the Greens look set to pick up hundreds of former Labour and Conservative seats. This represents a “power shift” that would “reinforce insurgents’ local networks and party organisations across the country, helping to forestall any restoration of the two-party system by the next general election”.
“It’s the Dutch-ification of British politics,” said Simon Hix, a politics professor at the European University Institute. “Everyone used to make fun of the Netherlands, where 17 parties get elected to parliament, but this trend is happening everywhere in the world.”
“Of course, the popularity or otherwise of all parties ebbs and flows over time” and as recently as the 2017 general election Labour and the Conservatives won a massive 82.4% of the vote between them, said BBC political editor Chris Mason. “But the longer-term trend is clear”: in recent years, the “palette of popular political parties has widened” beyond the Tory-Labour duopoly.
What next?
The dawn of genuine five-party politics – or seven-way if you include nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales – in Britain “spells problems for the political system” beyond the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s vote, said Sky News data journalist Alicja Hagopian.
In the short term, electoral fragmentation “brings governability into question”, said the Financial Times. Voters are “largely moving from one left-leaning party to another, or from one right-leaning party to another, but coalitions of left and right can be hard to build”. Britain’s first-past-the-post system also “creates particular problems of democratic legitimacy”. It means that as voting fragments, candidates are elected with an ever-smaller share of votes cast. In January, Reform won a council seat from Labour in Wales with a vote share of just 22%.
“Choice is good for democracy. It gives a fairer representation of what people actually want,” said Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “But this puts our electoral system for local elections under pressure, because first-past-the-post is not designed for fragmented competition between five strong parties.”
