The obsessions of the old guard are destabilising British politics
Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, May 2026 (PA Images / Alamy)
5 min read
Both Labour and the Conservatives face existential challenges. Their hangups, obsessions and pathologies help explain why.
Though embattled Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised "change", recent events are probably not what he had in mind. With the victory of Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election, we face the prospect of a seventh prime minister in 10 years.
We know that British political volatility is partly the result of deeper currents. Across Europe, the grand old parties of right and left cede ground to upstart rivals. In the UK, the tectonic plates of politics have been grinding away at the two-party dominance of Conservatives and Labour for decades. In the last 20 years, we have seen the resultant volcanic eruptions: SNP and Plaid Cymru governments, Brexit, and surges for Reform and the Green Party.
We also know, though, that it takes a lot for either of the two main parties to be replaced in Britain, due not least to the voting system. It is nonetheless a live possibility today because of the bungled responses of the Tories and Labour to these challenges.
Why have they got it so wrong? To misquote Tolstoy, each unhappy political party is unhappy in its own way.
Labour’s problem is that long-term changes in its voting base now sit very awkwardly with its sense of collective identity. The party’s activist and elected official class cling to an entrenched historical mythology of Labour as the political wing of the industrial working class. As the Instagram of Al Carns MP recently declared: "Labour was chiselled out of the mines, hammered out of the shipyards, forged in the factories."
In their heart of hearts, therefore, many Labour figures would prefer a different electorate to the one they have. "We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people," Angela Rayner recently warned. She’s right to worry: both Reform and the Greens are performing more strongly among economically insecure voters than Labour. Crucially, however, the relatively poor of Britain are not homogenous.
Because of this hangup, Labour has reacted to the loss of voters in post-industrial towns by trying to fend off the Reform challenge. These were ‘hero voters’ for Labour strategists in the 2024 election, an attitude that helps us understand the party’s authoritarian turn on immigration in office. The problem, as political scientists have been screaming at Labour for some time, is that these electors have not voted Labour for ages, if ever in many cases, and showed no evidence (even in 2024) of turning to the party in large numbers.
Meanwhile, and predictably, the upshot of Starmer’s hero voter strategy has been a huge loss of liberal-leaning voters in the left bloc – including, crucially, economically precarious workers in the cities – to the Greens. The solution is not as simple as ‘pivot left’: voters are not that coherent. Still, Labour’s internal political culture suffers from hangovers about who the party is ‘of’ as well as ‘for’, and these have prevented a clear analysis of viable electoral strategies.
To misquote Tolstoy, each unhappy political party is unhappy in its own way
The Conservatives have their own fetishes from their past. A certain handbag-wielding prime minister looms large. But theirs are quite different. If Labour is the party that struggles with power, the Conservatives were, at least historically, the party of statecraft par excellence. Power, above all, is key for the Tories, and flexibility to obtain power is no bad thing.
The problem, however, is that this strong will to power, when not checked by other impulses, can prove destructive in the long run. Since the 2010s, the Conservatives have pursued Brexit, much lower immigration and culture war politics with increasing vigour. This was partly due to internal party management issues, but also clearly an attempt to retain power by seeing off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Ukip.
This instinct led to several successful elections, particularly 2015 and 2019. But the choices made in the process (a referendum on EU membership, a hard Brexit) have also gradually alienated large parts of the Conservatives’ electorate: the English middle classes.
The Conservatives in the 20th century drew support from a patchwork of social groups, from backwoodsmen to industrialists. The cliché may have been that the Anglican Church was the Tory party at prayer, but Thatcher’s Chancellor Geoffrey Howe used to quip that the Tories were the National Farmers’ Union at prayer.
Still, it was heavily dependent on clerks, senior civil servants, and the traditional professions. It is therefore surprising just how unconcerned Kemi Badenoch’s party appears to be about its catastrophic losses of the comfortable, southern English middle-classes. In the local elections, Richmond-upon-Thames became a one-party state for the Liberal Democrats, the most dramatic example of the risks of adopting short-term tactics that harm long-term political health.
Both parties, then, have distinct pathologies that have hindered their ability to navigate the treacherous ground of fragmented British politics. But there is one failing that they share: quality of government. Liz Truss was only the extreme example of a wider trend. In the decade since the Brexit referendum, the UK has not only cycled between prime ministers but also supposedly era-defining agendas (‘Levelling Up’, ‘Change’) that were manifestly incoherent and collapsed under pressure. Perhaps relatedly, the quality of legislative scrutiny in parliament appears to have declined.
Post-2008 stagnation, the shocks of the pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are the dominant explanations for the wicked policy challenges facing UK politics. But here, too, the once-dominant parties of Britain might want to look in the mirror.
Dr Colm Murphy is a senior lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary University of London
