A changing electoral landscape is putting us in uncharted territory
4 min read
“The future is already here,” William Gibson once said, “it is just not evenly distributed.”
Following local elections where Labour and the Conservatives lost two thirds of the seats they held, many voters are getting used to a new form of two-party politics. On Durham council, the Liberal Democrats are now the main opposition to a landslide Reform majority. In Devon, Reform are the main opposition to a Lib Dem administration backed by the Greens. Is this the shape of things to come at Westminster?
We shouldn’t get too carried away. Council contests are poor proxies for general elections – far fewer people vote, and those who do, often vote differently. But the story from May’s county hall contests fits with evidence from polling. Labour have lost half their support in 18 months, and now languish in the low 20s. The Tories, who suffered their worst election drubbing in two centuries last summer, have carried on falling since, and now flirt with fourth place in some polls.
A majority of those with a preference are now telling the pollsters they will back someone other than Labour or Tory. That’s never happened before.
A party other than Labour or the Tories has been leading every opinion poll for months. That’s never happened before either. The duopoly that has defined British politics for a century has never looked weaker. Collapse for one, or both, of the big two has never looked more plausible.
The two parties’ likeliest paths to extinction are different. For the Conservatives, the risk is replacement: Reform are now the preferred choice of a majority of Leave voters, and the dominant party of the right in current polling. The arguments a generation of Tory leaders used to squeeze votes from Nigel Farage can now be applied by Farage to push the Conservatives off the cliff.
The biggest risk for the governing Labour Party is disintegration, with votes scattering across multiple competitors. Keir Starmer’s huge majority is built on sand – most Labour MPs have small majorities, but they face different local challenges. Labour has been leaking votes to the left, right and to abstention ever since – votes it can ill afford to lose given its weak starting position.
This is the price Labour pays for the huge bonus it received from the electoral system last summer: it is a perilously short distance from “just enough everywhere” and a landslide majority, to “not enough anywhere” and electoral oblivion. What might come next is harder to predict. Last year’s general election was the first ever to feature five major parties on the ballot in almost every seat. It also featured by far the most MPs elected on low shares of the vote, as contests split three or four ways returned MPs who had won a third or less of the local ballots cast.
Such fragmentation has only accelerated since, creating a chaotic political environment where small shifts in the level and distribution of parties’ support can have a massive impact on the outcome.
Feed the current polling – with Reform on about 30 per cent and leading by 5 to 10 points – into an election model and it suggests Reform could secure a handsome Commons majority. But knock just a few points off the Reform totals and leads, and the picture changes utterly, as Reform falls away and its opponents move back into contention in hundreds of seats.
Or take the current disintegration on the left, with the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalists and potentially a new Jeremy Corbyn party all taking votes from Labour. If that’s repeated in every seat, a divided left could help usher in a Farage government. But if many left voters are willing to consolidate behind the strongest local challenger, the picture changes dramatically. The desire to throw out a widely-loathed Tory government was motivation enough to drive large scale tactical voting last year. Many seats may turn on whether progressive fear of Farage outweighs disappointment with Starmer.
We are in uncharted territory. No British voter alive has ever had to weigh up the prospect of a new party taking the reins of government. Neither big party has had to consider the risk of electoral oblivion before, and neither is likely to meekly accept extinction. Electoral change at Westminster may still be years off; political change has already begun.
