There was once a reliable rule of British politics: if Labour was down, the Conservatives were up (or vice versa). With some exceptions, such as the rise of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s, this trend held throughout the postwar era.
But the pendulum has broken. Rather than one side profiting from the other’s woes, Labour and the Tories are united by their unpopularity (averaging 18 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively, in the latest poll of polls). Fragmentation is not a new phenomenon but the current scale of it is. For the first time in British history there are now five parties polling in double digits with Reform (on 30 per cent) joined by the Lib Dems and the Greens on 13 per cent each.
The latter, as I explored last Wednesday, have surged since “eco-populist” Zack Polanski became leader last month. Over the weekend, the Greens’ membership reached 128,000, surpassing the Tories’ last recorded figure of 123,000. Polanski, stealing a march on Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party, has filled the gap that existed to Labour’s left.
The picture is further complicated by the presence of the SNP, which is projected to win a fifth term at Holyrood next May, and Plaid Cymru, which is competing with Reform for first place in this Thursday’s Senedd by-election in Caerphilly. That seat has been held by Labour since Welsh devolution began in 1999, while the equivalent Westminster constituency has been won by the party since its creation in 1918. Tribal loyalties, as Scottish and “Red Wall” MPs previously learned, count for little in this new era.
The decline of the two-party system – “Netflix politics” as I have called it, or “Netflixification” to use Luke Tryl’s term – mirrors other trends in society. Just as most voters no longer swing between Labour and the Conservatives, so they no longer switch from BBC to ITV. Last month, for the first time in history, none of the five main channels attracted more than a million viewers during the prime 9pm slot. Streaming services, like insurgent parties, provide a new home for those weary of the traditional broadcasters. Both Nigel Farage, through his near-daily GB News show, and Polanski, through viral TikTok clips, are exploiting the new media landscape.
But fragmentation has its limits. Major broadcast events – an England football final, a royal occasion, last year’s Gavin & Stacey Christmas special – still attract almost 20 million viewers. In the right circumstances, the same herding phenomenon is witnessed in politics. Back in 2017, with the stakes heightened by Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s presence on the ballot, Labour and the Tories won 82.3 per cent of the vote between them (their highest combined share since 1970).
The remorseless logic of first-past-the-post means that, even in a seven-party era, the next election can be framed as a contest between Farage and Keir Starmer. Though Labour aides reject talk of a “Macron strategy”, the party’s best hope may be that social democrats, liberals and One Nation Tories vote as required to defeat the populist right. The risk, as the unthinkable routinely becomes thinkable, is that this landscape is unrecognisable by the next election.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
[Further reading: The death of Welsh Labour]
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