One of the ironies of Brexit is that since leaving the EU, the UK has become a more European country. Tax and spending levels – once likened to the US’s – are beginning to resemble Germany’s. Britain’s “flexible” labour market is undergoing continental-style regulation. And it will soon be the government’s job to make the trains run on time.
The UK’s politics, too, has an increasingly European appearance. Two opinion polls published this week – by YouGov and More in Common – feature four parties on between 17 and 24 per cent of the vote: Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and the Liberal Democrats (riding an anti-Trump wave). Throw in the Greens (on between 7 and 9 per cent) and this starts to look like a new era – the age of five-party politics.
The two-party system has been in decline for 75 years. At the 1951 general election, Labour and the Conservatives won 96.8 per cent of the vote between them. By 2010 this had fallen to just 65.1 per cent. The age of majority government, some declared, was over. But the Tory-Labour duopoly proved more resilient than many assumed. At the 2017 general election, amid Brexit polarisation, the two parties won 82.3 per cent – their highest combined share since 1970.
But fragmentation has now resumed – and intensified. In 2024, the joint Labour-Tory vote was a mere 57.4 per cent, the lowest in history. At a recent Parliamentary Press Gallery lunch, Nigel Farage – the anarchic Joker of British politics – revelled in this crumbling order.
“The Greens will win more at the next election, their polling has been rock-solid,” he declared. “They’ve become more professional, they know what they’re doing, they know who their voters are.” (His millennial “hard-left” daughter, he added, is one of them.)
Farage went on to predict that “pro-Gaza independents” would win 20-30 seats at the next general election and noted the SNP’s “slight revival” (in fact, the party enjoys a double-digit lead over Scottish Labour). “Project Starmer is in big trouble,” he concluded.
The Reform leader, who has predicted that his party will win the next election, has a vested interest in talking up Labour’s travails (the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on 1 May will be an early test of whether the hype is justified). But Starmer’s majority – likened by pollsters to a sand castle or a Jenga tower – is under threat from all sides. As with Germany’s routed Social Democrats, the risk is that Labour loses votes to everyone, everywhere, all at once.
But party strategists say they are playing a long game. As one put it to me, “Keir could go out and say lots of negative things about Trump and the US and get a boost in the polls, but to what end?” Those in the car industry in the West Midlands or the whisky industry in Scotland, they added, have little interest in the government doing “silly things for short-term popularity”. Unlike Canada’s insurgent Mark Carney, who faces an election in a few weeks, Labour will not face voters for four years.
Should Farage prove Starmer’s ultimate opponent, some inside Labour hope that he could summon a French-style “Republican front” against Reform. Progressive voters who have fled to the Lib Dems and the Greens will come home when needed. But in this era of fragmentation – call it Netflix politics – the next election will test tribalism as never before.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Anas Sarwar: “Energy security is national security”]
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