Thursday’s elections were a watershed in British politics. They marked the formal demise of two-party politics in our country and the transition to a multi-party system.
This is not a temporary glitch or a minor setback to politics as we’ve known it for the past century. It is a rupture, a new start. As a leading pollster said to me yesterday: ‘It’s time to write the obituary of the two‑party system.’
The Labour and Tory duopoly has been in decline for quite some time. It’s long been extinct in Scotland and Wales – and never did exist in Northern Ireland. But it clung on tenaciously in England, which dominates Westminster. No longer.
What we used to call ‘the two main parties’ would regularly win comfortable majorities in the Commons with just over 40 per cent of the vote. In Thursday’s local elections they couldn’t muster 40 per cent combined.
There is something rather satisfying in seeing Labour and the Tories get their comeuppance. After all, they are jointly responsible for much of what ails us now: economic stagnation, the highest taxes for 70 years, profligate spending, ballooning national debt, endless budget deficits, growing yobbery, the highest energy costs in the world and hollowed-out defence.
But our joy needs to be tempered by a rather sobering reality: our new fractured politics, with votes spread across five parties (seven if you include the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists) rather than concentrated on two, will never produce the firm, determined government required to deal with the mounting challenges crowding in on us.
There is something satisfying in seeing Labour and the Tories get their comeuppance, writes Andrew Neil. But our joy must be tempered by a sobering reality: our new fractured politics…
The Labour and Tory duopoly has been in decline for quite some time. It’s long been extinct in Scotland and Wales, but it clung on tenaciously in England. No longer.
At home, we wallow in economic decline and social disrepair. Abroad, we face an increasingly dangerous, chaotic world. A political system that does not produce strong government to confront such matters is not a system fit for purpose in trying times.
Thursday’s results in England suggest we now have a system in which our votes are spread so wide that there is no clear winner; no victor with a mandate to do what’s necessary.
Yes, Reform UK emerged much enhanced, with sweeping gains in Labour and Tory heartlands (and strong performances in Scotland and Wales).
But early projections suggest, based on Thursday’s performance, its share of the national vote in a General Election would be around 26 per cent, which would be way short of a Commons majority in any General Election. The rest of the vote was bunched in a 16 to 19 per cent band between Labour, the Conservatives, Greens and Lib Dems.
So no party could govern on its own. Our new fractured politics would demand a coalition government, which would inevitably be unstable (and probably short-lived).
On Thursday’s share of the vote, even a Reform-Tory coalition would not command an overall majority in the Commons. A Labour-Green-Lib Dem coalition would crumble at the first whiff of grapeshot.
I cannot imagine either confected coalition of parties taking the thorny decisions our current plight demands: tough-love welfare reform, massive rearmament, scrapping the Net Zero lunacies and prioritising policies that produce cheap, secure energy. Any one of these policies would likely rip a coalition government apart.
Part of the problem is that, although we’ve turned our backs on Labour and the Conservatives, we’re very far from giving a wholehearted embrace to the insurgents who would replace them.
So Reform spectacularly takes true-Blue Essex from the Tories; but the Tories take back Westminster and Wandsworth – flagship Tory boroughs in the Thatcher years – from Labour.
Labour is trounced by Reform in the Northern Red Wall and, in a painful pincer movement, the Greens eroded its support in university towns and among ethnic minorities.
But Labour still has its metropolitan base, especially where the public-sector, white-collar middle class predominates.
In truth, we no longer have national parties. In our brave new multi-party world we have parties which rule the roost in their regional redoubts but struggle to break out of them to true national appeal.
The Tories have long ceased to be a national party: it has been reduced to places with lots of affluent, old folk – which means it’s increasingly concentrated in southern England.
Labour ceased to be a national party on Thursday. It was ejected from its northern heartlands and stopped being of significance in Scotland and Wales.
The Lib Dems are for ever the party of leafy suburbs of a liberal bent, like London’s Richmond.
The nationalist parties are, by definition, geographically constrained.
The newcomer parties are making great strides, says our columnist. The Greens have eroded Labour’s support in university towns and among ethnic minorities
The Liberal Democrats remain the party of leafy suburbs of a liberal bent, like Richmond. But a Labour-Green-Lib Dem coalition would crumble at the first whiff of grapeshot, Neil writes
No party now has a national reach, which only adds to the fracturing of the vote and our rush to multi-party mayhem. It is made even worse by the failure of the insurgent parties to deliver a knockout blow to the legacy parties.
The newcomers (Reform, Greens) make great strides. But the old-timers (Labour, Tories) still cling on by their fingernails, refusing to go gracefully. That’s why our votes are so widely dispersed.
Our inability to find the strong government we need is made all the worse by the never-ending soap opera that is Keir Starmer’s leadership psychodrama.
Labour’s meltdown on Thursday inevitably returns the matter of his job security to front of stage yet again. There is still no sign it will be quickly resolved.
Starmer has decimated Labour in Wales, the crucible of British socialism. He scuppered any chance of Labour taking Scotland, once as much a Labour fiefdom as Wales, purely because of his own unpopularity.
He has presided over a Labour wipeout in its northern English heartlands. Flagship London boroughs have been lost to, of all people, the Tories. It doesn’t get worse than that.
It makes you wonder what Starmer has to do to be dumped. For it is not just his future that’s on the line. Under his tender mercies it’s the very future of the Labour Party that’s under threat.
Yet, for reasons best known to himself, Starmer has no intention of going quietly, even though he has shown no aptitude for either politics or government.
The Labour Party largely despises him almost as much as the public at large. But, unlike the Tories, it has no stomach for regicide. Moreover, the Labour politicians and activists I spoke to yesterday said they weren’t sure any of the alternatives would be an improvement.
It would hard to think of a more damning critique of our current political rulers. Yes, the current guy is useless but any replacement is likely to be just as useless. No wonder there is widespread despair in the country.
Multi-party politics can be a great source of fun and games for politicians. But now we risk, more than ever, being in the grip of unserious politicians, warns Andrew Neil
It’s also the reason why even a government with a massive majority, like the current one, is incapable of taking the necessary decisions to reverse our economic decline and restore our defences.
Starmer’s policy pick is now determined not by what’s best for the country but what is most likely to save his skin – which means tacking to the soft Left to appeal to the dominant force in his party.
This will plunge to ludicrous depths early next week when Starmer is billed to make a speech in favour of much closer alignment with the European Union to regenerate the UK economy. It makes you wonder what planet he’s now living on.
The idea Britain’s economy can be revitalised by hitching Britain umbilically to the European Union – a poster child for economic stagnation whose obsession with regulation has strangled every high-tech innovation for the past two decades – is for the birds. But Labour’s backward-looking soft Left is obsessed with closer ties with the EU. So that’s what Starmer proposes.
The same can be seen in all manner of other policies that Starmer now espouses. He has turned his back on welfare reform (the soft Left will have none of it) and is disgracefully reluctant to boost spending on defence (there are no soft Left votes in defence).
He refuses to rein in his Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, no matter the pain his absurd energy policies inflict on industry and households (the soft Left loves Miliband).
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ANDREW NEIL: We get the politicians we deserve. Things WILL get worse before they get better
At a time when our economic prospects, hardly bright to begin with, look grimmer than ever, and with growing geopolitical threats on all fronts, we are lumbered with a political system which offers no response.
It is paralysed by its own structures, simpletons and stupidities. It is bad enough with Starmer at the helm. It will be even worse under our new multi-party system, which threatens us with rigor mortis.
Worse than that. Far from espousing the robust solutions our tough times demand, our multi-party system encourages a race to the bottom in populist absurdities – rent controls, food price controls, free transport (indeed free everything), more state ownership and control, wealth taxes, the destruction of enterprise and wealth creation. It’s almost as if the country has a death wish.
Multi-party democracy has done Wales and Scotland no favours. For both it has produced an ethos, a political culture, which is great at spending wealth but useless at creating it.
Wales has grown poorer, fallen further behind the rest of the country and is going nowhere fast. Scotland is also rudderless, increasingly shabby, living on memories of past glories while its cities and towns are gripped with an urban squalor unrivalled anywhere else in Western Europe (even Eastern Europe is looking more prosperous these days).
Now that England has joined the ranks of the multi-party democracies, the great danger must be that it will go the same way.
It has a bigger, more diversified wealth base. But the risks are obvious and will become even more so if the next election produces political stalemate, with no stable government emerging.
The British economy has long had its troubles. Sometimes they have been confronted and resolved, sometimes they’ve been ignored and made worse. But the political system was inclined to come up with solutions, its stability and democratic authority an asset in tackling our underlying economic weaknesses.
Now, sad to relate, to a fragile economy we must add an unstable political system more likely to avoid solutions than produce them.
It has not gone unnoticed abroad, among those who we need to lend us money, invest in us, hold our bonds and our currency. They are watching closely.
The combination of a failing economy and dysfunctional politics is a new, unprecedented bad look for Britain. It will not be easily put right.
Multi-party politics can be a great source of fun and games for politicians. But it is our wellbeing, our prosperity they’re playing with. These are serious times. But we risk, more than ever, being in the grip of unserious politicians.
