The eclipse of Britain's major parties

But who can replace them?

I haven’t posted for nearly a month, after a brief flurry. I’ve been busy and on holiday. But it’s been quite hard to build up the head of steam needed to complete a post. So much is happening, and it’s quite bewildering. For a hundred years Britain’s political system has been dominated by two main parties: the Conservatives and Labour. The period before that, apart from a few years of transition, was similarly dominated by the Conservatives and the Liberals. The Caerphilly by-election to the Welsh Senedd saw all three parties pushed out of sight in a formerly safe Labour seat for a contest between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK.

The situation of the two parties are in reminds me of the Liberal Democrats after they formed a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. Their poll rating collapsed precipitately, and did not recover until after the catastrophic election in 2015. Throughout those years party insiders (myself included) fed themselves with stories that this was “mid-term blues” and that things would recover in time for the next election. The same story you hear quite a bit from Labour people. It ain’t necessarily so. Indeed, elsewhere in Europe traditional socialist and social democratic parties have sunk precipitously- notably the Socialists in France.

Meanwhile the Conservatives are losing a life-or-death struggle with Reform, the insurgents of the populist right. They have adopted the Reform agenda as their own, complete with some ugly racist overtones. We now have a blizzard of policies that are at best half-baked, which don’t show any serious interest in being in charge, together with hysterical criticism of the government. One or two interesting ideas get though - like abolishing stamp duty - but even these aren’t properly set in a wider context (what taxes would replace stamp duty?). That a quintessentially establishment party can set out to be an antiestablishment one would be quite a feat. The party has no coherent narrative for the party’s period in government from 2010 to 2024. Few people think they have the ability to win against the more agile and less burdened Reform.

Still, I’m not writing the Tories off just yet. What they are attempting has been successfully completed by the Republicans in America. They have greater organisational depth, grassroots knowhow and resilience than Reform, though their leader, Kemi Badenoch, seems clueless as to how to deploy these assets to advantage. And there is certain fragility about Reform - it is heavily dependent, organisationally and politically, on one man: Nigel Farage. And Mr Farage’s dalliances with Donald Trump and cryptocurrency, though good for fundraising, may turn round to bite him in the next three to four years. But oblivion beckons for the Conservatives if Reform doesn’t slip up.

The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is also trying to define himself with reference to Reform. He says reform is presenting the country with a “fork in the road” - a popular expression currently. This is sometimes referred to as the “Macron strategy”, after the way that French president Emmanuel Macron has managed to win against the not dissimilar threat from the populist right by uniting opposition to it. This is not an encouraging parallel at a number of levels. Firstly, the French two-round electoral system makes it much easier to implement; secondly, Mr Macron is a far more forceful leader; and thirdly, he is failing. The Caerphilly by-election shows that an anti-Reform coalition can work in a first-past-the-post electoral system - but it also shows that this does not necessarily form around Labour, even in a traditional Labour stronghold.

The party is developing the idea that they should robustly “call out” Reform to mobilise what they call out what they call the “progressive majority”. This is a long-standing myth - originally dating back to when both Labour and the Lib Dems polled better, and their combined vote share was comfortably more than that of the Conservatives. But this has been exposed: many people who voted for each of these parties could not be fairly called “progressive” - they just didn’t like the Tories. And then came the EU Referendum, and regular combined polling by the Conservatives, UKIP, the Brexit Party or Reform that put them at half or more of the electorate. There is a substantial, conservative minority who can be persuaded to vote either way. Right now these seem to be the people putting “immigration” at the top of their worries, alongside worrying about taxes. They also seem to think that the Labour government is pretty hopeless.

Which a growing number of people do. I have tried to give it, and Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves in particular, the benefit of the doubt. But a government of half-measures, and regular faux-pas, which seems to be retreating into a soft-left comfort zone, is making this harder. The party cannot expect to get away with this on the basis that it is better than what reform are offering. The final test for me will be the Budget in November. If the government goes for some bold tax reform, rather than rounding up the usual suspects, then I will see hope.

Meanwhile many other parties jostle for the non-Reform space - but none of them is all that credible. The Lib Dems are energetic local campaigners who appeal to the better-off middle classes - but seem to be allergic to getting behind any policy that could prove unpopular. The Greens are experiencing a polling surge under their new leader, and adept social media campaigner, Zack Polanski. But this might be described as a “core vote” strategy, incapable of winning much in the way of parliamentary seats (a striking contrast to the Lib Dems). The party of the left supposedly forming around Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana has little credibility - but may do well in a number of urban seats as they mobilise less well-integrated Muslim voters of South Asian heritage. And then there are the Scots and Welsh nationalists. The former will not soft pedal on Scottish independence, limiting their appeal, and Plaid will struggle outside their Welsh-language strongholds - though Caerphilly showed that this isn’t impossible. None of these parties is pushing for a credible economic programme.

The big question is whether the soft centre of British voters can mobilise around a tough economic message if it was presented to them, or whether they will insist on the various flavours of fantasy economics on offer. If they can, Labour, the Lib Dems and even the Conservatives might manage to develop such a message and break out of current deadlock. It doesn’t look promising, but we have three more years for something to emerge.