Was this the year that British democracy as we have known it began to turn into something else? Politicians, voters and journalists have made this claim before – when their side has been out of power for a long while, or when an elected government has been unusually dictatorial – and their warnings have usually been overstated. But this time the evidence of a fundamental shift away from a century-old status quo seems stronger.
Familiar landmarks have disappeared: Labour and Tory dominance, two-party electoral contests, the decisive power of a big Westminster majority, the patience voters usually show towards a new government, the predictable pendulum swing between right and left, the red lines between mainstream and extreme politics and even the central role of parliament.
Our possible next rulers, Reform UK, barely bother with the Commons, ignoring the convention that that is where future prime ministers make their names. The current government, despite a bland, diligent leader and some decent policies, is despised by most voters with an intensity that may be unprecedented. In the online spaces where political opinions are increasingly formed, debatable facts, rumours, myths, outright fictions and raw emotions surge back and forth, erupt into geysers of outrage – and then subside into stagnant pools of disillusionment.
“Confidence in the system of governing Britain remains at a historic low,” the National Centre for Social Research reported in June. “Trust in governments and MPs … [is] lower now than … after any previous election.” In the New Statesman, in October, the veteran commentator Andrew Marr expressed a common establishment view: “Britain has become ungovernable.”
Because the old party structures and Westminster’s web of institutions and rituals remain, drawing attention to themselves and still shaping the political calendar, it remains possible, some of the time, to believe that British politics is not really changing. There are also many people with a vested interest in prolonging the old order, from MPs who want to enjoy traditional, extended parliamentary careers, to journalists with mainly Tory and Labour contacts. And then there is the unease many voters may feel, whether they like the status quo or not, about Britain adopting a new, yet to be defined, political culture, in a world increasingly full of hostile states and authoritarians. Contempt for the Labour-Tory duopoly could turn to nostalgia if Nigel Farage welcomes Vladimir Putin to Downing Street.
Yet until Reform UK – or perhaps an equally untried coalition of anti-Reform parties – is tested and constrained by holding office, then Britain’s new politics remains free to develop in many parallel, largely uninhibited ways. What might these political futures be?
Some relatively optimistic centrists and leftists at the journal Renewal and the pressure group Compass see the need for an anti-Reform popular front also as an opportunity: to finally begin Britain’s shift to a European-style politics of coalition and proportional representation. Strikingly this year, despite all the government’s troubles and Reform UK’s poll breakthroughs, the combined support for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens hasn’t fallen much: from 48% in January to 44% now, according to the website Politico’s latest poll of polls. Meanwhile, support for the left-leaning SNP and Plaid Cymru has held steady. The widespread idea that Britain has recently become a much more reactionary country is more of a rightwing hope, and leftwing fear, than a description of reality.
But the problem for those who see potential in the poll trends for a long-term progressive majority at Westminster is that this year another, almost equally large bloc has been forming: on the right. The combined Tory-Reform UK vote was 46% at the start of January and is 48% now. With Tory defections to Reform continuing, the parties’ approaches to immigration and many other issues blurring, and the denials that they will form an alliance sounding steadily less definitive, the prospect is growing of a confrontation – perhaps lasting years – between two multi-party blocs with deeply opposed values. The Brexit wars may come to seem modest by comparison.
Our electoral system’s unsuitability for this kind of fragmented and polarised politics adds another new layer of uncertainty. The next general election could see four, or even five – if Reform’s recent dip in the polls continues – parties get a similar number of votes, yet win wildly diverging numbers of seats. A distortion of democracy on this scale has never happened in Britain before. How the winners and losers from such a lottery would react, and how the random quality of the results would affect the legitimacy of whatever government emerges, whether in the eyes of voters, financial markets or foreign states, are questions that Westminster is generally avoiding.
The election may not be for another three-and-a-half years: a long time in today’s accelerated politics. During this period of waiting some of Britain’s old political habits could reassert themselves. Some voters may return to the traditional main parties, especially if Farage’s erratic response to the allegations about his schooldays proves to be a sign of fragility under pressure.
This year, the two once-dominant parties have returned to some old themes. Labour policies such as unapologetically raising taxes on the rich have begun to echo postwar social democracy, while the Tories have returned to their own familiar territory of moralising about benefits claimants and promising austerity. If Kemi Badenoch continues to improve as Tory leader, and if Labour can somehow refresh its own leadership, then it’s possible that 2025 will be remembered as the end of an era of intense political instability, rather than its beginning.
Yet an even more turbulent late 2020s feels more likely. Voters have so many reasons to stay angry, from depressed earnings to the elevated cost of living. Online politics has been designed by tech companies never to calm down. Meanwhile, in France, the continued rise of rightwing populism, despite successive electoral coalitions constructed to keep it out of office, suggests that such tactics only work for so long.
If Reform UK does win power, its bullying but inept record in local government suggests that it, in turn, will struggle to satisfy enough voters. A failed Reform government could then push our politics back into its old comfort zone, or further away from the traditions of British democracy, into the unknown.