Breakdown In Britain

GOODNESS, WHAT A MESS. Our once stable political system is descending into unprecedented confusion and disillusionment. Oh, and we’ve run out of money.

These are potentially serious problems, but the money thing is much easier to understand. The long-term effects of the crash of 2008 plus the disruption and expense of the 2020-21 pandemic have left us with an enormous debt burden and se­rious fiscal problems. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in office for precisely one year, is therefore in a serious jam, with a sluggish economy and national debt approaching 100 per cent of GDP. None of this is entirely his or the Labour Party’s fault, but he has to stand and face a rising tide of discontent with very limited room for manoeuvre.

Starmer came into power on a platform of ‘change’ coupled with cast-iron promises not to raise major taxes. So not surprisingly, he has not been able to afford to make changes that people feel day-to-day. The lack of obvious improvement so far, and the excuses provided for it, have led many to believe that Labour is not, as it claimed, different from the Conservatives who, after a decade of chaos and misman­agement, were widely reviled as both incompetent and mendacious.

For many, the lack of action is doubly incomprehensible because of the enor­mous majority—174 seats—that Labour won just a year ago. But this is where the longer-term instability in British politics is work­ing against the established party system.

Last July, Starmer won 411 seats, but on a record low winning vote share of 33.7 per cent. Compare this to the last election, in 2019, when Labour won 202 seats on 32.1 per cent. That’s roughly twice as many seats for a rise in popularity of 1.6 per cent. This anomaly was largely the result of a collapse in the Conservative vote—down from 43 per cent in 2019 to 23 per cent in 2024, which brought a reduction in seats from 365 to 121. This is what gave Starmer what has been called his ‘loveless majority’.

Where does this volatility come from? One answer is from the electoral system itself, which is very inconsistent in the way it turns votes into seats, but the real issue here is the recent, unprecedented degree of fluidity in voting patterns. The old loyalties of class and region are gone, which has been exacerbated by the failure of successive governments to deliver on their prom­ises. In 2019, Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority for the Conservatives with talk of 40 new hospitals, ‘levelling up’, reform of social care, and an ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal—most of which didn’t materialise.

Something similar has now happened to Starmer, with the promised change remaining largely invisible. Labour leaders have tried to talk up some incremental improvements, but they don’t add up to what most people understand as change. Disappointment among voters produces a willingness to switch loyalties, and the prime beneficiary has been Reform UK, the new party of the populist right, which talks a good game, with glib answers for everything, while remaining untroubled by the realities of government.

Reform is currently leading national opinion polls, holding steady at about 30 per cent, with Labour on 24 and the Conservatives far behind on 17. Is this now three-party politics, or just a shuffling of the two-party system? Is there any permanent change in progress, and if so, where did it come from?

At one level, we are seeing the backfiring of a long-term centre-right strategy to appeal beyond the middle classes, by finding issues to woo sections of the aspiration­al working classes. Margaret Thatcher’s generation of Conservatives did this with a list of attractive policies, including lower direct taxes and the sale of council houses to occupants. This produced Tory victories in 1983, 1987 and 1992. The Labour Party then tried to extend its appeal from the traditional working classes into the middle classes by embracing the Thatcherite swing away from manufacturing into services, declaring in 1999 that its aim was that half the country should be university educated. Tony Blair then won in 2001 and 2005.

However well-intentioned, this left half of the nation outside the favoured bubble. This has now come home to roost in electoral terms, as small state right-wingers more radical than the Thatcherites have found ways to recruit the uneducated half of the nation, by emphasising social and cultural issues rather than economic. Under our system, anything near half the electorate can deliver a huge parliamentary majority.

Reform’s leaders have worked out that the new opium of the masses is not religion, or the desire to be rich, which was the secret ingredient of the Thatcher offer. They have created a persuasive new paradigm that has mobilised a new coalition. In the old leftwing playbook, the enemies of the workers were the bosses, but the populists now insist that the enemies of the workers are other workers. This is a profound change, which reflects the lived realities of many in a post-industrial world where the digital economy and mass migration have thoroughly shaken up the complex connections between employment, manufacturing and wealth creation.

Britain is now full of people who don’t see the point either of the government, or of themselves. We are no longer a nation of shopkeepers, or even of producers. Workless­ness and jobless growth are real. In the digital economy, we are a nation of consumers who subscribe to internet services. Few of the low­est earners work within tech. At most, they work in an Amazon warehouse, which is hardly the same thing, and requires minimal education compared to a software developer.

The combination of the Thatcherite appeal to the aspirational, and the Blairite ap­peal to the educated both left enormous holes in the idea of social inclusion. This is what Reform UK has exploited, though they still have to negotiate the disparities and inequali­ties of the British electoral system, which has no regard for proportionality, having been designed largely to create clear results. As a “first past the post” system, it tends to be harsh on minor parties. Its enduring merit is that it regularly appoints one party to govern, which is then fully accountable to voters at the next election. Whatever its faults, this system seemed adequate to British culture, and our political elites have by and large accepted it, particularly when they’re winning, though rather less so when they lose.

But now the two-party system we have known since the 1920s appears to be collapsing, and the question is how many parties we’re going to have to deal with from now on. The two old dinosaurs are looking tired and confused. Labour is struggling to deliver in government, while seeming at odds with much of its traditional support base. The Conservatives, with Reform to their right, are having difficulty finding a consistent line for an opposition party.

Currently, their messaging is that they agree with Reform about everything but are asking us not to vote for them. Reform looks poised to upset the apple cart by split­ting the political right, but the current instability doesn’t end there. Reform UK itself has already split, with two prominent former members starting their own parties.

Rupert Lowe, elected as a Reform MP in 2024, was expelled from the party five months ago and has now announced that he is to lead a new outfit named Restore Britain, while Ben Habib, formerly deputy chairman of Reform, has just launched a party named Advance UK. What unites all three of these enterprises is not only a small state, low-tax vision for the country and a declared hostility to immigration, but also that they are all funded by multimillionaires, even as they claim to champion the interests of the downtrodden native workers.

On the left, there is also new movement. The Greens and the Liberal Democrats both did well in 2024, with the Greens bagging a record four MPs. But the widespread disillusionment that surrounds the Labour Party is creating instability on the left too. Only a few days ago, Zarah Sultana, from the far left of the party, announced the birth of yet another new party, to be co-led by her and Jeremy Corbyn, the previous Labour leader.

This caused quite a kerfuffle, not least with Corbyn himself, who it appears had not been fully consulted about the an­nouncement. But there is wide recognition that there is a void to the left of where Starmer’s government sits, and although none of his MPs have yet broken ranks, there is a large radical constituency at local level who may well support a party standing on a more progres­sive platform.

Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party had its best result of recent times in 2017, getting three million more votes than Starmer did in 2024, and, as Labour leftwingers love to point out, he stood on a more radical platform than Starmer’s a year ago. But there is such disenchantment with La­bour’s current direction that the fledgling Sultana- Corbyn party, as yet unnamed, will at the very least be applauded, and even if none of its candidates are ever elected, it may do Labour terrible harm in its former heartlands. We await its full manifesto, but the twin issues of welfare reform and Britain’s stance on Gaza have haunted Starmer from the very first days of his premiership, and he shows little inclination or ability to resolve the discontent.

Just last week, he had a full-blown leadership crisis, being forced to gut a bill designed to slash the welfare budget, to such a degree that the proposed legislation will now not only not save money but may even increase government spend­ing. Thus far, his attempts to save money have a) not been successful, and b) have deeply upset many of his MPs who constantly appear in the media to explain that they did not get involved in politics in order to worsen the plight of the poor­est and most vulnerable in our society.

If there were a general election tomorrow, the polls tell us that Reform UK would be the largest party, though short of a majority. This is a ‘pinch me’ moment for most British political analysts. A party that was formed in 2021 and only attained a 14 per cent vote share in the last election is now the most popular party in the country, with its membership now over 200,000, well above the Tory figure.

Led by longtime rightwing agitator Nigel Farage, Reform UK has a similar policy offer to most of the other populist nationalist parties we see all over the world, from Hungary to the US. All its leaders are not only rightwing to the core, they are also generally very wealthy people, funded by yet more wealthy people. The party’s treasurer is Nick Candy, a property billionaire who has publicly boasted that there are plenty of other billionaires fully prepared to back the party. A few months ago, Elon Musk rather liked the look of Reform, although it now seems that his prom­ised £100 million contribution may not be needed, even if it was ever seriously intended. Musk liked the party’s stance, as he did those of many other radical right parties in Europe, but he didn’t like the idea of Farage as leader; he preferred Rupert Lowe, who is more combative and outspokenly anti-Muslim than Farage.

Farage has always distanced himself from the kind of street fighting neo-fascism that further right organisations tend to at­tract. Musk was calling for the party to unite forces with Tommy Robinson, who founded a street-level ‘extra-parliamentary’ or­ganisation called the English Defence League. Farage has always been scrupulously clear in his rejection of that kind of politics. His sworn objective is not to fight in the streets, but to replace the Conservative Party as the main centre-right party in Britain.

He could struggle to become prime minister, but he may well be about to achieve his declared strategic aim.