The polls seem to suggest that the two-party system is alive and well. But dig a bit deeper and you’ll find that voters no longer identify as strongly with either of the two major parties. Alan Wager argues that UK politics is a lot more fragmented than it seems, and that smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, and the SNP are still threats to Labour and the Conservatives. 

It has been a long and eventful decade in British politics. Yet it’s worth looking back at a piece published on this very blog nearly a decade ago, to remind ourselves just how long. Writing ahead of the 2015 general election, the political scientists Simon Hix and Jack Blumenau pointed out that ‘the decline in support for Britain’s two traditional parties over the past two decades is now common knowledge’. We were, so the story went, experiencing the UK’s evolution towards a ‘multi-party system’.

If you believe most of the current polls it now feels like, instead of a multi-party system, there is only one party in town. After an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson in 2019, most opinion polls – whether using simple methods or complex, and no matter how they allocate or reallocate undecided voters – are predicting a thumping triple digit majority for Keir Starmer. Far from a multi-party politics, some are talking of a decade of Labour hegemony. The SNP is in decline, the Green Party is not (yet) registering a significant uptick in the polls, and the Liberal Democrats’ poll ratings remain stagnant. Certainly, the new era of coalition governments that many expected a decade ago has not come to pass.

Yet, Blumenau and Hix’s piece was right: despite these surface-level appearances, if you take the long-view the two-party system remains more fragile than ever. British voters are volatile and lacking in trust in the political system, as we saw in the aftermath of referendums in 2014 and 2016. This detachment from both main parties is long-term, and structural. It means politics is increasingly messy and fragmented. Just 1 in 10 Brits now says that they identify with one of the main political parties very strongly, compared to half of the voting population in the 1960s. Increasingly, the parties have to piece together a majority from voters without a tribal or class loyalty.

It is Westminster’s political culture, and the glue of the first past the post system, that keeps the illusion that British politics is a two-party game intact.

This means that it is now a fact of life for Labour and the Conservatives that the path to Downing Street depends in large part on winning battles localized battles with smaller parties. When it comes to the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats are hoping to make around two dozen gains in ‘blue wall’ or ‘yellow halo’ Conservative constituencies in suburban England; Reform UK promise to eat away at their vote share everywhere, but particularly in areas on the ‘periphery’ of England and seaside towns. For Labour, despite signs of decline, it would be foolish to write off the threat of the SNP North of the border.

Despite this fragmented picture, British politics remain a two-party race. It is Westminster’s political culture, and the glue of the first past the post system, that keeps the illusion that British politics is a two-party game intact. It is over 170 years since Benjamin Disraeli infamously proclaimed to the House of Commons that “England does not Love Coalitions”. Less well known is the fact that Disraeli had been the architect of a cross-party agreement to bring down Robert Peel years earlier and had, the day before making that speech, privately offered different groups of opposition members of parliament (MPs) power and seats at the cabinet table in support of the budget. It is a story that illustrates a broad theme: it has always suited Labour and the Conservatives to pretend that the party system is less complicated than it is in reality.

Why and how do political leaders maintain this illusion that the UK has a simple two-party system? In my new book Cross-Party Politics in Britain, 1945-2019 I delved into the archives and conducted dozens of interviews with senior Labour and Conservative politicians to explore what drives and maintains. There are seven instances post-war where Labour and the Conservatives have considered publicly announcing they would work with smaller parties – whether as a governing coalition, or an electoral pact. From Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn to Tony Blair and Ted Heath to Harold Wilson, political leaders of all stripes have at least contemplated making this type of co-operation with their smaller competitors explicit.

Leaders of the Conservative and Labour are acutely aware of the fragility of the two-party system, propped up by the electoral system and the debt both parties owe to it.

Why do the leaders of the two main parties so often recoil from co-operation? And therefore why, no matter how much some in his party or the media have wanted him to at various stages throughout this parliament, was Keir Starmer was always unlikely to announce that voters should be supporting whoever is best placed to beat the Conservative candidate in their constituency? The answer is that leaders of the Conservative and Labour are acutely aware of the fragility of the two-party system, propped up by the electoral system and the debt both parties owe to it. They are acutely aware that promising coalitions or to change the electoral system comes with the risk of being seen as a historical mistake.

Take one example, from 50 years ago this month. As a Conservative-Liberal pact was touted in March 1974 to keep the Tory party in power with electoral reform as a quid pro quo, she argued that keeping Heath in power with electoral reform as the price would be to “sell the constitution for a mess of pottage”. Or take another example, when a coalition was agreed in May 2010. The key to achieving the Conservative-Liberal Democrat deal was an agreement to hold a referendum on the Alternative Vote. Even this weak form of electoral reform had the potential to disrupt the two-party equilibrium. Yet Cameron’s negotiation team had conducted rigorous testing on public opinion around the reform and knew it would lose. Upon completing the coalition negotiations, Hague recounted telling his wife “I think I’ve killed the Liberal Democrats”. Far from heralding a new multi-party pluralistic politics, the coalition saw the Conservatives gobble up Liberal Democrats across the country.

Sir David Butler, the last political scientist to publish a book on the history of coalitions in Britain nearly half a century ago, observed that the “unwritten rules of the game in British politics are deeply intertwined with the assumption that one party will win a clear majority and rule the roost”. Yet, increasingly, as Jack Blumenau and Simon Hix argued on these pages a decade ago, voters have other ideas. This mismatch, between Westminster’s two-party institutions and its multi-party electorate, will persist for as long as Labour and the Conservatives have the choice. The key unknown is whether, and if so when, the voters take that choice out of their hands.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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