Last week, in the rain outside Number 10, Rishi Sunak made a speech announcing the date of the next election. There were a little over 2,500 words in that speech, quite a few of them about the future, and at least twelve of those words were absolutely, unimpeachably true:
“On July 5th, either Keir Starmer or I will be prime minister.”
As predictions go, this is a pretty safe one. The Prime Minister has either been a Labour or Conservative party politician for every day ending in a Y since 23rd October 1922.
This isn’t going to change in 2024. The Prime Minister will continue to be a Labour or Conservative politician, sure as night follows day. Will it ever change?
Political Dominance
Since the Labour Party emerged as a national force in the 1920s, the two main parties have never received less than 65% of the total vote. They’ve only received less than 70% of the total vote on four occasions, twice at the beginning of the 1920s, and twice at the end of the New Labour era, in 2005 and 2010.
Here’s a pretty dull chart:
Clicking on the chart makes it interactive. It doesn’t make it less dull.
There isn’t even a slow trend at play here. We’re well past the peak, in the decade or two that followed the end of the second world war, when the two parties commanded more than 90% of the vote. There are times when either schisms within a political movement see more votes go to a third party (1983) or when a third party performs very well, taking advantage of dissatisfaction with the main two parties (2010).
But even in an era of multiparty TV debates, easier to build online movements and devolution – which gives a stronger voice to national or regional parties – the last decade has seen no real change in the proportion of votes that go in either the red or blue box. Labour and the Conservatives oversee a political hegemony.
Threats to Power
There are two main things that could change this hegemony, neither of which is very likely.
Firstly, voting reform.
Electoral reform would mean that the threshold parties need to cross to get meaningful representation in parliament would be dramatically lowered. In 2005, Labour got 35% of the vote and more than 350 seats. Five years later, the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the vote and 57 seats. On a purely votes-per-seat metric, this is terrifically unfair. But it does - 2010 and 2017 aside – tend to produce reasonably stable governing majorities.
Because of that, it remains tremendously unlikely that we ever see meaningful electoral reform in the UK. It relies on a scenario where a political party translates a minority vote share into a majority seat-share and then decides to forgo that enormous, hard-won advantage by ripping up the system that got it elected. In distant opposition, Labour have flirted with the idea of introducing electoral reform. As they get closer to power, they’ve got somewhat more equivocal about the idea. Last October, Labour’s shadow leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, said:
“I’m personally for, kind of, looking at electoral reform-type stuff.”
‘Kind of’ and ‘type stuff’ are not breath-holding commitments to major change.
Secondly, every now and then, political parties die.
It doesn’t happen very often. The last time a major political force in the UK suffered irreversible decline – not counting that time Laurence Fox failed to fill in the London Mayor forms on time – was over a hundred years ago, when the Liberal party was effectively replaced by Labour. That owed a lot to the extension of the franchise, especially to non-property owning men in 1918. Since the Representation of the People Act 1928 (which gave all men and women over 21 the right to vote), there’s not much further suffrage can go, short of giving the vote to children, pets or the deceased.
A more recent – and perhaps inauspicious – example was in Canada when the ruling Progressive Conservative Party slumped from 43% of the vote and 169 (out of 295) seats in 1988 to 16% and two (two!) seats in 1993.
This example is haunting Conservatives in the UK and entrancing their more rose-tinted opponents because there are a number of superficial similarities between that election - and the eventual death of the Progressive Conservatives, which officially wound up in 2003 - and our own beleaguered governing party.
The Progressive Conservatives had replaced the 1988 election winner with a relatively untested newcomer not long before the 1993 election. The economy was faltering. There was strong regional opposition – for Bloc Quebecois read the SNP or Plaid Cymru. A challenger party outflanking the government to the right, also called Reform…
But it’s unlikely that Canadian history repeats in the UK. As Jonn Elledge has recently, and persuasively, written:
“…most of those resemblances are superficial. Liz Truss was ejected before she could take the Tories into an election campaign, and even if the party has never really recovered at least it’s no longer 30 points behind. Tory underperformance in parts of the country prone to regionalism is hardly new; the SNP arguably already had their Bloc Québécois moment in 2015, it’s now receding, and it wasn’t the Tories that took the brunt of it anyway… [Reform] shows absolutely no sign of the momentum that allowed its Canadian namesake to supplant the Progressive Conservatives.”
Based on current polling, the Conservatives are heading for defeat, possibly a sizeable defeat. But the 2024 election is not an asteroid. In opposition – possibly over the course of one or two electoral cycles – they’ll remould, and come again.
What does this mean?
Continued hegemony. All told, it is very unlikely that we have a non-Conservative or Labour Prime Minister at any point over the next few decades. The existential risks to the two main parties are low, first-past-the-post is a game that really rewards its winners and oppositions have time – sometimes lots of time – in opposition to find themselves and their voters again. So, we have a political hegemony in the UK: always Labour or Conservative leaders.
Distance and apathy. Accusations of political apathy are a bit overblown in the UK - only once in the last 100 years has turnout dropped below 60% (2001) - but the average turnout since 2010 has been 67%, well down on the pre-1997 trend. It’s not a great sign when a third of the electorate either can’t be bothered or don’t think it’s worthwhile to vote. That means a wider gap between politics and the public, sustaining the low levels of political trust that have endured since time - and the Ipsos Mori Veracity Index - began (both 1983).
Big tents. It’s really hard, even within Westminster, to change the hegemony. Four of the biggest political figures in the country, in alliance with the Liberals, won just nine seats in 1983. Change UK once had 11 MPs, all of whom lost their seats nine months later, at the first opportunity. As a result, the big parties are not single identities, but multiple ones, which explains why both Suella Braverman and Tracey Crouch have both been sitting Conservative MPs, and why for the last couple of weeks Natalie Elphicke has sat on the same Labour benches as Zarah Sultana.
Changing political identities. Brexit showed us how much political tribalism could still matter – and how rare real apathy is. But as political party membership managers will attest, fewer people feel they really belong to a political party: there are more switchers and floating voters than before, less class-based voting and more tactical voting. The dominance of the two-party system hides a weakening in affinity and affiliation.
Reinvention. Although the rosettes are the same colour, the ideologies the political parties represent is actually pretty changeable. Opposition allows parties to do this: to recalibrate their offer, their personnel and their image to give them a better shot at winning next time around. Political reinvention is always more likely than replacement. If the Conservatives find themselves in opposition, they’re more likely to absorb Reform - or the political space they occupy - than be replaced by them.
More than this
Of course, this edition of Slow Futures was always going to look at a political trend.
Political trends are one of the seven areas of our continuous Horizon Scanning, alongside Economics, Society, Technology, Demographics, Environment and Consumer. Trajectory’s Now & Next subscribers get access to all that macrotrends information, monthly reports, on demand presentations and regular data from our sentiment tracker. You can find more information on that here.