The year that permanently shattered our political mainstream

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Normalcy favours Labour. The conventional course of events is for a party to win a general election, run into trouble, lose popularity, grit its teeth, recover somewhat – and go on to be re-elected. Only once since the Second World War, during the roller-coaster 1970s, did a Government fail to win again: in 1974, the Conservatives' stiff, luckless Edward Heath was narrowly defeated by Labour's manoeuvrable, wily Harold Wilson.
Wilson had lost to Heath four years earlier, but had won in 1966. Sir Alec Douglas Home had lost to Wilson in 1964, but the Conservatives had won a third successive election victory in 1959 under Harold Macmillan. Clement Attlee had lost to Sir Winston Churchill in 1951, but had won a year earlier for Labour in 1950.
The same pattern was observable almost half a century on. Sir John Major lost to Tony Blair in 1997, but the Conservatives had won four elections in a row previously, three of them under Margaret Thatcher. Gordon Brown lost in 2010 – turned out by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – but Blair had previously won three elections of his own.
Which takes us to Sir Keir Starmer – victorious in 2024 after four terms of Conservative or Tory-led government. At 172 seats, his majority was only seven fewer than Tony Blair's 179 seat margin in 1997. A year into his premiership, he has good reason, if his history is anything to go by, to look forward to the next election with confidence.
But history repeats itself until it suddenly stops doing so. And the question that the Prime Minister must surely be asking himself this weekend, as he reflects on the implosion of his authority this week, is whether the orderly, stable, predictable Britain of those election results is becoming more like, say, Italy – a country in which established political parties can unexpectedly collapse.
For they hold firm only if their base is solid. What is Labour's? The clue is in the name: Labour, traditionally, was the party of the working class, drawn from the trade unions, in a country that was largely white. Their rivals, the Conservatives, stood for capital, property and, in the broadest of terms, the middle class.
Such was the politics of the post-war settlement. In retrospect, it can be seen to have been quietly fading for three quarters of a century – since 1962, to be precise, when a Liberal by-election victory in Orpington heralded the erosion of the two party monopoly in England. Winnie Ewing signalled the rise of the SNP in Scotland five years later, winning a by-election in Hamilton.
In the first of 1974's two general elections, the Liberals won six million votes and the SNP gained seven seats. By 1997, the age of three party politics in England had come: the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats. Ten years later, the SNP formed its first Government in Scotland itself, and has held power there ever since.
Where is Labour's base in this brave new world? Much of the white working class doesn't vote at all: only three in five voters turned out to the polls last year. Older, working class, and former Leave voters are deserting Labour for Reform. Younger urban voters, many of them women, are opting instead for the Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents.
In short, the coalition that Sir Keir built was shallow as it was wide – and the 411 seats he won may turn out to matter less than the 34 per cent of the vote he won it with: the lowest proportion of the vote for any winning party since 1945. Indeed, the combined share for the two main parties, at 57 per cent, was its lowest in modern times.
Labour could recover, as history suggests that they will. Or a crisis in the markets could somehow rescue the Conservatives – establishing them in the public imagination as the party least likely to over-spend, over-tax and over-borrow (despite their record in Government in the wake of Brexit).
But the electoral trends of this fragmenting politics suggest a hung Parliament – especially if, on the one hand, Labour clings to economic orthodoxy and, on the other, Jeremy Corbyn's new party gains significant traction and adds definition to the emerging coalition of Greens, Islamists and unreconstructed socialists.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost control of all 15 councils they were defending in May's local elections, have fallen from 24 per cent in the polls last year to 17 per cent, and face hazardous local elections next year – especially in the east of England, where Reform is very strong. As matters stand, they are set to be the smaller of Britain's two Right-wing parties.
The last major political party to collapse here as a governing force was the Liberals – dominant for much of the nineteenth century, displaced on the Left by Labour in the twentieth. 'To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,' wrote Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest.
One wonders what he would have said of an age that sees the loss of not one but two great political parties as dominant governing forces. It hasn't happened yet and may not happen at all. But a combination of fractured continental-style politics, with a multiplicity of parties and first past the post are set to produce unsettling results.
Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange