2024 proved two-party politics is in its death throes. It could be Nigel Farage's opportunity

If the 2024 election proved anything – aside from the fact that the majority of people who bothered to vote rid of a government that had run things for 14 long years – it reminded us that the UK is no longer a country conveniently carved up between Labour and Conservatives. So as we move into 2025 and beyond, we need to ask ourselves whether we can continue to put up with an electoral system that’s less and less fit for purpose. It’s a dysfunctional system which could open up a big opportunity for Nigel Farage and Reform.

The tendency of people to feel a degree of tribal loyalty to one or other of the big two – often based on their class identity – has actually been waning ever since researchers first began to measure it using surveys in the 1960s.

Partly as a result, and partly because it’s got more and more difficult for governments to deliver a decent, no-worries standard of living for the average Brit, we’ve occasionally seen so-called ‘third parties’ make breakthroughs, at least in terms of vote-share, though not seat-share in the Commons. The Liberals in the early 1970s and then again, in an alliance with the Social Democrats, in the 1980s are one example; the SNP is another.

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But recently this fragmentation has accelerated in both scope and pace. In part because the elections of 2010 and 2015 were followed by two contests which seemed (but only seemed) to restore the two-party regime, many of us failed to notice they signalled a further weakening of the big two’s grip on British politics.  In reality, however, 2017 and 2019 were blips – pauses in the melting of an iceberg that’s starting to look unstoppable.

Such is the mainstream media’s continuing obsession with the familiar government vs opposition dynamic that it’s all too easy to ignore the underlying message of July’s results. This year Labour and the Tories together accounted for a measly 57% of the votes cast.  Compare that to 82% in 2017 and 76% in 2019 – or to 1951 when the figure was, believe it or not, 97% per cent.

And look at where the rest of those votes went – not just to the familiar ‘third parties’, the Lib Dems (12%) and the SNP (2.5%) but to the Greens (7%) and, most worryingly perhaps for both of the big two, the radical right wing populists of Reform UK led by Nigel Farage (14%). 

Labour also lost the support of significant numbers of Muslim voters to pro-Gaza Independents – voters that, who knows, it might never get back. Of course, not all those parties won a number of constituencies commensurate with their support in the country as a whole.

The UK, then, is more and more a multiparty system still trapped (but only just) in a two (or two-and-a-half) party body, its true nature distorted by a first-past-the-post system that’sfinding it increasingly tricky to do the job it’s supposed to do – namely to constrain the number of parties in parliament, even at the cost of leaving a substantial minority of voters feeling completely unrepresented.

In 2024, those supposedly “extreme” parties – the Greens and Nigel Farage’s Reform – did win seats at Westminster, albeit only a handful each. Not only will their presence allow them to further highlight the essential unfairness of the existing electoral system, it will also provide a golden opportunity for something we’ve never really seen before in the debate over our dysfunctional electoral system – a genuinely charismatic politician from the right of the political spectrum banging the drum for change.

Whether Nigel Farage chooses to seize said opportunity to bang that drum remains to be seen, of course. He may just decide to play the same old anti-immigration, anti-woke, and anti-net zero tunes that have served him so well in recent years in the hope that he can somehow overhaul the Tories by beating them at their own game under first-past-the-post.

If so, however, he’s likely to find himself playing a very long game indeed – unless, of course, he can somehow persuade a desperate Tory leader to cut him a deal whereby they don’t contest Labour-held seats that are Reform targets in return for him doing the same for them in Tory targets.

The danger for the Conservatives in such a deal is that it results in a hung parliament whereby they’re reliant on Reform to make it back into Number Ten. At that point Farage would be a fool if he didn’t insist on PR as his price.

Love him or loathe him, Farage is no fool. Watch this space.

Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. His books include The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron and The Labour Party Under Ed Miliband.

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