THE proportion of the vote won by the Labour and Conservative parties has fallen from a joint 97 per cent in 1951 to 57 per cent in 2024. Now Labour is running second among intended voters, or fourth, according to different polls. The Conservative Party is running third or fifth.
If polls are trending correctly, the Lab-Con duopoly is over. Both current main parties are on track to drop out of what is known as the two-party system. But there’s more to this political realignment. More parties than ever could win enough seats to join a coalition.
Reform UK might look like an outright winner today, but in a real election some of those now saying they’d vote for it would take its win for granted. Meanwhile, Reform’s opponents would vote for smaller parties, to clarify their opposition to both the incumbent and the challenger.
This appears to have happened already in Caerphilly, where Reform came second in a by-election that polling had suggested it would win. The incumbent Labour collapsed. The beneficiary was Plaid Cymru, not because the constituency is strongly Welsh nationalist, but because constituents wanted to communicate something other than what Labour and Reform are offering.
Reform’s rise is self-defeating in a third way. While some supporters take Reform’s win for granted, and some voters protest through anti-Reform parties, other voters realise that votes for smaller parties are no longer wasted votes. Hence, more parties become serious contenders for national seats.
Once you get to five parties attracting percentages in the teens, an outright majority for any party becomes almost impossible. Parliament’s representation would look more like proportional representation than first-past-the-post.
In a more multi-polar Parliament, smaller parties need to win only a few seats to become decisive to a coalition government. Such parties start locally, where a few seats are more powerful.
The Northern Irish are represented by parties that win seats nowhere else. The SNP and Plaid Cymru have again relegated Labour in Scotland and Wales respectively. SDP could dominate Yorkshire. A Cornish party could dominate Cornwall. An ‘England’ party could campaign for an English assembly. And as voters take localist parties seriously, they take smaller national parties seriously.
The Liberal Democrats are best placed, given their experience of coalition government from 2010 to 2015. They see themselves as the leftist party to supplant Labour. Indeed, they have crept within a few points of Labour, and even passed Labour according to Ipsos.
The Green Party has kept pace. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader in September, membership has grown 45 per cent to around 100,000. According to YouGov, the Greens tie for fourth with the Lib Dems at about 15 per cent, not far behind the Tories (17) and Labour (20). According to Ipsos, the Greens are running second at 27 per cent and the Lib Dems third (24).
These parties are stealing votes from Labour most, and are posturing as the best opposition to Reform. For instance, Plaid Cymru had called on Labour voters to join it to defeat Reform in Wales. In Scotland, the SNP has overcome scandalous finances, foreign loyalties and authoritarian policies to relegate Scottish Labour once again. And Reform is out-performing Labour in northern England’s ‘Red Wall’.
So without its Scottish, Welsh and northern English regional bases, what is Labour left with? Not even Muslims, apparently.
In 2019, seven in ten Muslims voted for Labour. In 2024, that dropped to six in ten Muslims (four in ten of the general population intended to vote Labour). Four pro-Palestinian ‘independents’ defeated Labour’s Parliamentary candidates in 2024. Despite Starmer’s recognition of Palestine in 2025, some Muslim Labourites don’t think he’s tough enough on Israel, and are organising to displace Labour MPs in 2029. Some of the competition is even uglier. A corrupt and bigoted Bangladeshi-Islamist party (Aspire) runs Tower Hamlets council in London, and could steal the two associated Parliamentary seats from Labour in 2029.
That’s before we get to the parties with national ambitions to steal the Muslim vote.
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, both expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism, have formed ‘Your Party’, with explicit appeal to Muslims. It is ridiculously named, chaotically managed, and internally split between the co-leaders’ factions. Still, one in five British adults would consider voting for it, rising to one in three among younger and Labour voters.
The Green Party also is competing for the Muslim vote. A Green official said Muslims can ‘politically decapitate’ Starmer and some of the ‘nastiest politicians we have’. This was not a private comment. Faaiz Hasan said it at a meeting of the Muslims Green group, at his party’s conference.
New parties and new leaders naturally attract hope, before they become tarnished by familiarity. But even by the tarnish-period, both Your Party and Green Party will split the Labour Party’s vote. They are even more attractive and credible in alliance. Three in ten Britons would vote for a Your/Green alliance, rising to half among Labour voters, and half of 16- to 34-year-olds.
With so many leftist parties stealing votes from it, Labour’s most efficient strategy is to compete with Reform on competence, rather than to compete with half a dozen other parties on who is the most authentic leftist.
The failure of eight Reform councils to fulfil the party’s promise to balance the books without raising taxes is helping Labour’s case. But still, I can’t see Labour recovering from its own executive failures. Voters hardly voted for Labour in 2024 on the grounds of competence, despite handing it a strong majority of seats. Lack of voter enthusiasm suggests that they voted against the Conservatives for 14 years of broken promises and drift.
Keir Starmer cannot rescue the party. His Blairism reminds voters of Labour’s misadventures up to 2010. His sophistry reminds them of Blair himself, but without the charisma. His approval ratings started net negative. Within months, he became the most unpopular premier on record, with four years to go. I can’t see him leading Labour into the next election. And I can’t see anybody on the bench who could do better.
Starmer and his Cabinet have failed to turn any indicator in the right direction: the economy, social cohesion, crime, employment, cost of living . . . the list goes on. They seem ideologically incapable of abandoning the policies that agitate everybody except a radical minority: censorship, two-tier justice, EU reset, and Net Zero . . . the list goes on.
Despite a recent dip, Reform is still polling at least 6 points ahead of Labour (at 26 per cent). The Ipsos poll has Reform 11 points ahead (at 33 per cent). So, Reform, despite its obsession with Labour heartlands, is threatened less by Labour than a rightist party.
The Conservative Party is not benefiting greatly from Labour’s decline. Blaming Britain’s malaise on 14 years of Conservative government is still an effective and somewhat justified strategy. Despite a good conference last month, the Conservative Party cannot win with returning conservatives alone. It needs traditional non-Conservatives. But they’re going elsewhere. According to Ipsos, the Con Party is running fifth, at just 20 per cent!
Reform shouldn’t prioritise Labour or the Conservatives. Those competitions are important, but not most important. Reform’s most consequential battles are with the other small and new parties, including (perhaps most of all) Advance UK (if it wins approval from the Electoral Commission).
Any party that wants to govern by 2029 needs to persuade voters that it alone is necessary and sufficient for reform. Otherwise voters will flirt with ever smaller parties. Those smaller parties could govern only by coalition. Their coalition would likely be insufficient, in seats and policy coherence, to deliver what Britain needs.
