Trevor Fisher on why the left needs to wake up to the implications of the collapse of the two party system
It is clear that what we must call the legacy parties – Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats – are under threat and face unprecedented challenges. The most obvious indicator of this is the crisis in Number 10, where Tory Prime Ministers since Thatcher have faced leadership challenges, and this is a pattern which Labour, despite having over 400 MPs, risks repeating. But underlying the regular crises at the top, it has now become clear that the two-party system has collapsed, and a system which from the eighteenth century to 2024 was based on two alternating parties aiming at victory at a general election now cannot offer any of the three legacy parties victory.
The next General Election may offer a joke party without experience, the keys to Number 10 with no evidence its leader, Nigel Farage, has any relevant skill and experience. Labour is handicapped from preventing this by the success of the Green Party in taking votes from Labour, plus Starmer’s repeated claim Labour can beat Reform – when it has lost the last three by-elections to Reform, Plaid* and the Greens. Starmer has little credibility, and Josh Simons may hand Makerfield to Reform.
Recent Developments
What is far worse, there is no effective debate on what is happening, and some key facts are not understood. This was illustrated by the letter run in the letter column of the April edition of Prospect Magazine. One Rory O’Kelly, describing the problems of the two main parties, wrote saying of the 2019 election:
“The subsequent collapse of Labour support was caused not by extraneous social factors but by the people running the party deciding to alienate large sectors of their voter base (“shaking off the fleas”). The collapse of the Tories had perhaps more complex reasons, but the common factor was that The leadership put control of the party ahead of winning elections”.
The Tory collapse in fact followed a series of electoral victories, but for Labour, election data shows that the claim the Corbyn leadership chose to “alienate large sectors of their voter base” is wrong. In both the elections when Corbyn led the party, Labour’s voter total was over ten million. In 2024 The voter total for Labour was less than ten million. Corbyn had not alienated existing supporters, but Starmer believed the myth, and the focus on the PLP numbers at Westminster led to the mistaken analysis that purging the Corbynites would solve Labour’s problems. It has intensified all the problems Labour has faced causing Starmer to face a move to expel him from Number 10.
The facts are quite clear, but Labour does not do statistical analysis or serious history. The decline of the two-party arrangement in the 1920s led to the replacement of the Liberals by Labour, once the franchise was extended: there was no threat to the system itself. Currently, there is an attempt to see developments in the same pattern, but with Reform UK as the threat to the right. In April Prospect, for example, the letter which followed Rory O’Kelly’s article accepted the decline of the old system existed, but Stefan Badham believed that a Reform government was likely to crash, and this would allow the two-party system to recover.
Dangerous optimism over two parties
The assumption that the two-party system can recover if Reform UK is allowed to fail is dangerous, mirroring the belief of the German communist party in 1932 that the Nazis would fail, allowing the communists to succeed. The reality is that there is now a multi-party system. The future cannot be predicted, but following the May 7th elections, some signs of what is happening can be put down, notably that the two legacy parties, which had run the period of mass voting, are in deep trouble and voters are more likely to head to other parties or no parties. Clearly, the five-party theory in England is simplistic as there is a growth of independents which has to be taken into account**. In the Celtic areas, particularly Scotland, the independence movements are in control and focus on destroying the UK. There is no sign that Number 10 understands that separatist parties now control government in all three devolved administrations.
While the reality of Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party is still to be assessed, the immediate reality, in Scotland, is the assumption that the SNP has a mandate, derived from a misreading of the electoral facts. Andy Ramsay in Open Democracy (8th May) argued: “There is a clear mandate for another independence referendum in Scotland. Westminster will flat out deny this mandate, leaving the roughly half of Scottish voters who support independence frustrated”. (emphasis added).
The essential point about May 7th in Scotland is that the SNP did not get half the vote or anything like this. It achieved 38.2% of the constituency vote, and less in the lists, though it is the major party at Holyrood. The five major parties in Scotland were SNP, Labour, Reform, Conservative and Lib Dem, with Reform the major gainer, overtaking the Lib Dems and Tories with 15.8% (seats) and 16.6% (List), while Labour continued its decline. Up to 2011, it had always gained over 30% of constituency votes and nearly 30% of list votes, but in 2026 its share was 19.2% of seats and 16% of list votes. The SNP mirrored the result Labour achieved in the 2024 General Election, winning more seats than its vote share justified.
A similar concern for accuracy has to be shown in dealing with independents, whose share appears to be around 5% in the Scottish list system and in England seems to be focused in Muslim areas and on the Gaza issue. Highlighting how politics has fragmented, Imtiaz Ameen, Chair of Dewsbury South Labour Party, wrote inLabour List that the impact of Gaza Independents was to put Reform in charge of Kirklees Council, with every Labour candidate defeated; his conclusion was that “The most likely outcome of voting for independents is a Reform Government, more sectarianism and further disengagement from the mainstream political process”.
This is obviously true, and it is clear that making Gaza the sole issue for Muslims is to remove them from local politics, for local government is not about the Middle East. In all aspects of a fragmented society, the big issues are being swamped by factional politics, which cannot help but serve the interests of the hard right. It is essential to accept that the old primacy of Legacy parties is over; the second essential is to assess what, in a chaotic reality, is starting to happen.
*Plaid won a Senedd by-election, the forerunner to Labour’s collapse in the Welsh election on May 7th.
** Independent growth is patchy – in Birmingham, there are 13 independents putting them ahead of the Lib Dems, but in Newcastle under Lyme, Reform won the council from No Overall Control, with no Green or Lib Dem Councillors.
Funny how no one seems interested in the “manifestos” of all these runners or how parties with no overall majority will “govern”. “By decree” on the case of Reform UK and “consensus” by any other combination.
I hope Starmer simply ignores the new MP for Makerfield and sticks to his guns.