The splintering of British politics

THE LABOUR Party faces a test of its popularity at local elections on May 1st. Sir Keir Starmer began his premiership last July promising to deliver a programme of “national renewal”. But nine months on things are not exactly going to plan. Voters have quickly lost patience with his government.

Our poll tracker, relaunched this week, makes clear how dramatic this shift has been. National polls of voting intentions show that, in the 50 years for which comparable data exist, Labour’s ten-percentage-point decline is the largest slump of any governing party in its first months in office. By contrast, nine months after Sir Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 Labour had increased its support by ten points.

Political preferences are fragmenting across the country. Reform UK is now in a three-way race with Labour and the Conservatives: each party attracts about a quarter of prospective voters. Backing for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens has nudged up, to 14% and 9% respectively (see top chart). Sir Keir’s party has haemorrhaged support among voters of all kinds over the past nine months: the young and old; rich and poor; men and women; and north and south (see bottom chart).

Labour is being squeezed from all quarters, too. Among people aged under 35, 44% of whom voted Labour last July, support has fallen to one-third, to the benefit of both the Greens on the left, the Lib Dems in the centre and Reform to the right. Fewer than one in five blue-collar workers say they would vote Labour. Sir Keir’s party is sitting in fourth place in the south of England and third in the Midlands. North of the border, the Scottish National Party enjoys a commanding lead: if a general election were held tomorrow, Labour would lose many of its 37 seats there.

But such an election will not be held tomorrow. The next one does not need to take place until August 2029. The question is whether the splintering will persist. Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, remarked recently that this fragmentation is something he “never thought we’d see”. As Mr Farage knows only too well, Britain’s first-past-the-post system does not reward small parties whose support is spread thinly. Reform won 14% of the ballots last July but gained just five MPs (less than 1% of seats).

In truth British politics have been splintering for some time. For the past decade the British Election Study (BES) has been asking a large representative sample of Britons about their party affiliation. When it first asked the question, in 2014, some 31% of respondents said they identified themselves with Labour. Five years later, the figure had fallen to 25%, about the same as today. Meanwhile the share of voters that do not identify themselves with any party has risen from 16% in 2014 to 25% now.

The Labour Party’s ruthless electoral efficiency—winning 63% of the seats in the Commons last year with just 34% of the vote—now makes it look remarkably vulnerable. Sir Keir has not had the kind of honeymoon period that many of his predecessors in Downing Street enjoyed. The local elections will bring the first ballot-box evidence of the extent to which his election-winning machine is going into reverse. ■

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