Two-party politics is breaking - and that's good for democracy.

Thoughts on the UK election - and on Australia's politics.

I'm not going to talk about the French elections because I don't speak French. Instead I’ll talk about the results from Thursday's general election in the UK and some of the parallels with Australia. 

At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in November last year, I sat next to a 'Red Wall' Tory MP at a dinner in Parliament. Over the course of the evening we would have spent two hours talking as I peppered him with questions.  Brendan Clarke-Smith was the MP for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands. It was a rural, working-class seat that included areas that once had coal mines.  Its largest towns were Worksop and Retford.  (I confessed I hadn’t heard of them, and he told me Bassetlaw was roughly halfway between Sheffield and Lincoln.) In the Brexit referendum in 2016, Bassetlaw voted 68% Leave.  When I asked Brendan how he explained the Brexit vote, he said his constituents were proud of their country's history and didn't want to be told what to do by Brussels.  He said voters in Bassetlaw felt they'd been taken for granted by the Labour Party and by London.  For nearly a century, Bassetlaw had been a safe Labour seat.

That changed at the 2019 UK election. Brendan gained an 18% swing, the largest in any seat in the country, and the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, gained an 80-seat majority. Brendan won Bassetlaw with 28,000 votes, compared Labour’s 14,000 votes, on a turnout of 63%.

On Thursday, Brendan got smashed.  Bassetlaw was one of the 244 seats the Conservatives lost as they went from 365 to 121 seats in the 650-seat UK Parliament.  The Labour candidate got 18,000 votes, Brendan 13,000 votes, Reform 10,000 votes, the Liberal Democrats 2,000 votes, and the Greens 2,000 votes on a turnout of 57%. I won't say that Reform 'cost' Brendan his seat - it was his party that cost him his seat.

My conversation with Brendan was one of the highlights of the ARC conference.  He was the sort of person you'd hope your local MP would be.  He grew up in public housing in the area, at the age of 22, was elected a local councillor, and before entering full-time politics as an MP in 2019 at the age of 39, had been a school teacher.  He was smart and energetic, and wholly committed to the electorate.  When you read his Wikipedia entry, you can see why I found him so interesting to talk to.  He campaigned for Brexit and said that removing Boris Johnson as Tory leader was 'one of the most ridiculous acts of self-harm I have witnessed in a long time'.

Clarke-Smith has received media attention for his views on food banks and public provision of free school meals for children from more economically deprived families.  He has described food banks as a 'political weapon', saying it is 'simply not true' that 'people can't afford to buy food on a regular basis' and 'If you keep saying to people that you're going to give stuff away, then you're going to have an increase I'm afraid'…  Campaigning on the issue of free school meals was led by the footballer Marcus Rashford.  Clarke-Smith said: 'We need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.  This means less celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty.'

Following an interim report on the connection between colonialism and properties now in the care of the National Trust, including links with historic slavery, Clarke-Smith was among the signatories of a letter to the Telegraph in November 2020 from the 'Common Sense Group' of Conservative Parliamentarians.  The letter accused the National Trust of being 'coloured by Cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the 'woke' agenda'…

In June 2021, Clarke-Smith opposed the England football team's intention to take the knee at the forthcoming European championship, saying: 'Fans understand [racism] perfectly well - they are just sick and tired of being preached and spoken down to.  They are there to watch a football match, not to be lectured on morality.'

If they'd had a few more MPs like Clarke-Smith, the Conservatives wouldn't have lost 244 seats and suffered the worst result in their history.

Not surprisingly, following the UK election there's been debate about reforming the UK's voting system.  Under the country's first past the post method, Labor with 34% of the vote won 411 seats, the Conservatives with 24% of the vote won 121 seats, the Liberal Democrats with 12% of the vote won 72 seats, and Reform with 14% of the vote won five seats.  The Liberal Democrats have long campaigned for some form of proportional representation. As part of the coalition agreement between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats following the 2010 UK election, in 2011 the UK had a referendum on changing the voting method.  The question was, 'At present, the UK uses the 'first past the post' system to elect MPs to the House of Commons.  Should the 'alternative vote' system be used instead?  42% of registered voters bothered to vote; the result was 68% for No and 32% for Yes.  The 'alternative vote' system is the name the British apply for what's known here in Australia as the 'preferential system', and Australia is one of the few countries that uses it. An argument against it is what Churchill is claimed to have said about it - candidates are chosen by 'the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates'. If alternative voting had been in place in the UK in 2024, the scale of Labor's victory would have been smaller, but the overall result would be no different.  The combined centre-left vote of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens was 52.6%.  For the centre-right of the Conservatives and Reform it was 38%.

Another outcome of the UK election has also gained a lot of attention.   The country's two-party political system is breaking up.  The combined share of the vote for Labour and the Conservatives is the lowest since the two-party system emerged in the 1920's.  Nearly half the electorate voted for what used to be called the 'minor parties'.  Except with more than ten per cent of the votes each, Reform and the Liberal Democrats are hardly 'minor'.  The UK political system is becoming European-like.  Australia is going the same way, but not as dramatically - yet.  At the last federal election the combined House of Representatives first preference vote for the Coalition and the ALP was 69%.  The Greens were on 12%, and the combined United Australia Party, One Nation, and Liberal Democrats vote was 11%.

Breaking the two-party system is good for democracy.  More political parties, and the more parties with a chance of being part of the government, provokes more debate and provides more choice to voters.  In 2024, Tory voters were told by the party they'd supported all their lives, 'We know we haven't been much good - but Labour will be even worse' and had a choice.  They could stay home and not vote, or they could vote for Reform.  A Dutton Coalition government with the smaller centre-right parties holding the balance of power in the Senate, would likely be a better government than a Coalition government with a Senate majority.

The two major parties in the UK and Australia naturally like the duopoly they belong to.  They'll complain that disturbing the duopoly is a recipe for instability.  And they're right.  'Stability' has given us Turnbull/Morrison/Albanese in Australia, and in the UK a Tory party that's just been decimated. 'Stability' has given Australia and the UK a decade of failed policies, notably 'net zero' supported by both the ALP and Coalition in Australia and Labour and the Conservatives in the UK.

The response from establishment parties to the threat of newcomers will be to try to regulate the newcomers out of existence by changing the electoral laws.  It's just like when big companies lobby for more government red tape.  Big companies can afford the extra costs in a way their smaller competitors can't.  The Labor Party are masters at manipulating the electoral system. In Victoria, limits on the size of donations to political parties imposed by Daniel Andrews crippled the attempts of new grassroots parties to run in the 2022 state election.  The Albanese government is threatening to do the same thing.  Donation limits and spending caps disproportionately hurt new parties and right-of-centre parties.  ABC journalists and the trade unions will always be able to campaign for the Labor Party.  Establishment political parties also favour compulsory voting, as voters are more likely to vote for parties that are well-known.

The British political scientist Matthew Goodwin has been writing for some time about the challenge faced by Tories from a Reform-like party. The Tories are unable or unwilling to respond to voter concerns about changes to the culture and identity of the UK.  As Goodwin pointed out, Tony Blair issued the same warning to Keir Starmer a few days ago.  This is what Blair said:

Here is where British politics has much in common with European politics.  Indeed, all over the western world, traditional political parties are suffering disruption.  Where the system embeds the two main parties, the disruption is internal.  Where the system embeds the two main parties, the disruption is internal.  Where the system allows new entrants to emerge, they are running riot everywhere.  Look at France or Italy.  Cultural issues, are at the heart of it.  Reform has pillaged the Tory vote in this election…

As more than one commentator on UK politics has said over the last few years, the Conservatives talked from the right but governed from the left.  Many Tory MPs had little in common with Brendan Clarke-Smith or his constituents.  Clarke-Smith strongly supported Boris Johnson, but Johnson, of the Tory's five prime ministers since 2010, did the most damage to the Conservative cause.  He was (and is) a Net Zero zealot, he avoided any pretence of undertaking economic reform, and (against his better judgment) he locked down England during COVID, producing all the social, educational, and financial consequences now so obvious. On top of that, he did not 'get Brexit done', and he didn't control Britain's borders.  (I said to Clarke-Smith that I was perplexed by the adoration of Johnson by so many Conservatives.  I said I understood the claim Johnson was a 'great communicator', but as someone watching from Australia, it seemed that most of the time what he was communicating about had nothing to do with either conservatism or liberalism.)

Like the Liberals in Australia, the Tories make much of the claim they're a 'broad church'.  Whether there's any benefit anymore to being a broad church - if ever there was - is a question the Tories need to confront.  If the Coalition loses the next federal election to the worst government since Whitlam, the Liberals might be pondering the same thing.  An Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution overturns every tenet of liberal democracy, yet the federal Liberal parliamentary party proudly accommodated passionate Yes supporters.  In the long term, it's unsustainable for a political party to house MPs who hold opposite opinions on something as fundamental as the Voice.  Political parties unsure of what they stand for, and desperate to please, make people like Scott Morrison and Rishi Sunak their leaders.  The most successful political party in Australia in the last twenty years has been the Greens.  They are not a broad church.

The Coalition's time in office in Australia after Tony Abbott looks a lot like the Tory's fourteen years of government.  The sole achievement of the Turnbull/Morrison administrations was AUKUS, and the one success of Conservative rule was Brexit in 2016 (which was largely an accident and has been so mismanaged that a majority of the UK population now regrets it).  The relentless progress of the 'woke' agenda in the UK under a Tory government and in Australia under a Coalition government is proof of the truth that 'politics is downstream of culture'.  In the UK and Australia, culture is impervious to politics.  This is particularly so when nominally centre-right governments refuse to engage in the battle for the nation's culture. Neither the Tories nor the the Coalition had any interest in defending freedom of speech, and both passed laws enabling future governments to censor the internet.

Other than the fact it wasn't Labour, there wasn't much to recommend the Conservative Party to the electorate.  The Conservatives can count themselves lucky they didn't suffer the 'extinction-like' event some predicted.  Maybe it would have been better if they had.

Recommended Reading

The day before the UK election, Robert Tombs, professor of history at Cambridge University, had this piece in Spiked Online about the Conservatives and their future.  He wrote, 'The Conservatives are facing their worst General Election defeat since 1906, when they won a mere 156 seats to the Liberals' 399.' We now know the Conservatives had their worst defeat since 1832.  Tombs explains a Tory recovery - if it comes - will take longer and be more difficult than a century ago.  In 1906 the Conservatives still won 43% of the vote and its Primrose League had two million members.  Today, the Conservative Party has about 170,000 members.