Brexiteer Nigel Farage seeks to reshape UK politics — again

Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage’s biggest success so far in UK politics came in 2016 when he helped lead the “Leave” campaign to victory in the Brexit referendum on whether or not the UK should remain in the EU.
A decade later, he has reemerged as a political force with grand ambitions to reshape the nation’s polity once again.
In elections in England on Thursday, Reform scored some big victories, with perhaps the stand-out success being a parliamentary by-election win in Runcorn and Helsby. However, the party also enjoyed big wins in several other key contests, including the first-ever Greater Lincolnshire mayoral election.
The ruling Labour Party suffered some significant setbacks, mainly at the hands of Reform. However, it held onto power in several important contests, including mayoral races in North Tyneside, the West of England, and Doncaster. Reform finished second in all three.
While Labour, which replaced the previous Conservative Party government after the general election in July last year, is suffering from a decline in popularity that many incumbent authorities around the world are facing, Thursday’s election results also dealt a big blow to the Conservatives, who have historically been the most successful UK party. Following the landslide loss to Labour in the 2024 general election, they were once again the biggest single losers on Thursday, in terms of number of seats lost.
Much of the electorate clearly has still not forgiven the Conservatives for the party’s internal troubles while it was in government between 2010 and 2024. Moreover, the last time that these English council seats were up for grabs was in 2021, when the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, was at the height of his popularity after the so-called “vaccine bounce” during the pandemic.
There is no question, therefore, that Reform has the political “wind in its sails,” so to speak. The ambition of Farage, an ally of US President Donald Trump, is big: victory at the next general election, which will probably be in 2028 or 2029.
Yet, while such a possibility cannot be dismissed, there is an even bigger, macro story taking place within the increasingly volatile world of UK politics, and it means that any predictions about what might happen almost half a decade hence are held hugely hostage to fortune.
For more than a century, British politics has tended to be dominated by the two main parties: Labour and Conservatives. Between 1945 and 1970, they collectively averaged in excess of 90 percent of the vote, and the seats won, in the eight UK general elections that took place during that period.
Since then, this two-party system has slowly but surely decayed. Since 1974, their collective average share of the vote at general elections dropped significantly, although there were some national ballots during that time, most recently in 2019, in which the so-called “two-party vote” experienced a resurgence.
However, several parties now challenge this long-standing two-party system, and not only relative newcomers Reform UK. Others include longer-established parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, both of whom picked up council seats in England on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party has governed the devolved Holyrood legislature in Edinburgh since 2007 and is currently favorite to win again at next year’s Scottish Parliament election. In Wales, the nationalist Plaid Cymru has become a very significant political force, too. 

The ruling Labour Party suffered some significant setbacks.

Andrew Hammond

The old two-party system has been on the decline for some time, and there are signs it might be nearing a pivotal point. To understand this fully requires some historical background to contextualize the current state of the UK political landscape.
Labour’s massive victory at the 2024 general election was the second consecutive general election landslide result, but the result went in the opposite direction to the huge Conservative win in 2019. Historically, such a large swing is a rare phenomenon, which potentially highlights a high degree of political disequilibrium.
The last time a similar pair of back-to-back results happened was more than a century ago: a Conservative win in 1900 followed by a big Liberal landslide in 1906. Back then, the huge Liberal victory helped bring about the political realignment that led to the modern British electoral system. Indeed, 1906 was the last time the Liberals won an absolute majority in the House of Commons, and the last general election at which neither Labour nor the Conservatives won the popular vote.
Almost 120 years later, the signs of deep-rooted disequilibrium in the UK’s political system include the fact that the collective share of the vote for Labour and the Conservatives is currently at one of the lowest levels in living memory. We might therefore be witnessing the entrenchment of a multiparty system of the kind seen in numerous continental European countries, rather than any new form of a two-party system.
This change is creating a more unpredictable and uncertain political landscape. Such fragmentation will make it harder for any single party to secure a majority government in a UK general election. This despite the fact that the so-called “first past the post” voting system in Britain tends to provide the leading party with a significantly larger number of seats in the House of Commons than would be the case under an electoral system based on proportional representation.
Certainly, coalitions and power-sharing agreements have long been a feature of local government in the UK, and in devolved parliaments and assemblies outside Westminster. However, this same pattern might now become a more regular feature at the heart of the UK government itself in London, as we saw in the 2010 and 2017 general elections, at which no one party won an absolute majority. The last time that had happened before then was in 1974.
Taking all of this together, parties such as Reform UK, the Lib Dems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP might increasingly be forging a new multiparty UK political system, potentially akin to those we can see in numerous continental European countries.
Thursday’s results are just the latest sign that Britain’s long standing two-party system might be giving way to a potentially much more unpredictable political landscape.

• Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.