From Conservative to Labour, SNP to Reform UK — How Britain’s Party System Produces Governments Nobody Entirely Voted For
The British Party System: Two Parties in Theory, Several in Practice, and One Permanent Crisis of Identity
British politics is officially a two-party system. The Conservative Party and the Labour Party have between them formed every government since 1922. They have alternated in power with the regularity of a particularly grim relay race. They have both been described, at various points in the same calendar year, as unelectable. One of them is usually right.
The reality is more complicated. The UK has five parties with significant Westminster representation, fourteen parties with elected members in devolved legislatures, and a number of single-issue and regional parties whose influence on national politics ranges from “substantial” (the SNP during 2010-2024) to “disproportionate to their seat count” (the DUP during 2017-2019) to “a persistent reminder that approximately four million people think the party system has failed them” (Reform UK, 2024).
The Conservative Party: An Organisation Historically Better at Winning Power Than Deciding What to Do With It
The Conservative Party is the oldest continuously operating political party in the world, founded in the 1830s from the remnants of the Tory party, and has spent the subsequent two centuries in the productive tension between its instinct to conserve and its periodic impulse to revolutionise. Disraeli invented One Nation conservatism. Thatcher dismantled the post-war settlement with the zeal of a person who had never been comfortable with settlements. Cameron modernised — briefly. May attempted stoic competence in circumstances that defeated stoic competence. Johnson did something else entirely.
The Conservatives lost the 2024 election with 121 seats — their worst result since 1906 — on the strength of a record that included, but was not limited to: three prime ministers in six weeks, Liz Truss’s economic policy causing a sterling crisis, multiple ethics scandals, Partygate, the Rwanda policy being ruled unlawful three times, and an accumulated impression among significant sections of the electorate that the party had run out of ideas and was recycling them in diminishing order of quality.
Under Kemi Badenoch, the party is conducting what political scientists call a “period of reflection” and what the membership calls “working out what we actually believe.” The Conservative Party website is, at time of writing, optimistic.
The Labour Party: An Organisation That Periodically Remembers It Wants to Win Elections
The Labour Party was founded in 1900 from the trade union movement and the ethical socialist tradition, committed to representing working people in Parliament. It has spent much of its subsequent history arguing about what “representing working people” means, whether it is compatible with winning elections, and whether winning elections is itself a form of selling out.
The Blair years (1997-2007) resolved this tension by deciding that Labour would represent working people by winning power on a programme that centred the aspirations of non-working people who were thinking of switching from Conservative. This produced three election victories, the minimum wage, the Human Rights Act, and the Iraq War, and was described as a Faustian bargain by the left immediately, and also later by Tony Blair when he was trying to sell the book.
Corbynism — Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from 2015 to 2020 — was an attempt to reclaim the party’s socialist traditions and produced the largest Labour membership in history, the two worst general election results since 1935, and a period of internal warfare sufficiently intense that a leaked internal report revealed factions actively working against their own party’s electoral prospects. This was considered shocking by some people and unsurprising by everyone else.
Starmerism won the 2024 election with the lowest vote share for a majority government in modern history, primarily by not being the Conservative Party — a mandate that is both historically significant and somewhat difficult to build a governing programme around.
The Liberal Democrats: A Party Whose Every Recovery Contains the Seeds of Its Next Decline
The Liberal Democrats, formed from the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats in 1988, occupy the awkward centre ground of British politics with the cheerful resilience of a party that has been written off approximately once per decade and keeps accumulating seats anyway.
The 2010-2015 coalition with the Conservatives — entered with every intention of moderating Conservative policy — produced the tuition fees reversal (Lib Dem manifesto commitment: abolish tuition fees; Lib Dem governmental outcome: treble tuition fees), a collapse from 57 seats to 8, and a period of sustained public anger that the party is still explaining to voters who were students in 2010 and are now in their thirties. The 2024 election returned 72 Lib Dem MPs — a record under their current name — proving that the British electorate’s memory for coalition betrayals is longer than expected and shorter than the Lib Dems feared.
The SNP, Reform UK, and the Parties Doing Something Interesting at the Edges
The Scottish National Party dominated Scottish politics from 2007 to 2024, governing Holyrood and sending large contingents to Westminster. The independence referendum of 2014 returned a 55% No vote. The 2024 Westminster election returned the SNP to 9 seats — down from 48 — following governance controversies, the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, a police investigation, and the accumulated costs of being in government for seventeen years, which has a tendency to reveal that governing is harder than campaigning about governing.
Reform UK — Nigel Farage’s latest electoral vehicle — won 14% of the vote and 5 seats in 2024, demonstrating with mathematical precision the brutal efficiency with which First Past the Post converts votes into seats for parties without geographic concentration. Four million votes. Five seats. The Reform UK website describes this as an injustice. Electoral reformers note that this particular injustice has been applied to many parties for many decades and suggest this may be a propitious moment for a broader conversation.
The party system, like the constitution it operates within, functions through a combination of institutional inertia, managed expectations, and the relative absence of anything immediately better. It is not an inspiring observation. It is, however, an accurate one.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The UK’s party system is dominated by the Conservative and Labour parties, which have alternated in government since 1922. The Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, and various regional and minor parties hold significant representation in Westminster and devolved legislatures. The 2024 general election returned Labour with 412 seats on 34% of the vote, the Conservatives with 121 seats on 24%, the Liberal Democrats with 72 seats on 12%, and Reform UK with 5 seats on 14%. Party funding is regulated by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Duverger’s Law — which predicts that plurality voting systems tend toward two-party competition — applies imperfectly to the UK, where strong regional parties have complicated the national picture.
Paige Shiver has established herself as a cornerstone of modern British satire through her work at Prat.UK, where she serves as a lead political commentator and cultural critic. With over a decade of experience in investigative journalism and comedy writing, Shiver specializes in deconstructing the absurdities of Westminster and the nuances of the UK’s social landscape.
Her expertise is rooted in a deep understanding of British policy, allowing her to deliver biting critiques that are as factually grounded as they are humorous. Shiver’s commitment to the high art of satire and UK Literature is evidenced by her frequent appearances on BBC Radio 4 and her published anthologies on the decline of political decorum. At Prat.UK, her transparency and rigorous research ensure that even her most satirical takes provide valuable, trustworthy insights into the national conversation.
Paige Shiver @ PaigeShiver.com
London is the only city where the phrase “cheers” can mean thank you, goodbye, good luck, or a passive-aggressive dismissal, depending entirely on the tone.
My mate in journalism. Says better than he’s written so he quit. Sorry mate.
Earned detail. Observation.