Don’t fall out of your seat, but UKIP is self-destructing. I know, this never happens, except on days ending with -y. It’s staggering just how much flak a seemingly stone-dead party can still absorb, if you even count UKIP as a real ‘party’ anymore. Their largest contribution to the political sphere since Brexit has been to plagiarise the Premier League logo. Oh, and shout about the Tories a bit, but everybody’s doing that.
UKIP-bashing aside, the political field in Britain is looking in need of a little…livening up. It’s thinned, and it was already pretty thin to begin with. In 2015, Labour and the Conservatives secured just over two-thirds of the votes in the UK, yet by the snap election last year, that figure was 82.4%. Perhaps the increase can be put down to simple voter variance, yet the size of these figures alone is extraordinary. You may have heard the phrase ‘two-party system’ used to describe British politics, and it’s very often appropriate – quite simply, the Conservatives and Labour dominate the landscape, forcing the other parties to the fringes.
Some of these parties have always been in the proverbial wilderness, like the Green Party (pun intended). Beyond Brighton Pavilion (co-leader Caroline Lucas’, as well as the party’s only, seat), they have never truly threatened to gain ground, their peak vote share trickling in at 3.8% in 2015 (disregarding the tactical voting that led to several Green candidates stepping aside in 2017). Others have been relegated to political oblivion in recent years, a fate that serves as possibly the only thing the Liberal Democrats and UKIP have in common. You likely remember the coalition years – the Lib Dems certainly do, and they’ve been reminded in both 2015 and 2017 with a net loss of 45 seats since 2010. Post-Brexit, UKIP lost 10.8% of the national vote share. These three parties, likely considered by many to form the second-tier in England, only constituted 11.8% of the vote there, dwarfed by the top two parties’ 87.5%.
Now, I’ve been throwing out more numbers than a lottery machine so far. You get the idea that at every general election our country is painted blue and red (bar a big block of yellow in Scotland, but even that is shifting to blue now). The resulting issue with this is evident in, well, both of these two political heavyweights and their approaches to Brexit, Labour’s lack of commitment to an approach and the Tories’ recurrent meltdown over implementing an approach. Since these parties are so vast, they represent the ideas of millions of people, only there is no way on Earth that so many people can agree on…anything. We can’t even get people to agree on how to pronounce ‘iPhone X’, let alone on whether to invest money in (to name a few areas) education, the NHS, the environment, defence, the justice system, infrastructure, social care or housing – and that is an ‘or’ situation. As a result, despite their commanding shares of the electorate, Labour and the Conservatives can never really have a true mandate for any set of policies.
Like I said earlier, such a struggle is visible with Brexit – what approach should the leadership of either party take? A large part of both parties doesn’t even want Brexit to happen, another part wants to remain in the single market with free movement (‘soft’ Brexit) whilst yet another part wants to detach completely (‘hard’ Brexit). A few voices even want us to just leave now without any trade deal at all (‘self-destructive’ Brexit). Should they support a second referendum on the final deal or not? A sub-part of the ‘soft’ part thinks so, whilst another doesn’t. Virtually none of the ‘hard’ part does, yet Farage, the arch-hardman himself, said it may be best, so maybe a fraction will begin to support a second vote. This account, of course, completely ignores those undecided, an added layer of complexity. It also totally over-simplifies the whole issue, and yet it’s still much too complicated. Makes you wonder why anybody goes anywhere near politics.
These multiple segments are irreconcilable, at least for the moment, much to the distaste of May, Corbyn, and their peers. Any action they try to take, any statement they try to make, any biscuit they try to bake, meets with friction. We’re always stuck in a rut, uncertain about where to move next, bickering about general attitudes, let alone minute details. Labour governments undo Conservative work, Conservative governments undo Labour work. Red paints over blue paints over red paints over blue…at the end of the day, it’s still the same wall we’re painting.
Forget about uniting the country for the future, maybe we should try uniting a single part of it first.