Back to the future? British politics in 2026

In the immediate aftermath of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, Fraser Nelson, then-editor of the influential right-wing British magazine The Spectator, published a piece arguing that Brexit had saved the U.K. from the populist wave sweeping over much of the West. Back then, a case could be made that Brexit had acted as a pressure valve, allowing the British public to vent its frustration without impacting the fundamental nature of British politics. As Nelson put it: “We have a system that works: hence Brexit. America’s politics is broken: hence Trump.”

Almost a decade on, that assessment appears significantly less prescient than it did at the time (which perhaps explains why the article can no longer be found on the Spectator’s website).¹

The notion of the U.K. as a bulwark against populism now seems rather less convincing. Support for the country’s traditional parties of government has plunged, while populist parties on both the left and right have gained ground. According to Ipsos, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval ratings after 14 months are the lowest of any prime minister in the past 50 years. Over the same period, support for his Labour Party dropped by nearly 14 points, the second-largest decline for a governing party in postwar political history.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK topped the polls for over a year, while the Green Party has also surged. Since Zack Polanski’s election as leader last September, Green Party membership has soared above 180,000—overtaking first the Liberal Democrats and then the Conservatives—and the party now regularly polls around 15%, buoyed by Polanski’s populist left-wing agenda. The Conservative Party, seemingly determined to “out-Reform” Farage (with several of its senior figures openly embracing ethno-nationalist rhetoric), has failed to benefit from Labour’s collapse in support—despite some recent signs of recovery in their polling.

As I write, the parties are gearing up for a by-election in the seat of Gorton and Denton. By-elections are, of course, different than general elections: turnout tends to be low, and voters often see them as an opportunity to give incumbents a bloody nose. All of this underscores the volatility and fragmentation of U.K. politics: the governing Labour Party fears losing a seat it carried with over 50% of the vote less than two years ago, in what looks set to be a four-way battle.

In what follows, I attempt to explain this remarkable situation—one in which a system designed to ensure the triumph of a stable two-party duopoly is fragmenting in highly unpredictable ways. The key argument is that the roots of the current political moment long predate recent crises over Brexit or Conservative governmental instability. What we are witnessing is the culmination of decades of growing frustration and dissatisfaction.

A crisis long in the making

Public frustration with U.K. politics dates to the start of this century. As early as the general election of 2001, Labour under then-Prime Minister Tony Blair secured some 3 million fewer votes than he had four years previously. The governing Labour Party gained only about 40% of the vote in an election where the turnout was down almost 12% compared to the 1997 general election.

Four years later, the party held on to only two out of three of its voters and was reelected with the support of just over a third of the electorate—the lowest proportion recorded by a winning party until Starmer’s win in 2024. On both occasions, however, the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system worked to disguise the shifts underway. Under this system, the candidate with the most votes in a constituency gets the seat, while their competitors get nothing. Labour lost just six seats in 2001 and was rewarded in 2005 with about 55% of the seats in the House of Commons and a 64-seat majority.

Popular dissatisfaction with politics, already simmering, was heightened by the war in Iraq. The war not only provoked opposition to Blair—“Tony B. Liar” was a slogan seen on many a placard—but also fostered a broader sense that experts could get it terribly wrong. Public trust suffered further in 2008 with the global financial crisis, and again in 2009 when the parliamentary expenses scandal came to light, leading to prison sentences and the repayment of millions of pounds by 250 members of parliament (MPs).

The 2008 global financial crisis, in particular, would have lasting repercussions for the U.K.’s economy and politics for at least the next decade, if not longer. Its impact was severe—the economy shrank by a staggering 6% in 2008-09. It was also persistent: by 2018, GDP was roughly 16% smaller than it would have been had the U.K. followed its pre-2008 trend. The hardest hit were those regions that were already less prosperous, and this vulnerability was exacerbated by the austerity policies of the 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which disproportionately harmed the most disadvantaged.

By the time of the 2015 election, there was growing public discontent, and voters largely viewed Labour and the Conservatives as offering the same mix of socially and economically liberal policies that had failed to generate growth and disproportionately affected the less well-off. The UK Independence Party (UKIP)—the forerunner of Reform UK—secured nearly 4 million votes (almost 13% of all votes cast). Once again, the workings of the U.K.’s highly majoritarian electoral system effectively muzzled discontent. The UKIP secured only one seat, but the warning signs were there ahead of the referendum on the U.K.’s European Union (EU) membership the following year.

Brexit has often been portrayed as the revenge of the “left behind,” but this is misleading. A mere 21% of Leave voters had routine or semi-routine jobs. The middle class, in fact, comprised 59% of Leave voters. That being said, there was a clear link between deprivation and a voter’s likelihood to vote Leave. As I wrote for Foreign Affairs in July 2016, Boston in Lincolnshire provided the Leave campaign’s biggest victory, with nearly 76% of voters backing Brexit. In 2016, the town’s median household income was under 17,000 pounds (just over $23,000 today), well below the median of 27,000 pounds (around $40,000) across the 20 local authorities with the strongest support for EU membership.

Like the Trump campaign in the United States later that year, the architects of Brexit appealed to groups who viscerally felt that the system was rigged against them: people who were out of work or were in insecure jobs paying insufficient salaries, often based on short-term “zero-hours” contracts; people who felt ignored, insulted, and condescended to by political elites.

The outcome, dubbed the “revenge of the places that don’t matter,” saw people who don’t usually bother to vote come out in droves. In Gateshead, a post-industrial town in the northeast, Leave won 57% of the vote on a 70.6% turnout (compared with just under 59% in the 2015 general election). In neighboring Hartlepool, nearly 70% backed Leave as turnout climbed to 65.5% (up from 56.5% the previous year). Nearly 3 million more voters—close to 10% of the electorate—cast ballots on June 23, 2016, compared with the general election in May 2015.

For a while following that fateful vote, it appeared that U.K. politicians had taken note. Political discourse shifted strikingly, with even the Conservative Party seemingly embracing the need to address the kinds of inequalities that had just revealed themselves so brutally.

In July 2016, Prime Minister Theresa May stood outside Downing Street and spoke of the “burning injustices” in British society and her desire to focus her government’s attention on those “just managing.” Arguably, no governing party in recent times has produced a manifesto as statist and interventionist as the Conservatives in 2017. Conservatives, it said, “do not believe in untrammeled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.”

The reading of the Brexit vote as a demand for domestic reform survived May’s tenure. During an election campaign stop in 2019, Boris Johnson told a crowd in the north of England that they’d voted to leave the EU “to force politicians in Westminster to listen to you, not just London and the southeast.” The day after he won the 2019 general election, he summoned the U.K.’s senior civil servants and declared that the government would prioritize policies that improve the lives of working-class voters in northern England who had supported Brexit and voted for the Tories.

At this moment, it was possible to be lulled into believing Fraser Nelson’s argument that Brexit had sucked the populist poison from British politics. The elections of 2017 and 2019 saw the two traditional governing parties reassert their dominance as the UKIP imploded and its successor, the Brexit Party, which rebranded as Reform UK in 2021, shed voters to Johnson’s Conservatives. Politicians seemed to have acknowledged the need to do things differently.

Yet the moment did not last. The increase in the combined Conservative-Labour vote share had two main causes. One was Brexit; the other was the stark ideological divide between the Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. By the 2024 election, however, that share was the lowest it had been for over a century.

A key reason was the two parties’ failure to deliver. Time after time, the British public registered its dissatisfaction with the status quo. This was evident in the Brexit referendum, in Labour’s strong showing under Corbyn in 2017, in Johnson’s 2019 victory, and in Labour’s majority in 2024, won on a manifesto simply titled “Change.”

Yet for all the fine words, those “burning injustices” that May denounced were not addressed. Indeed, in the years following the referendum, economic outcomes worsened, particularly for the poorest, as first the COVID-19 pandemic and then the cost-of-living crisis took their toll. Change did not materialize.

Several factors contributed to this. Successive British governments were, in part, profoundly distracted—first by managing the fallout of Britain leaving the European Union, then by the pandemic. There was also an element of hubris: history suggested that the two parties would retain their dominance over the political landscape, even when they failed to deliver. History, however, is an imperfect guide to the future.

A fragile return to the center

To casual observers, the 2024 election of a moderate, center-left Labour government with a parliamentary majority of over 160 looked like a dramatic reassertion of the political center. Yet Keir Starmer’s victory was both narrower and more fragile than the majority he secured might suggest. Robert Ford has written of Labour’s electoral “Jenga” tower, built on under 34% of the vote. Labour lost vote share in constituencies it had held, while gaining in areas where it needed to overtake the Conservatives. As a report by Compass found, many of Labour’s victories were razor-thin, with 131 seats decided by fewer than 5,000 votes, including 103 where the party won by less than 5% of the vote. In the run-up to the election, a staggering 48% of Labour voters said they were voting Labour primarily to “get the Tories out.”

Subsequently, not only has Labour hemorrhaged support, but the Conservatives, too, have lost ground since the election. Labour has posted its lowest ever vote share, after the second-largest fall in support recorded for a British government. The Tories, for their part, have failed to profit. According to a September 2025 YouGov MRP, a statistical model that uses national polling and demographic data to forecast election results, the Tories would drop to a projected 45 seats in the next election.

This is helping to not only turbocharge political fragmentation but also drive support for populist alternatives. The first MRP of 2026 conducted by More in Common projected Reform UK winning 381 seats, with a majority of 112, more than all other parties combined. Labour is projected to fall to just 85 seats (a 326-seat loss from the last election) while the Conservatives come in at 70 (a loss of 51). Meanwhile, the Greens were projected to more than double their seat count from four to nine.

How have we arrived at this situation? Why have things soured for Starmer so quickly? Part of the explanation lies in his own failings and those of his government. There is no sense of overall direction or political purpose. Labour seems to have come to power believing that, simply by replacing the Conservatives, things would automatically get better. That impression was reinforced by a long interview the prime minister gave to the New Statesman, in which he suggested there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the country.

Labour has also made a number of mistakes. There was the early controversy over so-called “freebiegate,” as Starmer and his ministers were accused of failing to declare gifts and accepting over 20,000 pounds (about $27,000) worth of free tickets to see Taylor Swift. More substantively, the government has been forced into humiliating retreat on policies such as an inheritance tax on agricultural land, winter fuel payments to elderly people, and reforms to the welfare system. As 2025 drew to a close, perhaps the most humiliating episode came when the chancellor, who had been preparing the electorate for a manifesto-breaking increase in income tax, scrapped the plan amid fears it would alienate both voters and the government’s own MPs.

Labour has not had the most inspiring start, then. By the end of 2025, a YouGov poll found, a mere 18% of Britons had a favorable opinion of Starmer, while 72% were unfavorable. His net favorability score (-54) is comparable to that of Boris Johnson when he stepped down as prime minister (-53) and Jeremy Corbyn’s lowest rating as Labour leader (-55).

These figures cannot be simply attributed to the various instances of economic and political mismanagement that have occurred on the prime minister’s watch. Rather, Starmer is the victim of a long-term erosion of faith in mainstream politics, rooted in almost 20 years of poor economic performance and rising public disillusionment.

This combination has sucked support away from the traditional governing duopoly. The 2024 election saw the Conservatives and Labour attract their lowest combined vote share in the era of universal suffrage: fewer than three in five of all votes cast. The following May saw unprecedented fragmentation in local elections. The average vote share of Labour and the Tories was a mere 36.8%—the first time it had ever dropped below 50% and the lowest in over a century.

Public disillusionment is translating into growing support for populist parties, with both Reform UK and the Greens gaining popularity since 2024. Several structural reasons help explain this: widespread frustration with the traditional governing parties, a loss of trust in politics, and the political realignment sparked by the Brexit referendum, which has shifted the central divide in British politics from class to the contrast between social conservatives and social liberals.

Both Reform UK and the Greens are playing to their strengths in this regard. Reform went into the 2024 election with an “anti-woke,” anti-immigration, anti-net-zero policy platform. On immigration policy, the two parties are also playing to this “values” divide, albeit in different directions. Reform UK announced in August 2025 that it was prepared to deport 600,000 people who illegally enter into or reside in the U.K. For his part, Polanski, leader of the Greens, has criticized the end of freedom of movement with the European Union. YouGov polling conducted in early January of this year found that 2% of 2024 Green voters thought “tackling immigration” should be the government’s highest priority in 2026—compared to 56% of Reform voters.

On economics, both Reform and the Greens have attempted to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Both parties have supported calls for the Bank of England to end interest payments on reserves held by commercial lenders (though Reform is also calling on the bank to back the development of cryptocurrency). Polanski supported Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s demand that the U.K. stop being “in hock” to bond markets, while his party has also proposed a wealth tax of 1% on people with assets over 10 million pounds and 2% on assets above 1 billion pounds.

Yet one consequence of electoral success has been that both parties have also attempted to adjust some of their more eye-catching policies to broaden their electoral coalitions and appeal to a wider audience. It took only days for Reform to retreat from its promise to deport child migrants. Reform has also disavowed a promise made in its manifesto in 2024 to cut taxes by 90 billion pounds, blaming sluggish growth and high debt (both of which predated the election). Equally, while the Green Party conference in October 2025 voted for the abolition of private landlords (19% of all households in England live in privately rented properties), the party has subsequently “clarified” that this means not abolishing but regulating them more in order to shrink the private housing sector.

For Reform UK, there remains a tension between the small-state economic agenda it promised in 2024, including significant tax cuts and measures to make hiring and firing easier, and the need to woo traditional blue-collar Labour voters. Since the general election, the party has unveiled several more left-wing economic policies, including nationalizing a steel plant that was in trouble.

Both parties, therefore, face the challenge of trying to professionalize in order to increase their electoral bases. Both have, or are in the process of creating, their own think tanks to formulate policies—the Centre for a Better Britain already performs this function for Reform, while Verdant is due to be launched next year to provide progressive policy ideas and defend the Green Party from criticism that its economic policies are naïve.

For Reform, a further challenge is the potential to be judged on its record in government. At last year’s local elections, the party outright won majorities in 10 local authorities and attempted to govern as a minority administration in other places. It promised to carry out a DOGE-style crackdown on wasteful expenditure. Four of the five Reform-led local authorities have proposed 5% council tax rises (the maximum allowed amount) because of their failure to cut costs.

And finally, there is the threat of scandal. The Guardian has now recorded 34 allegations against Nigel Farage for racist comments made at school. More recently, a senior Reform candidate, Chris Parry, not only opined that people “from other religions should eat bacon for a month to prove their Christian sincerity and credentials,” but, back in February 2025, tweeted that Foreign Secretary David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean.”

To the extent that these parties mainly appeal to people who are fed up with traditional politics, it is not necessarily the case that potential voters will be strongly swayed by stories of problems in local government. That being said, Farage’s attempts to distance his party from the right-wing agitator Tommy Robinson speak to his fear of Reform being seen as extreme or racist.

Clearly, much can happen before the next election, which is unlikely to take place until 2029. We will need to see how well these challenger parties perform under the spotlight of greater scrutiny and in their efforts to attract more mainstream voters. This is not to downplay the challenge they pose, but simply to note that the step from “fringe” to “mainstream” is a big one.

Similarly, if growth improves, cost-of-living pressures ease, public services strengthen, and immigration numbers fall as expected, the Labour Party might manage to claw back some of the voters it has lost since 2024.

As for the Conservatives, having fallen to fourth place in May 2025—the government’s unpopularity having failed to boost support for the main opposition party—they are now showing some signs of recovery, albeit from an appallingly low base. Much will hinge on whether the Tories can capitalize on the center-right space that Reform has left in its wake, as John Major suggested in a speech last year.

A system under strain

There is still much at stake. The simmering discontent that has marked British politics for years is now threatening to boil over. Labour’s manifesto promised “change,” but during the first year and a half of this government—as throughout the period since 2016—there seems to be a persistent gulf between what politicians promise and what they deliver. As of January 2026, nearly three-quarters of voters think “things are getting worse” while only 8% think they are getting better. Polling by Ipsos in April 2025 showed economic optimism is at its lowest level since 1978, the year it started asking voters about how they expected the economy to change.

None of which is to say that Britain has become ungovernable, as some prominent commentators have argued. Rather, it points to a failure of the two traditional parties of government, over many years, to deal with chronic, structural problems in the country’s political economy. Fully explaining this would require its own essay. Suffice to say here that chronic short-termism, partly a result of our increasingly dysfunctional and adversarial two-party system, has significantly contributed to our inability to generate growth, as has the British state’s excessive centralization.

Starmer was wrong, therefore, to assert that the country is not beset by fundamental problems. Perhaps worse still, his government, sitting atop a huge majority, has to date failed to take the kinds of steps that would begin to address some of these structural weaknesses.

The collapse of mainstream party support has been a long time coming. Dissatisfaction with a political duopoly that is seen as failing to deliver has been fostered by political scandal, weakening ties of loyalty to political parties, and economic underperformance. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but we are, it would seem, in for a tumultuous and unpredictable time. The pressure, contra Fraser, is still building.