Britain: Is two-party politics on the way back?
by Colin Wilson
At the local elections in May, two-party politics in Britain looked like it was on the way out. With Reform on the right and the Greens on the left making gains, it seemed we had left behind the rivalry between Tories and Labour which had dominated British political life for a hundred years. The party that had benefitted most since the 2024 General Election from this new world of multi-party politics was Reform. For over a year, British socialists had been coming to terms with the possibility of a Reform government being elected in 2029 with Nigel Farage as Prime Minister. Yet, from a high point around a year ago, Reform’s poll lead has declined and support for the party among its media backers has collapsed. In the last few months, two-party politics has begun at least attempting a comeback.
Getting back to the old status quo will take some doing. Ten years ago, Labour and the Tories between them controlled most local councils, 86 out of 114. After the May elections, they controlled under a third of the total. The Tories, who ran 38 councils in 2016, were left in charge of only nine. In May Reform gained control of 14 councils, up from zero. The Greens won 5 councils, also up from zero. That success followed the Greens’ February by-election victory in Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, where their vote was three times that in the General Election and they beat Reform to take the seat from Labour.
These signs of the decay of the two-party system go back to the 2024 General Election and before. Labour then lost six seats to community independents, reflecting anger over Palestine in areas with large Muslim populations, as well as more general discontent with declining public services. With the “first past the post” electoral system making it hard for smaller parties to win seats, Reform gained only 5 MPs, but came second in some 60 seats in the north of England, while the Greens won in 4 constituencies but came second in northern city centres and some 20 London seats. In the long term, the points made in Peter Mair’s book Ruling the Void from 2013 still apply – party memberships have declined, their links to local communities have decayed and differences in their political ideas have become blurred. Add to that the long-term effects of austerity policies imposed since 2010 and it’s no surprise that voters reject the mainstream.
The following two years did little to restore Tory and Labour fortunes. The Tories’ endless psychodramas – May’s over Brexit, Johnson’s over Covid, Truss trashing the economy and Sunak entirely out of his depth – had left them with their all-time lowest vote share. Meanwhile Keir Starmer, elected to deliver change, had shown himself to be a remarkably incompetent politician, a robotic middle manager constantly giving ground to the far right and with no apparent politics of his own. The momentum behind Reform increased – last autumn their opinion poll ratings were consistently over 30%, with Labour and the Tories around 20%. Meanwhile the Greens, after the election of left-wing leader Zack Polanski, were also hitting 20% in some polls early this year and looking to some like a possible left alternative to Labour.
The other factor increasing support for Reform has been the rise of racism against migrants. The summers of both 2024 and 2025 saw thousands of people take part in racist riots backed by far-right and fascist parties. In September 2025 the Unite the Kingdom rally, backed by far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, drew 100,000 people to London. The right wing press published endless articles attacking desperate people risking their lives to cross the English Channel in small boats. Farage was careful to distance himself from actual fascists – he claimed that Robinson was banned from joining Reform – while presenting a more respectable version of anti-migrant racism.
This strategy proved successful for Farage, a highly skilled politician who had carried Brexit from an eccentric fringe belief to victory in the 2016 referendum. Farage’s self-portrayal as an outsider to the elite is even taken seriously, even though he’s a former pupil at £10,000-per-term Dulwich College, and makes £2 million a year on top of his MP’s pay, for example by presenting a show on right-wing GB News.
Despite this, Reform has now run into several serious problems. Journalists have discovered multiple issues with the party’s finances. Crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne gave Farage £5 million early in 2024, months before he was elected as an MP. Farage claims that this was a personal gift, unconnected to his role as an MP and that he therefore did not need to declare it to the parliamentary authorities – an investigation is in progress. Further undeclared donations have been revealed from convicted fraudster and leading Reform activist “posh George” Cottrell and from Cottrell’s mother. Police are investigating donations to Reform by a company controlled by Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader.
Trying to divert attention from these issues, Farage resigned as MP for Clacton so as to stand in the resulting by-election. He presumably hoped that his victory could be presented as an endorsement from voters against the “witch hunt” he claimed he faced over Reform’s finances. This manoeuvre, however, has turned into a farce – other parties are boycotting the election, so that Farage’s most credible challenger is the satirical candidate Count Binface. Farage will probably win, but the episode has done nothing for his credibility.
The attitude to all this of the right-wing press, including long-standing Reform supporters, has been unexpected. Some of the recent investigative journalism has been carried out by papers which have long opposed Reform, such as the centrist Guardian and the neoliberal Financial Times. But Farage has also come under attack from Gabriel Pogrund at the Murdoch-owned Times. The Telegraph, normally a keen supporter of the far right, has run opinion pieces headlined "Farage's by-election is a catastrophe for right-wing Britain", "Never mind Clacton, Reform has a woman problem" and "Count Binface is the best of British". In the Daily Mail, Dan Hodges refers to Reform’s “tsunami of sleaze claims” and even suggests that “the trail could lead back to the Kremlin”. Peter Hitchens, also in the Mail, wrote on 11 July a column headlined “Petulant, snarling Nigel Farage, the Thatcher tribute act with nothing much to offer”.
It would seem that Farage’s supporters are deserting him. This is not because they have changed their political ideas. They still favour attacks on migrants and trans people, are determined to do as little as possible about the climate emergency, and say so openly in the pages of the Mail, Telegraph and Spectator. What has changed is that they don’t see Farage and Reform as the key vehicles for those politics as they did a year ago.
For one thing, the financial scandals have dented Farage’s “man of the people” pose. There are other issues. Reform support reached around 30 percent in the polls, but then it stuck there. Farage as an individual is unpopular, liked by 32% of people according to YouGov but disliked by 52%. Reform’s opponents have shown themselves capable, in both the Denton and Gorton and the Makerfield by-elections, of voting strategically to keep them out. And in the councils it now controls, Reform has done little beyond symbolic actions involving bans on Pride flags and LGBT library books – nothing which it could even claim would improve its supporters’ lives.
Meanwhile, alternative vehicles for right-wing politics are emerging. Restore Britain, a split from Reform, is even further to the right, with policies including mass deportations, reinstating the death penalty, banning the burqa and niqab and also halal and kosher slaughter. Restore came third in Makerfield with 7% of the vote, and fourth in first-preference votes in the Greater Manchester mayoral election on 30 July, with 9% of votes cast. In particular, Restore undermines Farage’s strategy of presenting himself as respectably right-wing while hinting at more extreme politics – a hard core of racist voters clearly exists, and why vote for Reform giving you the wink when Restore is proudly and openly racist?
A much more significant political vehicle for far-right ideas is the Tory party under Kemi Badenoch. It’s remarkable now to think that same-sex marriage and net zero were both Tory government initiatives. Writing in the Telegraph on 9 July, just as Farage’s Clacton manoeuvre was getting into difficulties, Badenoch outlined what the party now stands for: Tory candidates must reject the European Convention on Human Rights as well as net zero (in the middle of the summer’s third heatwave, no less) and must support cutting welfare to fund the military. But, she stressed, as well as accepting these policy positions, they must be competent, and pass strict candidate vetting procedures.
Badenoch is, in effect, saying that she has a political agenda only a little short of that of Farage and Reform. For example Reform is pledged to repeal the Equality Act, which guarantees formal legal equality for people whatever their gender, race, sexuality or disability, while the Tories are committed to abolishing the duty of public sector bodies to promote equality, part of that act. In Badenoch’s view, however, tactical voting makes Reform unelectable, Farage’s by-election stunt shows they are not serious politicians, and too many Reform members and candidates are liabilities. Their Denton and Gorton candidate Robert Kenyon, for example, turned out to have made offensive and sexist comments about TV presenter Carol Vorderman. A newly-elected Reform councillor explained to a meeting of Kirklees Council this June that she didn’t understand what standing orders were or what an amendment is. Badenoch’s offer is that her policies are slightly less right-wing than those of Reform – but they will actually be delivered, by the experienced and capable cadres of the most successful ruling class party in world history. As Reform stumbles – now polling below Labour and typically only a few points above the Tories – she can hope the claim will gain in credibility.
The final part of the picture is that the Greens’ sudden polling rise to over 20% has also undergone a sharp decline. Factors here include repeated attacks on Polanski in the right-wing media, occasional mistakes by Polanski and the fact that newly Green-led councils have introduced small reforms but made no major challenge to the deprivation affecting many people in inner London. The most important factor, however, is of course the replacement of Starmer with Andy Burnham. Burnham is a more talented politician and a more personable individual than Starmer, and his initial policy announcements – cuts in bus fares and in VAT on electricity – have won him some support. But more substantial policies remain unchanged – Burnham has said Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza but arms exports to Israel continue. In his first speech as Prime Minister, he gave a commitment to an increase of £25 billion in arms spending by 2035. Burnham may hope that some small shifts to the left plus an amenable personality will get him through, but they may well not.
Britain remains politically volatile. An entrenched lead for Reform a year ago has collapsed, though Farage certainly won’t disappear from British politics any time soon. Labour has been rescued, at least for now, by first rumours and now the reality of Burnham’s leadership. The Tories are manoeuvring to steal Reform’s clothes. The Greens, polling at a comparable level with Tories, Labour and Reform in March, are now at around half that level. There’s no avoiding the fact that millions of people – sometimes out of desperation at a never-ending cost of living crisis – have been persuaded to blame migrants for their problems. But if 100,000 people came to Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London last September, 150,000 attended London Trans+ Pride on 25 July, and many hundreds of thousands have marched for Palestine. The two-party system has started trying to regain control, but still has a long way to go before it succeeds.