Duopoly- Are we becoming a 2 party state?

The recent General Election showed Labour as a successful campaigning force. Even in my local constituency, a Conservative stronghold, Labour made significant gains. The country is reverting to the good old days, when it was a true socialist, working class driven Labour Party, against a true capitalist, traditionalist Conservative Party.

Yet, what has caused this reversion to the old, two-party political system that our parents and grandparents grew up with?

The General election in June was phenomenal. We saw Theresa May suffer electoral embarrassment, yet we saw a huge vote share between Labour and the Conservatives. Pre-election polls estimated the combined share to reach around 68%. Yet the Conservatives achieved 42.4%, and Labour a staggering 40.1%, pulling them out of oblivion and into a position where they could challenge May’s new Government. Possibly increasing their chances of gaining victory in 2022. Yet, together they gained a combined vote share of 82.5%. This kind of result hasn’t been seen since the 1983 General election, where the Tories and Labour had a combined vote share of 80.8%. Nevertheless, we must wonder as to why Labour and the Conservatives gained such a large proportion of the vote.

Momentum was a major reason as to why Labour gained such a large proportion of the vote. Labour were expected to plummet under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, yet gained the greatest swing to Labour since Attlee’s 1945 victory. Momentum were highly critical of the Conservative Government, yet engaged with people in a way that hasn’t been seen in mainstream politics for a long time. They have many activists on the ground, in offices, and all over the country, investigating and bringing to light the distrust, distain, and disappointment of certain people within the electorate towards Theresa May and the Conservatives. They support Corbyn wholeheartedly, and will defend the highly popular leader to the last. However, Momentum is most impressive with their online presence, backed up by various media outlets, they have utilised Social media as a tool to pull in large numbers of young Labour voters.

However, Momentum is effective as it targets gripes and issues with cleverly written propaganda, which gain them great support. For example, the “Daddy, why do you hate me?” post was a clever video, showing a father describing all the things he got for free when he grew up to his daughter, which she won’t get, because he voted for Theresa May. It was an evident guilt trip, a tactic used across the board in politics, and it reached 7 million people in just a week. Momentum has the capacity and ability to influence the Labour party, the media, and the electorate with ease. Because of this, Labour was able to gain ground in marginal seats, and grasp a larger percentage of the vote share than could possibly have been predicted at the start of the General Election race. Thus, it gave Labour that strong footing to fight a Conservative government, but has also pushed us back into the days of Duopoly.

Another major factor in the rise of the Duopoly is the fall of UKIP. Ever since their knight in shining armour put down his pint glass and threw the purple rosette in the bin, no one has been able to gain the political success that Farage did. Paul Nuttall failed tremendously to put forward a positive case for UKIP as a party that was not purely tied down to Brexit. This can be seen clearly in the polling, which had UKIP at 16% in 2016, but then only a measly 4% by 2017. Even their once proud membership is starting to dwindle, with the numbers falling from 45, 994 in 2015, to 39,000 in 2016. Stephen Bush, a correspondent for the New Statesman, said that UKIP’s failure could been analysed particularly starkly in Wales, where traditional Labour voters who wanted Brexit had voted for UKIP. But, once they had voted UKIP and seen the results, it simply became a “gateway drug” into them supporting the Conservative Party, who arguably have a much clearer position on Brexit than that of Labour. Therefore, this progression of Labour voters to the Conservatives has kept the Conservative vote share up and continued our progress to a simple 2 party system.

However, there is one final piece to the jigsaw puzzle of this newly formed path to the Duopoly; the failure of other political parties. For me, the evident example of this is the Liberal Democrats. Whilst the party is on the rise with the #LibDemFightback, there is no denying that the election result was a disappointment for the party. They had an opportunity to grasp the remain vote and convince them that there was still a battle to be fought over our involvement in the European Union. However, no such vote materialised on the 8th June. Mark Pack, a prominent Liberal Democrat journalist and pollster, suggested that the Liberal Democrats had 25 seats up for grabs, but would only win 12.5. The fact that the party could not make any truly significant gains, and that they lost key, highly respected MPs such as Nick Clegg shows that the party is clearly struggling, and needs to take a new direction under Vince Cable. However, the thing that shocked me most was their actual vote share. At 7.4%, it was the lowest since 1959. The party even lost 375 deposits, which is staggering. The Liberal Democrats will be to blame for a two-party state as much as the two parties themselves, as they will have been unable to provide a credible third option to Labour and the Conservatives.

Yet, there is some hope for the Liberal Democrats. They currently have 103,951 members, the highest ever on record, showing a clear grassroots level of support. They also had 28 seats where the party polled over 30% in the General Election, indicating a popularity for them as another political option which is viable. Scotland is a further important battle ground for them, as they have a third of their seats now in the SNP dominated region. But with Nicola Sturgeon losing multiple seats at the last election, there is room for Liberal growth in Scotland. However, I believe that the Liberal Democrats suffered in the election because Tim Farron was far too focused on Brexit and Europe; elections are won by focusing on local issues and domestic policy, not just our relationships with other countries.

But the real question we must now ask ourselves is how do we combat this rising Duopoly? Maybe many of you would enjoy a two-party system, with Westminster becoming nothing more than a dog fighting pen, with Labour and the Conservatives tearing into each other at Prime Minister’s Questions. However, politics must serve the people and we cannot follow the US to two parties obsessed entirely on hitting each other. Many would argue for electoral reform to undo our two party rule, but the true way back is the third parties having a popular message for the electorate, a real alternative.

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