UK politics is fragmenting. And the pace is accelerating.
The traditional two-and-a-half party system (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat) has given way to a five-party landscape, with Reform UK and the Greens now forces in their own right. In Scotland and Wales, nationalists govern for the first time since devolution, while both main parties absorbed significant losses at the most recent local elections. A Labour government under pressure is attempting to maintain control ahead of a general election that can be no more than three years away.
The causes are structural. Most political analysts and psephologists trace the fragmentation to the compounding shocks of the global financial crisis, Brexit, Covid-19, and successive geopolitical crises, and fundamentally, governments' repeated failure to get ahead of them. Whether this represents a temporary realignment or something more lasting - a period like the early 1920s, when Labour displaced the Liberals - remains contested.
