David Butterfield

Are we entering a golden age of backbench politics?

It’s been a while since the young H.H. Asquith told Spectator readers that ‘no third Party has ever been able to stand its ground in England.’ His leader, ‘The English Extreme Left’, appeared in 1876, when the enervated Liberal Party seemed destined to split. His core contention was that Britain would not, in fact could not, brook multi-party politics:

For the last two hundred years there always have been two great Parties, and two only; and though that is in itself no reason why a third should not now be formed, it is a very serious practical obstacle in the way of its success. Parties, like other institutions, at any rate in England, grow, and are not manufactured.

And yet Asquith’s faith in the ‘rude dichotomy of English Party politics’ was misplaced. By the time he became PM in 1908, the Liberals had split and Labour was on the march, destined to replace them. More recent history also weighs against him. For forty years – 1974 to 2015 – the Conservative-Labour duopoly was hard pushed by other parties: only twice (1979 and 1992) did the two secure more than 75 per cent of the vote; in the elections of 2005, 2010 and 2015, their share slumped to two-thirds.

But the events of 2017 have driven British politics back to two-party acquiescence. The largest turn-out in twenty years gave Conservative and Labour their largest vote share for almost fifty years (82.3 per cent). The two parties had not received so many votes (26.5 million) since 1951; in England, their combined total was the largest ever, and the largest share (87.3 per cent) since 1970.

This resurgence of the traditional parties mirrors the striking decline of various ‘third’ parties. The Liberal Democrats contrived to airbrush themselves from the House of Commons, receiving only seven per cent of the vote – their lowest share since the 1950s – and a dozen seats.

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