Back to the (Political) Future: Small Parties in British Politics

You might have heard of Nigel Farage. He’s of some relevance to British politics at the moment. The party he leads, Reform UK, has gained its first MSP, and as of the most recent YouGov poll (26/8/25) is leading – Labour, in second, is eight points behind. An impressive record for a party with only four MPs – that’s one less than it had after the last election, just over a year ago.

Reform UK, moreover, isn’t the only emergent party in British politics. At the other end of the political spectrum, Jeremy Corbyn’s new political vehicle – presently titled Your Party – claims to have 800,000 people signed up to its mailing list. North of the border, Alex Salmond’s Alba Party, though less prominent than Reform and Your Party, shows the spate of political-party founding is not a purely English phenomenon.

So – to the question of the moment in British politics. Will these new parties upend politics as we know it? Should we look forward to our next parliament being dominated by Farage and Corbyn and their respective political groups? To be perfectly frank: nobody knows. Political predictions are never safe bets – “a week is a long time in politics”. In a December 1938 article for The Adelphi, George Orwell predicted that should Labour not adopt an “anti-militarist and anti-imperialist line”, it would find “its enemies will eat it up”. Labour joined Churchill’s War Ministry and won the 1945 election with 393 seats to the Conservative’s 197. If Orwell could get it so badly wrong, the words of an Oxford undergraduate – who cannot claim an OED-approved eponymous adjective – are probably not worth much.

Nonetheless, the historical angle has been much underused in attempting to assess the likelihood of parties like Reform and Your Party becoming major forces in British politics. Much ink has been spilled in an effort to pass judgement on the questions I posed above, but little has examined what past upheavals in British politics might tell us about those occurring today. Hence there is a distinct gap in the discourse around new parties. The majority of those who have given their tuppence on the matter have sought to dissect the present or guess the future – few have looked to the past, to see whether historical parallels can be used to divine what the fates of the new parties might be.

In that vein, let us return to the winter of 1981. The state of politics is uncannily familiar. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives had been elected in 1979 on a promise to remedy the economic malaise left behind by the previous administration – the stagflation which had sent Jim Callaghan’s government to the IMF for a loan. Instead, the national finances seemed to have gone from bad to worse. Moreover, the PM is widely considered to be an authoritarian leader of her party. Talk of discontent on the backbenches – possibly even in the cabinet – is common.

The Prime Minister’s sole consolation is that the opposition is not being led by its most effective operators. Popular anger at its missteps whilst in government has not fully abated. Yet even this reassurance is not as secure as it might seem at first. A third political force has recently come on the scene. Lead by a defector from one of the two major parties, it’s polling higher than both the government and the opposition. Commentators suggest that it might be about to overturn the hallowed ‘two-party system’ that had held good since the 1920s.

The Alliance in late 1981, therefore, was in a similar position to that new parties find themselves in today. With the two main parties suffering as a result of an economic crisis neither could remedy, there was room for a third party, led by experienced political operators, to rise sharply in the polls, capitalising on high levels of popular dissatisfaction with both Labour and the Conservatives. The language used by The Alliance’s leaders, and the journalists who covered them, reflects the significance of the threat contemporaries believed this situation posed to the Conservatives and Labour. Addressing the Liberal Party Conference in 1981, David Steel told attendees to "Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!"

For a moment, The Alliance seemed unstoppable. Yet still they failed. Though over the winter of 1981 and in early 1982 The Alliance enjoyed a glorious moment in the sun, their fall from grace has been profound. The Liberal Democrats, formed in 1988 when the Liberal Party merged with most of the SDP, have enjoyed brief spells of success since, most notably when they were invited to join the government (as junior partners) between 2010 and 2015. Yet they have never been able to escape the label ‘Third Party’ and are so publicity-starved their present leader is reduced to a parliamentary parody of the Rector of Stiffkey, performing burlesque stunts in order to gain a modicum of press coverage. The remainder of the SDP has sunk even lower. The scion of the SDP that refused to join the Liberals in 1988 attempted to dissolve itself in 1990, but a scion of holdouts continued attempts to resuscitate the corpse. This scion-of-a-scion continues to exist and still calls itself the SDP, but the present party is barely a shadow of the force that beat the Iron Lady into third place in the polls. They hold three local government seats.

None of this makes happy reading for supporters of Farage or Corbyn, but they should not despair yet. There is an example in British political history of a party successfully rising from nothing to national significance, achieving in doing so a century as either the opposition or the government. In the general election of 1900, two MPs from the recently formed Labour Representation Committee were sent to Parliament. A few years later, the LRC would rename itself The Labour Party, and in 1923 – with 191 MPs and the informal support of the Liberals, who hoped Labour would prove incompetent – the Labour Party’s first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, entered Downing Street. Though their first term of office lasted less than a year, Labour did not collapse as the Liberals had hoped. The last election of the decade, in 1929, saw 287 Labour MPs returned to the Liberal’s 59.

The moral of the story for the new parties of today seems obvious. If only the party’s leadership could discern why Labour succeeded, and why The Alliance did not, their path to power would be assured. If the missteps of the latter and the genius of the former could be fully uncovered, an unbeatable strategy could be formulated to propel Reform or Your Party into government. It seems to me, however, that the success of the early Labour Party and the collapse of The Alliance points to something rather different. Rather than the two stories serving as a convenient Do-and-Don’t manual for an up-and-coming party, the contrasting fates of Labour and The Alliance demonstrate that a new party’s success is as much determined by extraneous events as by ones it controls.

I say this because I believe Labour’s rise was primarily driven not by the party making its own good luck, but by its fortune to be founded a few years before the spectacular immolation of the Liberal Party. Between its return to office in an electoral landslide in 1906 and the departure of the last Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, from office in 1922, the party fell apart under the dual strain of policies that corroded the party’s ideological underpinnings and the egos of its upper echelons. Bread-and-butter Liberal policies like Free Trade were discredited when a Liberal government was forced to adopt antonymic positions in response to the First World War. More importantly, the rivalry of Asquith and Lloyd-George literally tore the party in two, allowing Labour to win seats where the Liberal vote split.

The Alliance, on the other hand, did not enjoy such good fortune. Although one half of The Alliance was a splinter of Labour, the party did not divide further after the Gang of Four quit. There was thus no split vote The Alliance could exploit – it had to run head-tohead against Labour, rather than against two smaller, weaker Labours. The British electoral system, First-Past-the-Post, makes it notoriously dihicult for new parties to win seats. Labour’s success in doing so was predicated more on Liberal division than their own genius, and The Alliance’s failure to match Labour’s success must be largely ascribed to the fact neither the Tories or Labour became as disunified in the early 1980s as the Liberals had been around the turn of the 1920s.

What does this mean for Reform UK and Your Party? If the best way for a new party to achieve prominence is for an existing one to implode, whether or not Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn gets to live on Downing Street after the next election depends more on the fate of the Conservatives and Labour than what the new parties themselves get up to between now and 2029. The story of Labour and The Alliance tells us that to perceive the future we must look beyond the new parties, to the Tories and Labour, for it is there, not within the new parties themselves, that the party’s future is likeliest to be made. The closer the Conservatives come to collapse, the better Reform’s chances, and vice versa for Labour and Your Party. Come 2029, it might not matter if the new parties are ready for government. If the present parties have fallen far enough, history tells us they may well end up there anyway.