British politics today involve turbulence and change
Arthur I. Cyr
In Britain, the small Green Party has won its first by-election. A by-election is held between general elections when a seat becomes available among the 650 in the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament. The upper house is the House of Lords.
At the end of February, Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a plumber and member of the local government council, won a major upset victory in the by-election for the constituency of Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester.
Manchester was once a major manufacturing center in the heart of England. This constituency was created in 2024 following a comprehensive review and redrawing of boundaries for House of Commons seats. Manchester, economically challenged and facing industrial decline, used to be a Labour Party stronghold.
Times have changed, dramatically.
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the great Victorian British musical impresarios, declared admiringly in their 1882 light opera “Iolanthe” that Great Britain was a two-party nation:
“… every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative.” The Conservative Party and the Liberal Party were dominant in the Victorian age, through most of the 19th century and into the 20th century.
Even then, however, the overall political environment was changing, and would continue to do so dramatically.
While the government of Great Britain was stable overall, there was sustained and occasionally violent pressure to grant independence to Ireland. Most of Ireland gained independence in 1921 after sustained struggle. Protestant Northern Ireland remained with Britain to comprise the United Kingdom.
Also early in that century, the Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party.
Now, the environment of two-party stability is changing even more. Both major parties are declining. An early indicator was the long-term revival of the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, along with the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, which began in the 1960s.
Turbulence and unpredictability are now the order of the day, as demonstrated in Gorton and Denton.
In the 2010 general election, neither major party won a clear majority in the House of Commons, for the first time in British politics since World War II. The result was a coalition government from 2010 to 2015 involving the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, the first coalition since the special all-party government during the challenge of that war.
British politics today is steadily fracturing. Brexit, the agonizing effort to break free of the European Union, first splintered the governing Conservative Party and later divided the Labour Party as well.
It is important to keep in mind that the British have maintained institutions and the rule of law, even as alternative parties and patterns are emerging. In our time, the British have maintained stability through institutional as well as policy reforms, generally peacefully. Regional assemblies for Scotland and Wales are one result.
Professor Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, an increasingly visible and influential expert on politics and opinion trends, argues that Spencer’s victory reflects the collapse of traditional support for the Labour Party among working-class and ethnic populations.
Yet, while Britain’s politics are shifting, the long-term success of its representative government and competitive party democracy is enduring and undeniable.
Britain’s fundamental stability contrasts with some trends in Europe — and the United States.
Arthur I. Cyr (acyr@carthage.edu) is author of “After the Cold War – American Foreign Policy, Europe and Asia” (NYU Press and Palgrave/Macmillan).