Letter from London - New Year 2026
The year that is just underway will be a pivotal twelve months in UK politics. By the time it comes to an end we shall be at - and perhaps beyond - the halfway mark of this parliament. The recent trend towards the breaking down of the UK party system as we have known it for a century will either have been reversed - or else, firmly entrenched.
UK politics – not unlike its economy - is in a something of a doom loop. The narrative of ‘broken Britain’ used by Rachel Reeves when she first arrived at the Treasury and more recently by despondent Tories, echoing the dismay and anger of their dwindling band of supporters about the state of the country they have governed for all bar eighteen months of the last decade-and-a half, will continue to play directly into the hands of populist movements. This has been epitomised by Reform UK, which has now led every national opinion poll for ten months.
Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage remains the only top flight national politician fully to appreciate how the rules of electoral engagement are rapidly changing with the dominance of social media; watch his slick ‘smash and grab’ campaigns, as he and his party move on without trace from one newsworthy sensation to the next. Whilst self-regarding TV presenters and political journalists obsess over trivialities in parliament, the opinions of media celebrities and stories covered in the national newspapers, Reform UK steadfastly refuses to be intimidated or intermediated by what middle-aged and older voters understand as the mainstream media. The new insurgents - and in this I include Zack Polanski (real name David Paulden) of the Green Party - adopt a style that reflects well the limited attention span that plagues much of the younger electorate in our modern, fragmented digital networking era.
There is some real desperation on the part of the legacy party leaders in their recent assertions that ‘Farage has peaked too soon’ or claims after narrow misses in six-party by-elections for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh senate that ‘Reform’s support has hit a ceiling’. Few voters seem to care much about ‘revelations’ of racism during his school days almost half a century ago despite weeks of breathless coverage in The Guardian and on the BBC. In a similar vein other leftist commentators try to reassure themselves and their readers, viewers or listeners that come election day British voters have historically been too discerning - and frankly sensible - to be taken in by the antics of an attention-seeking, grievance-stoking populist. Yet Farage has been a fixture on the political scene for over 25 years now. In stark contrast to his persistent detractors he never, ever talks down to working class Britons nor disdains their instincts, values or what his opponents would self-righteously call their prejudices. As a result, this public school educated, former City of London trader has been able to position himself successfully as an authentic, anti-establishment figure. Since his election to the UK parliament in July 2024, at the eighth time of asking, he has been the figurehead of Reform UK’s remorseless political advance, which continues week on week with local electoral victories in every corner of Great Britain and courtesy of defections from other political parties.
It is the struggling Labour Party that is now firmly in Reform UK’s sights. The hapless collapse in the government’s popularity and standing since delivering a landslide majority just eighteen months ago will almost certainly play out in a brutal internal power-struggle in the year ahead. Unlike their main opponents, Labour has historically been notoriously reluctant to remove failing or unpopular leaders, but Keir Starmer urgently needs to recognise the seriousness of the UK’s structural social challenges and lead the national conversation on touchstone issues. Failure to do so will embolden not only the Reform UK disruptors, but likely result in fragmentation of his own parliamentary ranks. The further splintering of the Labour vote in the direction of the Green Party, Independents (five of whom were elected even in 2024 on a pro-Palestine platform) and Jeremy Corbyn’s new vehicle, Your Party, will likely follow and undermine one of Starmer’s key selling points; that only his party stands between the current suboptimal malaise and the emergence of a ‘hard-right’ anti-immigration populist government.
Political history has an uncanny way of repeating itself. The seeds were sown on the fall of Clement Attlee’s immediate post-war Labour government when deteriorating international conditions forced it to increase defence spending. What was then set in train was a deep and irreparable rift within the parliamentary party and its supporters in the country when the government prioritised security expenditure over welfare spending at a time of economic hardship and rising living costs.
The parallels with today’s situation are crystal clear. In the late 1940s the welfare state was suffering from the teething problems that came with the rolling out of much expanded entitlements even before its inexorably rising budgets were checked; today the long shadow of Covid still weighs heavily on waiting lists and productivity levels in the NHS, the Court Service and much else besides but disgruntled voters, already beset at best by stagnating living standards, are unwilling to give the authorities any slack.
Very much on the frontline for much of this public dissatisfaction are the huge new cohort of Labour MPs, many of whom instinctively believe that some things – including the welfare of the most vulnerable at home and away – are more important than simply holding power. A fair few with little appetite or interest in becoming ministers shave already come to the hard-nosed calculation that they are likely to be one-term MPs. When fatalism of this sort seeps in, conventional party discipline is quickly replaced by an ideological desire to do right by their consciences and their constituents.
Meanwhile the prospect of being replaced by a populist government has already inspired an urgency on the part of many in the Labour movement to place on the statute book a raft of ‘progressive’ measures whilst they still hold the levers of power. Measures such as permitting full-term abortion; outlawing Islamophobia as a nod to the sensibilities of religionists who have traditionally provided Labour with its most reliable ethnic voting bloc and weaponising the public enquiry process by commissioning blatantly partisan investigations into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the 1980s miners’ strike and foreign influence in political funding (designed simply to embarrass Reform UK and the Tories). Watch now for the renewed clamour for imposing further taxes on wealth as well as clamping down on the rights of second home owners and landlords as a scorched earth approach holds sway – I suspect much more along these cultural and fiscally confiscatory lines will follow as the sands of time towards the next election slip away.
Unfortunately, much of the energy and relish that will be devoted to this type of legislative pursuit is really displacement activity from the much more pressing problem to hand: how to ensure that we live collectively within our means without passing on unsustainable debt to future generations. The need for welfare reform has not gone away, but putting pensions, social care and NHS spending on a sustainable footing remains in a box marked ‘too difficult to do’…..until the money really runs out.
In the blue corner, the Conservatives still battle in vain to earn much of a hearing after the dismal economic outcomes and unprecedented political turmoil of their most recent period in office. Despite a notable improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s performance and work rate, speculation endures about another of its favourite pastimes – a challenge to the leadership. In truth whoever may or may not emerge from its next bout of infighting faces a very challenging set of local elections in May. This applies to a series of delayed county council contests in parts of England (watch for contests in Essex and East Anglia in particular) and all-out Welsh senate and Scottish parliamentary contests. Meanwhile in London the Tories until recently entertained high hopes of making significant headway against Labour from an all-time low performance when these councils were last contested in 2022; however, most of the Tories’ outer London heartlands now appear under dire threat from the advance of Reform UK. As immigration and the cost of living incessantly remain the most salient issues in the eyes of the voters there will be constant reminders of the Conservatives’ appalling track record – from static living standards during the past decade-and-a-half to the abject loss of control in legal migration after Brexit was confirmed (the so-called ‘Boris Wave’).
But it is parliamentary by-elections that are invariably the real electoral game changer in UK politics. Their occurrence is the very definition of randomness and by rights the verdict of a few tens of thousands of voters in one six hundred and fiftieth of the Kingdom should be dismissed as ephemeral. But they are a dismal or welcome (according to their outcome) snapshot of political opinion and a reminder to each and every MP of their mortality. Their results have a potentially devastating impact on party morale; in a conversation I had in the summer with a prominent member of the Shadow Cabinet, he admitted that he would not be sure that the Conservatives would hold a single seat in a by-election. As we saw with their loss in Runcorn & Helsby last May, Labour can scarcely have much more confidence - 362 out of the 411 seats they won in 2024 were with lower majorities than in that small corner of north Cheshire.
It is not only in the interests of balance that I end with a few words about the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party who have been vying with each other over the past decade to capture the constitutionally significant third-party designation in UK politics. Their continued strength has played an important part in the shake-up of UK politics and the imminent prospect that our two-party system will collapse. The SNP can scarcely believe their good fortune as the latest set of Scottish Parliamentary elections approaches – from high-profile internal strife, allegations of corruption and its dismal showing at the general election in 2024, the SNP are now confident of remaining the largest single party in the Scottish parliament as Labour stutters again north of the border.
Quietly and with their characteristic opportunism to the fore, the Liberal Democrats have also been strengthening their position especially in and around constituencies they unexpectedly won from the Conservatives at the General Election. They also await with interest the potential fresh opportunities to attract centrist Tory supporters in the Home Counties and South of England if, as seems likely, the Conservatives try to regain ground lost to Reform UK by entering a bidding war with the insurgents on touchstone right-wing policy issues.
What is interesting to note is that the areas in which the SNP and Liberal Democrats are most entrenched are generally areas with the weakest prospects for Reform UK. I suspect this has less to do with differences in ideology, but is more a clear statement that the voters have had enough of the UK’s two traditional political parties and will offer support to whichever party seems best placed in their locality to overturn the duopoly’s century long dominance.
Politics, like modern-day life, is fast-changing. There is no going back to the world before social media and this reflects the disunited and less coherent community identities that are now a fixture of modern life. This huge change is unremittingly bad news for the two traditional teams that vied for political power in the last century - not to mention their ritual style of doing business. It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for the Labour and Conservative Party whose fates are more closely intertwined than they would have us believe. Desperately they carry on in the same old way in the forlorn hope that ‘business as usual’ will soon be restored, but in the eyes of all too many of their erstwhile supporters this epitomises their complacency and incompetence.
5th January 2026
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