PARTY-CONFERENCE season 2025 is the shop window for new multi-party politics in Britain. Fed up with Sir Keir? Try Zac Polanski’s new “eco-populist” Greens, or maybe Jeremy Corbyn’s as-yet-unnamed new party of the Left. Or, if your complaint is that Labour should get on with rejoining the EU, maybe Ed Davey’s Lib Dems? After all, they’re the biggest third-party grouping in the Commons for 100 years.
Normally, when a Labour government is in the doldrums, the Conservatives would scoop up disaffected voters; but Kemi Badenoch, heir to the most successful and longest-lived political party in history, finds herself in the relegation zone, struggling to avoid demotion to the minor league of politics.
Instead, the beneficiary is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK — poised for a commanding parliamentary majority on perhaps one third of the vote, if the polls are to be believed. Veterans of the 1980s will recall how an earlier insurgent party, the SDP, briefly appeared destined to break the political mould, before fading at a General Election; but the game is different now, and it is far from pre-ordained that Mr Farage will suffer the same fate. The simplicities of the old two-party choice have been replaced by a bewildering variety of offerings.
So, how might this novel new politics play out? Labour, having shed one third of the voters who put them in power last year, hopes to lure them back with a “patriotic renewal”, which will include a national identity card to clamp down on illegal migration, and a “Build, Baby, Build” planning policy to create new towns and new housing, to offer Generation Z the prospect of home ownership. But they will also have to maintain eye-wateringly tight spending limits on public services and, probably, take another stab at welfare reform.
The harbinger of that last policy was the appointment of Pat McFadden as Work and Pensions Secretary in the recent government reshuffle. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, desperately needs to rein in welfare spending, but the political difficulty of cutting benefits was demonstrated by the twin fiascos over the pensioners’ winter fuel payments and the benefits-cut revolt by Labour MPs. Enter the wily Mr McFadden, a fixer with a pedigree stretching back to Tony Blair’s Downing Street, appointed as the man most likely to achieve serious savings. Much will now depend on those political skills.
The Government needs to win positive marks for both technical merit and artistic impression from several unforgiving judging panels: the bond markets are already nervous about the level of public borrowing, and crisis looms if they decisively lose faith; Labour MPs are close to despair over the performance of their leadership and their personal prospect of re-election; and the voters themselves will have an opportunity to register their verdict in elections for the Scottish Parliament, then the Welsh Sennedd and English metropolitan councils in May 2026.
A negative verdict from any of those judges could produce another spasm of political chaos.
Mark D’Arcy co-presents the Hansard Society’s podcast, Parliament Matters.
Paul Vallely is away.
