If they did not exist, would we invent them? Given the chance to start from scratch, would Britain regard the Conservative and Labour parties, the two old and ugly sisters of our politics, as the best we can do? Are they fit for the purpose of representing and reconciling the diversity of opinions in a modern and complex country? And for offering it a choice of decent governments? A growing number of us have been saying not and for a long time.
Even before Brexit split both parties and scrambled voter allegiances, much of the electorate was expressing its dissatisfaction with the big two. The Tories have not won a solid parliamentary majority since 1987. The last Labour leader who was not called Tony Blair to secure a healthy Commons majority was Harold Wilson in 1966.
The number of voters who enthusiastically identify as red or blue has been in long-term decline. Party membership has also been shrivelling. The Tories, who once boasted that they were a million strong, bump along at around 100,000. Labour enjoyed a trend-defying surge in its membership during the Ohhh Jeremy Corbyn phase of his leadership, but that is going downhill as the magical uncle turns out not to be so wondrous after all.
It is true that the big two can still gather up a lot of votes. After decades of decline in their combined vote share, it blipped up at the last election. But I don’t think that truly indicated renewed enthusiasm for either of them. It was a false positive induced by an electoral system that compels many voters to make a forced choice between the unappetising and the inedible. It doesn’t mean that these nose-holding voters like what’s put before them. The current choice on offer is so disdained that, when pollsters ask who would make best prime minister, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are regularly beaten into second and third place by Neither. More than half of the electorate say their views are not properly represented by the existing political parties.
Many politicians can’t stand the parties they represent. Some actively and publicly rage about what has become of them. I cannot recall a period in my lifetime when so many MPs have expressed so much disgust and despair with the state of their own parties. For every Tory who expresses agony about what Brexit has done to the party they used to love, there is a Labour MP voicing anguish about what Corbynism has done to the party that they have spent a lifetime serving.
Both parties are closer to splitting than at any time in the past 30 years. In fact, they are already split. The relevant questions are when, how and in what numbers actual breakaways will start to happen. A group of Labour MPs has one foot out of the door. They would have gone some time ago were it not for Brexit and it will be Brexit and the Labour leadership’s refusal to commit to a second referendum that will be most often cited as the catalyst for the creation of a new formation. While Brexit is evidently important, it also stands proxy for the many profound ideological divisions between the social democrats in Labour and a leadership cadre that will not condemn Venezuela’s corrupt and ruinous dictatorship because the regime calls itself socialist. The root cause of a breakaway from Labour will be the belief of some of its MPs and members that the party they used to belong to no longer exists and their self-respect is incompatible with remaining within its ranks.
It goes without saying that Brexit has driven a wedge through the Conservative party. Explaining the humiliations and contortions that Theresa May has undergone over the past 32 months, some of her friends report that her overriding objective has been to avoid going down in history as the leader who turned Tory divisions over Europe into a formal split. She is now in the last gasp of her attempts to find a Brexit deal that does not blow up her party. Even if she somehow pulls that off, this will only be a temporary postponement of the ultimate struggle for the Tory soul. Brexit is a cause of Tory division in itself and the battleground for a war between very different conceptions of what Conservatism should be about and what the party ought to be offering the country. This struggle will come to its head when Mrs May’s retirement unleashes a contest to succeed her. A group of centrist Conservative MPs has publicly declared that they could not remain members of their party if the leadership is acquired by Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg or another of the English nationalist faction most popular with Tory activists.
Both parties would have split already and probably long ago were it not for the straitjacket imposed by Britain’s method of electing MPs. The unstable coalition that is the Conservative party and the unhappy forced marriage called the Labour party are held together by a system that is designed to accommodate only two parties. It makes breaking away to try something fresh difficult and risky. That is how we have ended up with a Conservative party that contains Sarah Wollaston and Andrew Bridgen, who would be in separate parties in a different system. That is how we have ended up with a Labour party that contains Chris Williamson and Chris Leslie, politicians who will very likely be in separate parties before very long.
The Tory party has long been a menagerie of free marketeers, internationalists, liberals, libertarians, traditionalists, reactionaries, authoritarians and nationalists. When times are good and the party is prospering, they have held it together if only because they have loathed the Labour party even more than each other. When their fundamental differences are stressed, the competing Tory factions erupt. The trigger for Conservative explosions has nearly always been Europe because it exposes very different ideas of what it means to be on the right. Labour has ever been a church so broad that its pews have included social democrats, socialists, greens, incrementalists, would-be revolutionaries, central planners, localists, Atlanticists who were appalled by the Soviet Union and fellow travellers who rather admired the Kremlin. When times are good and the party is prospering, they have kept the show on the road if only because they have detested the Tories even more than each other. Under strain, the deep fissures can no longer be concealed.
There are several serious problems with two parties each containing rival and sometimes downright contradictory ideologies. One wing or another of each tribe is always in a state of dissatisfaction with the party’s direction. When Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp, one-nation Conservatives felt forlorn. In David Cameron’s time, social conservatives were repelled by his liberal social reforms. During the New Labour era, Jeremy Corbyn and his friends were a marginalised and constantly rebellious minority within their party. Under Corbyn Labour, it is the party’s social democrats who feel that their party has been stolen from them.
Big tent parties are only sustainable when they are broad-minded and permissive places, capable of containing, managing and reconciling the wide diversity of opinion within them. Both the Conservative and the Labour parties have become notably less tolerant, in the polarising age of Brexit and Corbynism.
Nick Boles, a former minister, is being threatened with deselection as MP for Grantham and Stamford because local Tories don’t like the positions he has taken on Brexit. He is the most visible but not the only Tory MP who is being menaced in this way. Other Tory MPs will privately confess that they have not properly voiced their conviction that Brexit is a folly, for fear that they will be unseated by angry activists.
Labour has been gripped by a sectarianism that demands loyalty oaths from Labour MPs and threatens them with eviction for ideological deviancy. The party has descended to a very bad place when Luciana Berger, a Labour MP who has been on the receiving end of the most vile antisemitic abuse and required police protection at last year’s party conference following death threats, can be threatened with censure by her local party for protesting about racism.
The number of MPs who split off will be small, at least to begin with. It is a big decision, and too perilous for the average timorous parliamentarian, given the high hurdle presented by the British electoral system. The breakaways may be doomed to failure; they may have more success than most currently expect. Whichever it is, they will be another symptom of the chronic condition of the ugly sisters, a sickliness the voters noticed long ago.
• Andrew Rawnsley is an Observer columnist
