Our new five-party system

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.

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Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has long been maligned for its tendency to lock out less established, challenger parties and deprive those who vote for them of their full share of political representation. Indeed, the 2024 general election was the most disproportionate in our history. The Labour party won nearly two-third of the seats in the House of Commons. But it was a loveless landslide — secured on only 33.7 per cent of the votes cast. Considering the low turnout (59.7 per cent), just 2 in 10 of the electorate cast a vote for their Labour candidate.

 Meanwhile, the Greens and Reform were left with fewer than 10 seats despite securing a combined 20 per cent of public support between them. In a proportional system, Reform would have had more than 90 seats and the Greens more than 40. Indeed, during that campaign I heard from countless voters who were opposed to the two traditional parties but expressed frustration that a vote for anyone else would be a “wasted vote”. 

 But were the one in five votes that were cast for Reform and the Greens quite as “wasted” as initially seemed? Less than two years later we have a five-party system (six in Scotland and Wales) and the traditional duopoly commands barely one third of the national vote between them.

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From the beginning of its tenure, the Labour government has been hampered by the lack of a stable platform, its margin of victory in July 2024 made possible only by the temporary adherence of disparate voter outlooks united by a desire to be rid of the Conservatives. Within weeks of entering Downing Street, Keir Starmer appeared to have lost the benefit of the doubt from that coalition of convenience.

Reform UK has eight MPs and the Greens just five. That is just 1.2 per cent and 0.7 per cent of the Commons respectively. However, both these parties are dominating political debate. 

Reform’s rise (they have now led the polls in every British Polling Council-affiliated poll for more than a year) has drastically altered the direction of travel for both the government and the opposition. But for the challenge of Reform, would the Conservatives be promising to take Britain out of the ECHR and deport all new illegal arrivals within a week or Labour’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood be planning to double the amount of time required for immigrants to gain citizenship?

Having tripled its vote share in the past two years, the Green Party is now also enjoying political influence far beyond its parliamentary representation. The losses Labour suffered to them in the local elections directly contributed to Keir Starmer’s leadership contest (Catherine West, the first MP to go over the top, cited a friend losing their London council seat to the Greens as one of her chief motivations for trying to force Starmer’s hand). Whoever succeeds Keir Starmer is likely to pull the party towards Green priorities. We have already had a King’s Speech which focused on banning all further drilling in the North Sea.

We are witnessing a more sophisticated understanding of the new vectors of political influence, with the public increasingly feeling able to bypass traditional representation in Westminster to make their voices heard. Now that voters have seen parties outside the mainstream able to not just win individual areas under first-past-the-post (such as the Greens in Gorton and Denton and Reform in Runcorn and Helsby) but significantly influence the political weather, they are much less likely to feel their vote has gone to waste.

In this environment the winner-takes-all nature of first-past-the-post means that very few Labour and Conservative MPs can still consider themselves the occupants of a truly safe seat. Having multiple parties operate under first-past-the-post certainly adds an element of chaos to potential political outcomes, but there is also real opportunity.

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The results from this month’s local and devolved elections are the latest in a string of data points from this electoral cycle (including by-elections in Gorton and Denton and Caerphilly) that demonstrated this new volatility. Reform and the Greens emerged as the biggest winners of the night, whilst Labour and the Conservatives both suffered heavy losses.

The fracturing of the vote meant that results on a local level were often as chaotic as they were unpredictable. The lowest winning vote share was in Tyseley and Hay Mills, where the Green candidate managed to prevail on just 20.5 per cent of the vote (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Reform and the Workers Party were all not far behind, with five parties finishing clustered within six points of each other).

Reform emerged as the biggest winners of the night, gaining control of many councils, including Rochdale and Plymouth on less than half the vote. However, other parties also benefitted from disproportionate results. Labour won 56 per cent of the seats in Merton despite getting less than 30 per cent of the vote. In Lewisham, the Greens won 73 per cent of the seats on 44 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives won back majority control of Westminster Council, even though their vote fell back from 2022. As with many parties they benefitted not from winning new supporters, but simply from losing fewer than their rivals.

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What does this mean for the next general election? If anything, we might see even greater fracturing of the electorate. One of the latest projections has 148 seats in Britain being won on less than 30 per cent of the vote. In 2024, only seven seats were won by such a low share. Just one in seven of Reform and Green voters say they would return to the two traditional parties if their current party of choice let them down. One in three say they’d look for something new again. We may already be seeing the emergence of another challenger party, in the form of Restore Britain, who won every council seat they fought in Great Yarmouth in May’s local elections.

Results in Birmingham are a window into what we might expect from the next general election. An extraordinary mix of six parties (including George Galloway’s Workers Party) and local independent candidates contested the 101 seats up for grabs, with no party managing to achieve even half the number needed for a majority. No party exceeded 21 per cent of the vote, making any kind of coalition difficult and, if achieved, fragile. Indeed, an under-appreciated outcome from the last set of local elections was that nearly half of the councils up for re-election ended up with no overall control.

Whilst this does mean that final outcomes are unpredictable (or “challenging” if you are in the predictions business) they are nonetheless largely in line with current public opinion: split between several parties, but without a singular faith that any of them can fix the country’s problems. The stranglehold of the two main parties has been broken, opening the field to political entrepreneurs. As such, first-past-the-post can no longer be criticised for acting as a gatekeeper for Labour and the Tories or for providing artificial stability and consensus in the face of an electorate which finds those virtues to be in short supply.

In reality, the opposite could prove true: that the new volatility in our system means that even a “fringe” party has a realistic prospect of gaining a majority at a local or national level. In these circumstances, calls for a change of voting system take on a strangely anti-democratic flavour, whereby a move to abandon first-past-the-post serves as a last ditch failsafe to halt the ascendency of the new forces reshaping British politics.

If so, traditional reasons for smaller parties advocating for proportional representation may be self-defeating. Indeed, there is a sense in which a move to some version of PR would magnify political stasis if the result of so many parties vying for support proved to be representative gridlock. 

Our electoral system isn’t to blame for our current political climate: it is those politicians (including ones who were elected with large majorities and clear mandates) that have consistently promised change that they fail to deliver. Until that improves, current political trends will continue, no matter what the electoral system.