The British political system

The UK's two-party political system could be on the brink of collapsing into a shitstorm of political chaos and radical renewal following local elections across England. The vote revealed a growing disconnect between the two main parties and the voters, with both Labour and the Conservatives doing badly.





Elections to the European Parliament later this month threaten to ramp up the pressure even more, making party splits, rebellions, leadership challenges, and other moves possible.





The biggest loser in the local elections was the Conservative Party, which lost over 1,300 council seats. Normally this would mean that the main opposition party, the Labour Party, would pick up hundreds of seats. But instead Labour lost nearly a hundred seats themselves. Even UKIP did badly, losing most of the seats it won in 2015 when it was riding high.





The Lib Dems, a traditional "protest vote" party, did best, picking up around 700 council seats and winning control of several councils.





Here are the numbers:









The Greens did well too. But there was also a massive increase in "Others," a catch-all term for Residents Associations, Independents, and some small nationalist parties.





Analysts are having a hard time understanding the result, but one thing is obvious -- the public is deeply fed up with both the main parties, and is ready for something new.





Two new parties that were recently created did not stand in this election. One was Nigel Farage's Brexit Party (BP), the other was Change UK (CUK) a Brexit-denying party made up of mainly ex-Labour MPs. Both parties were preparing for the European Parliamentary elections scheduled for the 23rd of May due to Britain's failure to leave the EU on time.





Recent opinion polls have shown BP on around 30% of the vote and CUK on around 10%. That is fully 40% of the vote that was not represented in these council election results.





There is still a chance that the European elections can be avoided if Conservatives and Labour reach a speedy agreement on a Brexit deal. But this is extremely unlikely, as the price Labour would ask in return would be too high.





Also, although Labour is in a bad position, it is not in as bad a position as the Conservative Party, which is suffering much more from the rise of BP than Labour is from the rise of CUK. Labour's leadership is therefore hoping that a very bad result for the Tories in the European elections will cause more infighting, chaos, and demoralisation in that party, and also trigger a general election, which they hope they can win.





However, there is no guarantee that Labour would do much better than the Conservatives in a general election right now. In fact, it could lead to a situation in which both the Labour and Conservative vote is so depressed that so-called "Third Parties" -- which normally suffer from Britain's extremely unfair first-past-the-post voting system -- win large numbers of parliamentary seats.





If that happens, then those "Third Parties," like BP, CUK, UKIP, and the Lib Dems, might decide to club together to prevent the two big parties reasserting their unfair dominance.





This would involve a temporary coalition government and a vote to change the voting system to one of proportional representation, as that would favour their own survival.





If that happens, then there would be little point in the Labour and Conservative Parties existing, as they are essentially just coalitions of different groups, who disagree and even hate each other, thrown together to exploit Britain's unfair electoral system.



If that system was changed to represent small parties, Labour and the Cons would soon collapse and splinter into several other parties.



