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BRITAIN has had a tumultuous year of politics and the next is likely to be just as dramatic.

The UK General Election will take place on Thursday, May 7, when none of the three established Westminster parties and their leaders are likely to be any more popular than they are now.

Cameron’s poll ratings at least run ahead of Tory support, whereas Miliband and Clegg are massively unpopular with 22 per cent and 13 per cent satisfaction ratings respectively. According to the polls, Miliband is, notoriously, more unpopular in Scotland than the Tory Prime Minister.

At the last UK election in 2010, the Conservatives finished 20 seats short of a majority but 48 seats ahead of Labour. Combining with the Lib Dems in coalition produced a comfortable majority but any Labour-Lib Dem potential deal would have been scuppered as they were 11 seats short of a majority.

The politics of parliamentary arithmetic matters. 2015 may well see both Labour and Tories unable to form a majority by themselves or in association with the Lib Dems.

This will produce either a three-party coalition government or, more likely, a weak minority government of either Labour or Tories needing to win individual parliamentary votes on an issue-by-issue basis.

Already Westminster insiders are looking to the prospect of two general elections one after the other. Tory strategists are already planning contingencies, having raised £78million in the last four years – a figure which dwarfs Labour funding – with a quarter of it from City of London hedge funds.

Money will have a bigger impact than ever before in this election along with social media, with any party which stands in each constituency able to spend £32.7million in the long campaign.

The old parties don’t have Westminster politics all to themselves any more.

UKIP won the May Euro elections with 27 per cent of the national vote, returning 24 MEPs including one in Scotland, and went on to win two by-elections.

The SNP’s popularity has gone into the stratosphere since the referendum, with membership reaching 92,000 and impressive poll ratings for Westminster and the Scottish Parliament.

The Westminster SNP figures worry Labour, with the two polls taken since Jim Murphy became Scottish Labour leader showing the SNP way ahead of Labour, meaning that Labour cannot count on their 41 Scottish seats the way they once did.

Yet this is a Westminster insider class version of Britain which doesn’t address the popular concerns and anxieties many

people feel. An alternative viewpoint would address the creaking nature of British society: the divided society, episodic anger, lack of trust in elites and institutions and the widespread sense of feeling let down and disappointed at the state of the country.

There are many contributory factors to this: the economic dislocation of the 1980s, the arrogance in New Labour politics and the lack of accountability following the banking crash and the political expenses scandals and more. All of this combines into a popular view that politicians and the mainstream parties no longer represent and look after the

interests of working people.

Writer John Harris captured this recently looking at the alienation in former Labour heartlands –from the north of England to Scotland and Wales. In the latter, someone asked “What’s Labour done for the Rhondda Valley?” while a young man looking for work did not know what a trade union was.

There is a counterview to this from Westminster watchers that everything is all right. The former political editor of the New Statesman Rafael Behr gave voice to this when he dismissed the notion of crisis, writing: “Sudden transformations in politics are rare. The safest prediction of what will happen next is…it will look a lot like what is happening now.”

How ingrained this is can be evidenced by Behr dismissing the referendum as “The union that entered 2014 is the same one that leaves it”. This ignores an SNP and independence movement galvanised, the Westminster class confused and bemused and the emergence of the English democratic question.

If that view is blinkered, a third perspective will become more vocal on the right as the election approaches. This will trumpet “the great British jobs miracle” and want to mobilise opinion to slash public spending and bring the state back to the levels of the 1930s – a strategy Chancellor George Osborne has embraced.

2015 will witness these competing visions of Britain present themselves. The traditional parties will do all they can to keep the show on the road, to hope the insurrections of UKIP and the SNP fade away and that they can keep their monopoly of Westminster politics and power.

Next year’s election may not see Britain’s political system overthrown but uncertainty and change will continue to shape what passes for Westminster politics. The old parties are in retreat, confusion and denial about the modern world.

In Britain, as elsewhere, people will in larger numbers turn to populists, outsiders and anti-establishment forces to show their discontent and disillusionment. And in this, 2015, while not promising a revolution, marks a country in transition.

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