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Like an iceberg slowly melting, the break-up of the "big two" parties has been building for decades. But history doesn't move in straight lines, and if this is the start of a new alignment in British politics - a big "if" - it's happening in a way few saw coming. [THREAD] 
2.The modern two-party system peaked in the 1950s, when nearly 97% of the electorate voted Conservative or Labour. The two parties were broad coalitions with mass memberships & deep roots in trade unions, the churches & middle-class sociability. It's been in free-fall ever since.
3. From 1951 to 2010, the percentage of voters backing Labour or the Conservatives fell from 97% to 65% - a drop of nearly a third. If we count the growing numbers who stayed at home, the proportion voting for one of the big two nearly halved over that period: from 80% to 42%.
4. By the 2000s, the big two were haemorrhaging votes to other parties: the SDP, LDs, Greens, UKIP, SNP, Plaid Cymru. Thanks to our antiquated electoral system, they kept racking up huge majorities. But like that iceberg melting at sea, their structural integrity was collapsing.
5. Even First Past the Post has a tipping point & by 2010 it was becoming hard for any single party to win a stable majority. Coalition governments, electoral reform & party fragmentation seemed the way of the future. But in the election of 2017, something astonishing happened...
6. In 2017 the two-party system made a spectacular come-back, winning 82% of votes & 89% of seats. Outside Scotland & Wales, smaller parties were crushed. Labour hoovered up 59% of 2015 Green voters, 43% of Plaid voters & 29% of Lib Dems. The Tories gobbled up 45% of UKIP voters.
7. The Lib Dems held barely a third (36%) of the votes they'd won in 2015 - itself a crushing defeat. The SNP lost nearly half (45%) of its 2015 vote. Of the 3.8 million who backed UKIP in 2015, less than 600,000 stayed loyal in 2017. The two-party system was back in business.
8. That happened for 2 reasons. First, both parties tacked radically to their flanks. The Tories ran on what was effectively a UKIP manifesto, while Labour's leader was closer, ideologically, to TUSC or the SWP than to New Labour. That shut down the threat from both Right & Left.
9. It was possible to do that without losing their base, because 2017 became a Brexit election in which Leavers rallied behind the Tories and Remainers behind Labour. But that alignment was always artificial, since the parties were not, in fact, clearly opposed on the subject.
10. So the balloon effect of 2017, for both parties, could easily burst. Remainers feel unrepresented, Leavers fear betrayal & the moderates in both parties (who probably held disproportionate power in the past) have been decisively overpowered by their more radical memberships.
11. At the same time, both parties have become less pluralist & less tolerant of dissent. The scope once given to Tory rebels like Bill Cash, or to Labour rebels like Jeremy Corbyn, no longer exists. And parties that will not bend are significantly more likely to break.
12. At the electoral level, both parties have largely shed their historic class base: Labour now wins in Kensington but loses in Mansfield, while the Tories tack increasingly towards a form of rust-belt republicanism. That can work, but erodes long-standing party loyalties.
13. The result is a nest of paradoxes: two parties who are harder to challenge, but harder for dissenting voices to remain inside; parties that hoover up their largest vote shares for decades, but are less & less relevant to the social or intellectual divisions in Britain today.
14. Today's announcement is probably a tremor, not an earthquake; a pebble, not an avalanche. But a shock is surely coming. The tectonic plates of British politics are moving, and when the dust settles, the landscape may look very different to anything we can imagine today.[ENDS]
