Time for a political change

Steve Speakers Corner
6 min readMar 22, 2020

The United Kingdom’s political system has seesawed between two main political parties for two hundred years. Over the last hundred years the country has regularly alternated between Tory and Labour governments. Prior to the establishment of the Labour Party, the government similarly alternated between the Conservative and Liberal parties. At no point has a third party really got much of a look in, in this continual two horse race, governments and policies continually swinging between the two front riders.

UK vote shares since 1832 (Blue: Conservative; Yellow: Liberals/LDs; Red: Labour)

Over the last one hundred years, the leading two parties have on average received 80% of the total number of votes cast in general elections and won 92% of the total seats in the House of Commons.

In the last general election of December 2019, the main opposition party won the fewest seats it had won for nearly 100 years. Many pundits have pointed out that the Conservative landslide was not just about their own success and that of their leader Boris Johnson. Johnson’s approval rating in the run up to the election was firmly in the negative, standing at minus 12. His main campaign promise to get the country out of the European Union divided the country and he had a bit of a reputation amongst many as an…

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