Is the duopoly finally breaking?

The last Ipsos opinion poll for the general election puts Labour and the Tories on an combined 56% of the vote, which is an all-time low. Does this mean their power duopoly is finally breaking down?

Between them Labour and the Tories have held political power in Britain for a century, but if the final general election polls are to be believed, they’re heading for their lowest combined vote share in all of that time.

According to the final Ipsos poll before the election, it could be as low as 56%, which is an astonishing decline from the combined vote shares of 75.7% in 2019 and 84.2% in 2017.

The Tories seem to have lost almost half of their voters to Farage’s mob, meaning they’re heading for their lowest share of the vote ever, while 68% of the people saying they’ll vote Labour are doing it principally to get rid of the Tories, not out of any fondness for Starmer or his dramatic lunge to the political right.

It’s now looking like a distinct possibility that Labour will achieve a lower percentage of the vote, and a lower number of actual votes, than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour did in 2017!

If Labour manage to win one of the biggest landslides in Westminster history on the back of a low turnout election, in which they perform no better than Corbyn did in 2017, it’ll just go to prove what an absurd and unrepresentative electoral system we’re lumbered with.

However, does anyone think that the beneficiaries of this absurd disproportionality would ever do anything to undo their artificial advantage and reform the system so that votes are more-or-less proportional to seats?

Of course not. Why would Starmer’s cabal change a ludicrous system that rewards them with something like two thirds of the parliamentary seats on a little over one third of the actual vote?

They’ll revel in their win and complacently stick with a ridiculously disproportional electoral system that’s clearly becoming more and more unstable.

They won’t concern themselves with the rapid deterioration of life-long voter loyalty, or ask themselves how a system that’s supposed to deliver stability has resulted in an unprecedented swing from a large Tory majority in 2019 to an even bigger Labour one now.

Disillusionment and anger with Labour will set in extremely quickly if Starmer sticks with his diabolical plans to continue with Tory under-investment and austerity ruination, favour corporations and the mega-rich, and attack the (already catastrophically weakened) NHS for the benefit of privatisation health profiteers.

And it seems unlikely that the Tories will recover from their thumping defeat quickly if they go chasing after the extreme-right, ultranationalist reactionary voters they’re losing to Farage’s mob, rather than focusing on what they actually did wrong over the last 14 years.

The political situations in countries across Europe demonstrate that old-fashioned power duopolies like the Labour/Tory one are weakening everywhere.

Once mighty conservative parties and workers’ parties have been collapsing into minor also-rans all over the place, and Emmanuel Macron’s rapid descent from commanding a huge and unprecedented parliamentary majority in France into a distant third place is proof of what happens to self-styled "centrists" (such as Starmer) when they consciously ignore the interests of the people who actually elected them, in order to push right-wing economics that benefit capitalists, property owners, and the mega-rich.

Even though Labour are set to win an incredible and undeserved mega-majority, the age-old Labour/Tory power duopoly has never actually looked weaker or more unpopular.

But this is far from a positive development if the left and social liberals continue failing to get their acts together, because if they don’t, Farage’s fanatics look determined to fill the void like the Le Pen family cabal are trying to do in France. And who knows what horrors they could come up with now that they’ve achieved their fantasy of Brexit isolationism.

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