This week, local democracy reporter Daniel Esson looks at the rise of minor parties and how Britain has become a truly multi-party democracy…

The popularity of Reform UK, and the growing influence of other minor parties, has led some commentators and politicians alike to realise that the grip of Labour and the Conservatives on British politics is loosening.

Today’s local election results will further show that we now live in a truly multi-party politics, just with an electoral system which resists it.

Duverger’s Law holds that first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting systems with single-member electoral districts push towards a system of two big-tent catch-all parties. This fact is hard to deny, and shows in that the role of challenger parties in Britain has been generally to displace one of the existing two hegemonic ones, as the Liberals supplanted the Whigs, and Labour did to the Liberals.

British political parties used to be actual mass parties – with a credible claim to representing and channelling the views and interests of huge proportions of the public, not only through direct party membership but also through unions and associations linked to the parties. In the early 1950s, the Tories claimed a membership of 2.8 million, and Labour a million; while these were likely inflated, these dwarf figures since. Labour’s peak of almost 600,000 under Jeremy Corbyn led some in that party to declare that they were again a mass party.

With the precipitous decline in Labour and Tory membership in recent years, it’s safe to say that, even including fringe parties, there are probably fewer than a million paid-up party members of any sort in the UK as of 2025.

That sounds a lot, but the reality of this hollowness becomes clear in local party meetings. Some local branches have most of their membership exclusively on paper, few of which are actually actively involved. There was a time when Canterbury’s Labour Party had to reschedule meetings because all those who showed up could not fit into the Friends Meeting House. Now, one hears such a thing is unthinkable.

As the public has withdrawn away from political participation, the leading elites of political parties, left unmoored from their base in society, have retreated further into the state, into the world of the institutions – charities, NGOs, think-tankery, “campaigns” which seldom seem to leave SW1. Peter Mair famously called this the ‘mutual retreat’ of politicians and the public away from each other, leaving a yawning void where representative politics use to be. To most of the public, politics is an alien world and parties are its UFOs. Or, as Rudy Andeweg put it, “parties have become the representatives of government in society, rather than society’s bridgehead in the state”.

Despite the collapse in the membership and support bases of political parties – Labour and the Tories until recently seemed the only game in town, and it’s FPTP which keeps them there, just about. In most of the country, especially at general elections, Labour and the Tories can credibly claim it’s a two-horse race and compel constituents to vote for them in full awareness that they are voting for a party which doesn’t represent their views or interests to achieve a greater aim, like not allowing the others to form a government.

If the country had a form of proportional representation, Labour and the Tories would be reduced to rumps as voters look for other parties closer to their own preferences – which would doubtless spring up like mushrooms after rain under PR. PR is a popular reform among Labour members – not so among its leaders, who know that that way danger lies - not least because their own ever-warring factions would finally go their own ways.

The Tories were resoundingly defeated after years of visceral unpopularity, and despite Labour’s near two-thirds majority in Parliament, they were elected on the second-lowest turnout since universal suffrage.

Even under FPTP, polling suggests the most popular single party is Reform UK which actively positions itself against the lot of them. The two parties which have totalised the political spectrum in Britain for a century look completely out for the count, held in stasis only by the voting system, which pretty much every party except them wants to abolish. The hangover of the 20th century is clearing – all that needs to happen is for voters to stop opting for the hair of the dog.

There are plenty of ways to stay in the know when it comes to politics in Kent and Medway.

For more from Dan Esson and the local democracy team, you can sign up to the Kent Politics Briefing newsletter, which arrives in inboxes every Friday.

You can also listen to our Kent Politics Podcast. This week’s episode welcomes Electoral Calculus’s Martin Baxter who explains how it was a “very cross” electorate that went to the polls yesterday.

You can listen to the podcast at IM Listening, or download it from Apple Podcasts, Spotify and TuneIn – just search for Kent Politics Podcast. New episodes are available every Friday.

And you can watch the KMTV Kent Politics Show every Friday at 5pm on Freeview channel 7 and Virgin Media channel 159.