The Electorate Isn’t Moving.
It’s Going Around in Circles.

Britain has tried almost everyone

Since 2010, the electorate has worked its way through virtually every available political offer.

Britain tried a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, which promised to repair the public finances and govern responsibly in the national interest.

It then gave the Conservatives a majority.

It voted for Brexit and was promised sovereignty, control and national renewal.

Millions turned towards Jeremy Corbyn because he appeared to offer a decisive break with austerity and the economic settlement surrounding it.

Britain then gave Boris Johnson a huge majority to “get Brexit done” and level up the country.

After fourteen years of Conservative government, Labour was handed power on another promise of change, stability and competence.

When those promises failed to produce the transformation people expected, support moved again—to Reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and independents.

That is usually described as political movement. But movement suggests a journey. It implies that the country is travelling towards a new settlement.

What we are actually seeing is circulation.

The electorate moves from one promise to another and repeatedly arrives back at the same material conditions: unaffordable housing, deteriorating infrastructure, insecure work, high bills, struggling councils and overstretched public services.

People keep voting for change. The operating system underneath government largely survives.

The politics of the quick fix

People are not irrational for wanting something different.

They have spent years watching public services deteriorate while being told that one more election, one more leader, one more announcement or one more act of political will can put Britain right.

Every party offers its own version of the quick fix.

These parties are not identical. Their policies would produce genuinely different consequences, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But they all operate inside the same political marketplace. That marketplace rewards promises of immediate relief far more readily than honest explanations of cost, difficulty and time.

Nobody wants to tell the electorate that Britain’s problems have accumulated across decades and could take decades of investment and reconstruction to reverse.

Nobody wants to explain clearly what rebuilding the country would cost, who would pay, what would have to change and which benefits might not appear until after the next election.

It is easier to identify one villain, announce one policy and promise one breakthrough.

Find the public’s frustration, massage the message around it and keep massaging it until enough people are prepared to put you in power.

When power becomes the prize

Of course political parties want power. Without winning elections, they cannot implement anything.

But gaining power has increasingly become the objective rather than the means.

Parties study the polling, identify the language that performs well and remove anything likely to frighten a decisive group of voters. Difficult trade-offs are softened. Long-term costs are hidden. Structural problems are reduced to slogans.

The programme is massaged until it becomes electorally saleable.

The party then enters government and confronts the same system that limited its predecessors: centralised, financially constrained, extensively outsourced and increasingly dependent upon private companies to deliver public objectives.

It discovers that announcing change and delivering change are completely different things.

But from the party’s perspective, managing decline inside government is still preferable to watching somebody else manage it from opposition.

It is better to be in power than not—even when being in power does not appear to make people’s lives materially better.

That is the trap.

A state that still has power—but less capacity

It would be wrong to say the British government has no levers.

Parliament can legislate. The Treasury can tax, borrow and spend. Ministers can regulate markets, create institutions, nationalise assets and change the organisation of public services.

Britain remains a wealthy country with enormous formal state power.

The problem is that successive governments have weakened many of the institutions through which political decisions become material results.

Essential utilities were privatised. Public services were outsourced. Local authorities lost money, personnel and expertise. Government departments became dependent upon consultants and contractors. Long-term planning was subordinated to spending reviews, fiscal rules and electoral cycles.

Government can announce a housing target without owning sufficient land, employing builders or giving councils the resources to construct the homes.

It can demand cleaner rivers without directly controlling the water companies responsible for much of the infrastructure.

It can promise better transport while depending on fragmented operators, contractors and short-term funding settlements.

It can announce national renewal while refusing to maintain the investment and institutional capacity that renewal requires.

Westminster retains the authority to announce change.

What has been weakened is its ability to deliver that change directly.

What hollowing out looks like

The condition of English local government shows what this means in practice.

Institute for Fiscal Studies research found that council core funding per person in 2024–25 remained 18% lower in real terms than in 2010–11. In the most deprived tenth of council areas, it remained 26% lower.

The reduction did not affect every service equally.

Councils were forced to protect statutory services and respond to residents with the most acute needs. Spending on adult and acute children’s social care grew from 50% of councils’ non-education spending in 2010–11 to around 65% by 2023–24.

Meanwhile, spending on youth services and Sure Start remained around 70% lower than in 2010–11. Spending on highways and transport, culture and leisure, and planning remained more than 40% lower. Housing spending remained roughly one-third lower.

That is what hollowing out looks like.

The council still exists. The name remains above the door. The legal responsibilities remain. But its ability to plan, prevent, maintain, develop and shape the future has been squeezed by the growing cost of responding to immediate crises.

Fewer planners do not simply mean slower planning applications. They mean less public capacity to determine what gets built and where.

Reduced transport spending does not simply mean fewer buses. It makes it harder to connect people to employment, education and services.

Cuts to youth provision do not remove the needs of young people. They remove the institutions designed to intervene before those needs become more serious and more expensive.

The state saves money in one place and then pays for the consequences somewhere else.

The outsourced state

Outsourcing is not automatically wrong. Governments will always purchase specialist services, equipment and expertise from outside organisations.

The problem arises when outsourcing becomes the default rather than a deliberate choice—when the state loses the internal knowledge required to understand, challenge or replace the contractors on which it depends.

That is why the government’s own change in language matters.

A new public-interest test will require departments to consider whether major outsourced services would be better delivered internally. Larger departments will also be expected to publish insourcing strategies.

The government itself has described this as calling time on “outsourcing by default.”

That is an admission embedded inside a policy change: contracting out had ceased to be merely a tool and had become a governing habit.

Once capacity has been lost, rebuilding it is not as easy as cancelling a contract. Skills must be recruited. Teams must be reconstructed. Institutional knowledge must be recovered. Systems must be rebuilt.

Hollowing out can happen quickly. Restoring capability takes years.

The “big beasts” have not returned

This is why I am unconvinced when commentators see Labour and the Conservatives rise slightly and announce the return of the two big beasts.

A party polling 23% or 27% is not politically dominant. It is one weakened participant in a fragmented contest.

Labour and the Conservatives retain considerable advantages. They possess national organisations, established brands, parliamentary representation, financial networks and decades of media recognition.

But familiarity should not be confused with public loyalty.

The old two-party system was supported by class identity, trade unions, workplaces, churches, local associations, newspapers and communities in which voting habits passed between generations.

Much of that world has weakened or disappeared.

Today, somebody can move from Conservative to Reform, Labour to Green or Liberal Democrat to Labour without developing a deep attachment to any of them. Support may be conditional, temporary and motivated more by rejection than belief.

A modest polling recovery does not prove that trust has returned. It may simply mean another party disappointed its voters first.

Labour and the Conservatives are not necessarily becoming the big beasts again.

They are the two oldest surviving brands in a political market where loyalty has collapsed.

Would proportional representation solve it?

A proportional voting system would make Parliament more representative.

It would reduce wasted votes, weaken the distortions produced by first-past-the-post and make it harder for a party supported by a minority of voters to secure an enormous parliamentary majority.

Smaller parties would gain representation closer to their actual support, while negotiation and coalition-building would become normal features of government.

Those would be meaningful democratic improvements.

But a fairer voting system would not automatically make Britain govern better.

It would change how power is distributed. It would not, by itself, rebuild the machinery through which that power is exercised.

Proportional representation cannot employ planners, restore council departments, recover institutional knowledge, finance infrastructure or reverse decades of dependence on outsourcing.

Britain could elect a Parliament that represented its political fragmentation almost perfectly and still end up with five parties negotiating over how to manage the same decline.

We might represent the dysfunction more fairly without resolving it.

The operating system survives

That is the part missing from most conversations about the polls.

Commentators obsess over which party is up, which leader is down and whether voters are moving left or right.

The more important question is why governments with different leaders, slogans and parliamentary majorities keep producing such familiar outcomes.

Austerity promised to repair the public finances and create the foundations for growth.

Brexit promised to restore sovereignty and control.

Boris Johnson promised to level up the country.

Labour promised change.

The personalities changed. The language changed. The electoral coalitions changed.

The reluctance to describe honestly what reconstruction would cost also survived.

People experience another disappointment and move towards the next party offering a faster answer.

Reform rises. The Greens rise. Labour recovers. The Conservatives recover. Another poll appears and the media announces another historic realignment.

But the electorate is not arriving anywhere. It is being sent around the same political roundabout.

Reconstructing power

The question Britain faces is not simply: which party should govern next?

What would any party need in order to govern effectively again?

That means rebuilding institutional expertise and giving local and regional government genuine authority and capacity.

It means maintaining infrastructure investment across decades rather than announcing disconnected projects.

It means reducing automatic dependence on outsourcing and reconsidering who should control essential services.

It means giving government the ability to build, employ and deliver—not merely regulate, subsidise and commission.

Above all, it requires political honesty.

Rebuilding Britain would involve costs, choices and trade-offs. It could not be delivered through one Budget, one Parliament or one change of prime minister.

It would require a programme capable of surviving elections and a public conversation mature enough to accept that everything cannot be repaired cheaply, painlessly and immediately.

That is not an attractive proposition in a political system addicted to quick fixes.

But without it, every new government will eventually collide with the same limitations.