Move over, Labour, Tories: plenty of room for a new party

The Herald Scotland

11-07-2025

History tells us that it is time for another existential event. A week ago, the latest attempt was made to precipitate this existential change, when Labour's problem child, Zarah Sultana, announced that she and Labour's problem grandad Jeremy Corbyn were forming a new political party.
This one is going nowhere. Ms Sultana's opening gambit – 'it's socialism or barbarism' – told us what we needed to know. This is not a serious outfit and these are not serious people; they'll be talking to seven people in a North London wine bar by the time the next election rolls around.
Nigel Farage is not likely to be in that wine bar, and not just because he's more of a country pub kind of guy. Love him or hate him, Mr Farage is a much more serious operator and is a large part of the way through executing a plan to destroy the Tory party and, as it turns out, maybe the Labour Party at the same time.
Read more by Andy Maciver
Mr Farage's plan – as I have written before on these pages – is actually remarkably similar to events, over the Atlantic in Canada, during the latter part of the last century and the early part of this one. In 1987 the Reform Party was formed in Western Canada as a populist protest against the out-of-touch elites in the East. In 1993 the Progressive Conservatives were decimated. By 2002 they were dead. By 2006 Reform, feasting on the carcass of the Progressive Conservatives and renaming itself the Conservative Party of Canada, was in power, where it remained for almost a decade.
If Mr Farage emulates his Canadian inspiration in 2029 and strolls into 10 Downing Street, the only people who could say they are surprised are those who aren't watching closely enough.
Forget, for a moment, that we are talking about Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Forget that they currently look like the disruptors who could break the two-party monopoly of the last century. Britain finds itself in a doom loop and this is a monopoly which needs to be broken.
If we need any more proof of this, the Labour Government's welfare debacle should tell us everything we need to know. Labour's welfare reform agenda, mild at the outset and indistinguishable from the status quo by the time it was rejected by the party's own MPs, is over.
Almost one quarter of the working age population – the very people who should be earning the money to spend in the economy, and paying the tax to fund public services – is in receipt of welfare. We spend more than double the amount on working age welfare than we do on defence, at a time when President Putin is itching to test Nato's Article Five, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has his finger on the nuclear button.
This is a uniquely British problem, and a debilitating one.
Already swallowing a quarter of government spending, and well over half when combined with the healthcare budget, the welfare bill will now go up dramatically. Economic growth is predicted to be negligible. Political reality will lead to an increase in tax, which will further stifle growth and reduce the tax take.
Pessimism is the enemy of progress, but pessimism is all I can muster today, particularly given that the Office of Budget responsibility appears to agree.
The Tories are unable to clean this up, principally because although the British people will often give the Tory party permission to fix the economy, it will never give it permission to reform welfare or public services.
And so, if the electorate will not allow the Tories to fix Britain's problems, and its own MPs will not allow Labour to fix Britain's problems, then someone else will have to.
Nigel Farage has already jolted the two-party system (Image: PA)
A proportional electoral system would help, decisively. This has been a long time coming. Westminster may be the mother of parliaments, but even old mums need to adapt to a change in circumstances. Britain's big issues – welfare, of course, but also failed public services, insufficient housing and emaciated infrastructure – cannot be overcome during the course of a single term of office. Yet our all-or-nothing first past the post system encourages short-term, undeliverable promises, and discourages sensible long-term policymaking.
Proportional representation, at a stroke, would create a parliament of minorities and demand that they worked together strategically and without the frantic day-to-day Westminster reality that 'you're either with us or you're against us'.
In Scotland, of course, we already have proportional representation. And I know what you're thinking: 'hold on Maciver, you idiot, Scotland isn't any better'. You'd be right, of course, but we've been scarred by the independence argument, which has in effect turned Holyrood into a two-tribe parliament of nationalists and unionists.
This could change. Indeed, there is decent polling evidence that, between them the SNP and the Greens will not be able to command a parliamentary majority in favour of independence, which would take that issue off the table and allow calmer, considered policy. Those close to both the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, for instance, would be in no way surprised if those parties found themselves working very closely together after next year's Holyrood election.
That, on its own, won't be enough to change the rules of the game in the Scottish Parliament. What it needs to function as a real, European-style proportional parliament is for those parties which operate at arms length to parties in Westminster – the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems – to create or morph into parties of and for the Scottish Parliament alone. That this is the major long-term concern of SNP strategists tells its own story.
The moral of the story is that there is nothing to fear from new political parties. Quite the opposite. They may be all that can save us from decline, decay and decomposition.
Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters, and co-host of the Holyrood Sources podcast