Play nice together

v.

ASENSIBLE PARTY SYSTEM FOR BRITAIN probably wouldn’t have the Labour or Conservative parties. There would be a socialist party, a leftish Green party, a greenish NIMBY party, a working class “fund the NHS, hang the paedos” party, a social democratic and liberal party, a right of centre liberal pro-business party, a national-conservative party, secessionist nationalist parties and some flotsam and jetsam to the right of the nat-cons.

Such a realignment would be liberating: we’d no longer have to share a party with people we despise for the sake of winning an election — though both main parties are sweaty, overcrowded political omnibuses, there are also several tribes crammed into the Lib Dems’ creaking Mini.

Given the undeniable results of our current electoral system, why don’t Labour and the Lib Dems merge? To answer this question is to address the history of why we’re two parties.

Political systems are not normally designed from scratch. There’s a lot of history, happenstance and Darwinian evolution involved, particularly when the barriers to entry are as high as they are in Britain. There have only been three times when a new party has broken in and transformed the political landscape — the Labour party in 1918, the Liberals and SNP in 1974 and UKIP in 2015.

We have ended up with a system with a profound structural advantage for the right, partly because the realignment after the coalition in 2010 was not the one we might have expected. In the past, Conservative-Liberal cooperation has produced “National Liberal” formations and each time the Liberal breakaways have given the Conservatives new infusions of political talent, electoral support, money and, perhaps most importantly, ideas.

In its history, the Tory party has discovered the free market, democracy, consensus and the voters of mill towns through its embrace of Liberal