How Britain's Two Biggest Parties Both Collapsed at the Same Time

To say that western democracies are going through a bit of chaos right now is an understatement. Nowhere is that more obvious than the United Kingdom.

For the past hundred years, the same two parties, the Conservatives and Labour, have swapped power between them. Today they're both falling apart, and if things continue, both could be shut out of Downing Street when the next election rolls around in 2029. The most remarkable part? Both wounds are self-inflicted.

Across the west, only the United States has been more stable, with Republicans and Democrats controlling some part of government for roughly 170 years. And political stability is generally a good thing for a country, especially in an increasingly interconnected world. In a two-party system, when party A loses, you more or less know who you'll be dealing with. Everyone likes knowing what the backup plan is. But when the backup is someone who's never held power before, the wider world gets skittish. International cooperation stalls. Trade deals go elsewhere. Foreign investment grinds to a halt.

The lesson, as we'll see, is simple: when your party exists only to oppose something or someone, you don't have a foundation. You don't stand for anything, just against someone else. And understanding how Britain got here can help us spot the same pattern taking shape in the United States.

So what exactly is happening in London? Let's take the two parties one at a time, starting with the Conservatives.

The Conservative Unraveling

The Conservatives returned to government in the 2010 general election, set against the backdrop of the global financial crisis and then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown's dour Scottish mood. David Cameron's austerity program of less government spending to balance the books became the mantra of British government for the next five years.

But all that time, the UK's relationship with the European Union was handing other right-wing parties, and some of the more hardline Conservative MPs, something to rally around. So Cameron made a deal: stick with the Conservatives, and if he won the next election, they'd get their Brexit referendum.

If you're reading this, you probably know how that turned out. He won. Brexit passed, even though Cameron himself had campaigned against it. So he resigned, and was replaced by his Home Secretary, Theresa May, in 2016.

But Brexit was, and remains, a poisoned chalice. Nobody knew what kind of deal would actually shake out, and everyone had a different idea of what Brexit even meant. Out of the EU with a trade deal? Closer alignment with the US? Total independence? May couldn't assemble a majority behind any single plan, so she resigned after just three years and was replaced by her former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.

Johnson's 2019 election campaign was built around one policy: "Get Brexit Done." After three years of fighting, voters just wanted it over with, and Johnson was rewarded with a massive 80-seat majority to force through whatever he wanted. He won seats Labour had held for a century, in the former industrial heartlands that helped build not just the UK but the entire British Empire.

That economic engine had been gutted, much like the American rust belt. Cheaper labor overseas means it's cheaper to make things there and ship them here. The promise of bringing jobs back after leaving the EU resonated with those "Red Wall" voters. So both the Red Wall in the UK and the Rust Belt in the US flipped from the union-dominated left-wing party to the protectionist right.

How Johnson Set Up the Collapse

Here's the irony: it was Johnson himself who set the stage for the Conservative collapse. It wasn't any government policy that brought him down. It was his own behavior.

Partygate, the office parties held during COVID lockdowns when ordinary people couldn't even visit dying loved ones, reeked of hypocrisy. One gathering took place the night before the funeral of Prince Philip, the Queen's husband. And you don't mess with the monarchy, especially when your party was founded on being pro-royal more than 300 years ago, and your voters skew older, socially conservative, and deeply nostalgic for the good old days of king and country.

Johnson was wounded but looked like he might scrape through. Then a sex scandal finished the job, and not even his own. Johnson had appointed Chris Pincher as Deputy Chief Whip despite knowing Pincher had a documented history of sexual impropriety. Senior figures in his government, including the Chancellor (Britain's finance minister) and the Health Secretary, resigned, which set off a domino effect.

You can survive a scandal in a parliamentary system. But once your own party decides you're the scandal, the game is up.

This is actually one of the great features of parliamentary systems: you can remove an unpopular leader without throwing out the entire party, and you don't have to wait a fixed number of years to do it. Here in the US, we're stuck with whoever we've got unless they're removed from office, resign, or die.

Truss vs. the Lettuce

Johnson resigned and was ultimately replaced by Liz Truss.

Now, these replacement Prime Ministers don't go to the public first. They're chosen through internal party contests, where MPs whittle the field down to a couple of finalists who are then voted on by party members. To Americans this might seem unfair, since the new leader gets a head start without facing the country, but a new Prime Minister can call an election to confirm their mandate, as May did in 2017 and Johnson did in December 2019.

It matters because the process tends to produce relative extremists, much like party primaries in the US. The ideological true believers make the final call. And those believers picked Liz Truss, who promised an American-style right-wing economic policy.

How'd that work out? Truss lasted 49 days, the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history by an imperial mile. She's a footnote now, a pub trivia answer to "who was Prime Minister when Queen Elizabeth died?"

As soon as the national mourning period ended, Truss introduced a mini-budget, a mid-year course correction stuffed with unfunded tax cuts, presented without any independent economic review. It sent the pound into freefall and spooked UK bond markets so badly that the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund had to intervene. Famously, she lost a contest with a head of lettuce. She probably would have been gone even sooner had the country not ground to a halt following the Queen's death.

Sunak and the Legitimacy Problem

After another internal election, the Conservatives replaced Truss with Rishi Sunak, Johnson's former Chancellor, whose resignation had helped trigger Johnson's downfall. Sunak was a moderate, largely because the more conservative wing of the party was now tainted by association with the Truss disaster and didn't even make its case.

But by this point, many British voters were questioning the democratic legitimacy of the whole carousel. May replaced Cameron without an election. Johnson replaced May without an election. Truss replaced Johnson, and Sunak replaced Truss, both without elections, and both leading a party that had won power on Johnson's manifesto.

Sunak stopped the panic, but he could never move the polls. The public had made up its mind. The Conservatives were 20 points down, and when Sunak finally called a snap election to get out of town, they won just 121 seats, their worst result in almost 200 years.

Labour's Puddle-Deep Landslide

But the victorious Labour Party's landslide of 412 seats was, in truth, a marriage of convenience.

Thanks to first-past-the-post (the same system the US uses, where whoever gets the most votes in a seat wins it, even without a majority), Labour took all those seats on roughly one in three votes. People didn't vote for Labour so much as they voted for anyone but the Conservatives. It was a very wide but very shallow victory. Like a puddle.

One Labour candidate won a seat with just 26.7% of the vote, and, fittingly, it was the seat Liz Truss had held. The public had rendered its verdict.

The trouble is that a shallow victory means that on day one, only about a third of the country actually supports you. There's no room for error, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made some.

He got barely a month-long honeymoon. Then came a run of bad political communication and an endless series of flip-flops as he tried to dance around whatever is left of the British political center. His harder line on immigration, probably the single most important issue for the British public, has pushed away left-wing supporters and given the Greens fresh energy. The left is also fracturing over Gaza, with younger voters drifting toward the new Your Party, led by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It's not a huge amount of support, but when your best day is only 33%, you can't afford to lose anyone.

The Tightrope Starmer Can't Walk

So Starmer's Labour isn't right-wing enough on immigration and isn't left-wing enough on the economy. He's trying to walk the same centrist tightrope that gave Tony Blair's Labour a decade in power, but that was 30 years ago, and Starmer doesn't have the instincts for it. He's not half the communicator Blair was. Say what you want about Blair's increasingly tarnished legacy, but he knew how to campaign and how to talk to voters.

People want bold ideas, and Starmer waffles before reversing course, U-turning on winter fuel payments, agricultural inheritance taxes, welfare reform. Just recently, his own Defence Secretary resigned because promised military funding hadn't materialized, largely because the money isn't there. That, in turn, owes a lot to the hit to European trade since Brexit and 15 years of underinvestment under Conservative governments. But the British public has no patience, and they blame Starmer, who's been in office less than two years.

He simply can't convince anyone, because no one knows who he is or what he stands for.

The Lesson for the United States

And that's the lesson American parties should take to heart. If you don't give people a reason to vote for you, if you just run on "we're not them," you'll have no foundation to actually get anything done. You'll lurch from crisis to crisis, trying to climb out of the hole you've dug and leave some kind of lasting legacy, only for the next administration to reverse everything. That's assuming the courts let it get that far.

If Keir Starmer called a snap election today, it would be suicide. Nigel Farage's right-wing Reform UK would likely win a majority, only a few years after being founded. But, just like Labour, they'd do it on around 26% of the vote, because the left is split among several parties and the Conservatives have given their former voters no reason to come back.

How can the UK ever be stable if a party can win a massive majority on a fraction of the vote and then fail to deliver any of the wild promises it made? Brexit has already shrunk Britain's standing on a world stage dominated by political and economic superpowers. And when other countries can't tell who, or what kind of government, they'll be dealing with from one year to the next, they'll increasingly just ignore them.

Is the same thing coming for the US? Will increasingly extreme administrations every four years, each undoing everything its predecessor did, push other countries to move on and look toward more stable partners, even ones they're not perfectly aligned with?

It's happened before. Just look at former world powers like the UK to see what that decline looks like.