2026: The Fragmentation Will Continue until Morale Improves

Some thoughts on the political year ahead

2025 was perhaps the year that broke two-party politics in the UK. On the right, the Conservatives barely seemed to notice their own death throes, failing to make headway against a struggling Labour government and an ascendant Reform. On the left, Labour itself haemorrhaged support to insurgents on its own side and to a vast swathe of indifference and apathy. As the New Year begins, the historic parties are polling lower than they have ever done. The question for 2026 will be whether and how that consolidates.

Labour continues to have a large parliamentary majority, yet hollow public support. The Tories are the main Opposition, perhaps in name only. Neither has found effective ways to discharge their post-2024 roles. The Conservatives remain weighed down by their record of time in office. Labour by their fiscal inheritance and internal pathologies. Both are also struggling with broader philosophical questions. Neither has a sense of who their people are – who they are representing and how it translates into policy. Both often seem actively hostile to the coalition they do have.

The momentum, by contrast, lies with challenger parties that have addressed these questions. Reform on the right, the Greens on the left, and the Lib Dems hoovering up a solid chunk of the centre. Each of these has a broader sense of who they are and who they stand for, even if they don’t channel it into governance. It may not be fleshed out into a coherent policy platform, but they are connecting with voters and garnering support from those dissatisfied with the mainstream. We are already seeing how this develops into political blocs.

The story of 2026 will be about how these surges are capitalised on. The May elections will serve as a testing ground for the poll leads. In Scotland, Wales, and the English councils, we can anticipate latent poll leads to solidify into victories. This matters in two ways: for the boost it will provide to the challenger parties and for the turmoil it will likely generate for the incumbents. How the subsequent nine months play out will be the political story of the year.

Winning elections is the bedrock of politics. For the parties on the rise, May presents a significant opportunity to translate theoretical gains into tangible outcomes. Reform had a head start on this last year, but the elections in English cities will provide a similar opportunity for the parties of the left. If they adopt it, it will deliver substantial benefits.

The first advantage is psychological. Poll leads can be explained away and rationalised by those with an interest in doing so. The sight of councillors losing their seats en masse cannot be. In 2025, the surge in Reform wins arguably drove the wave of Con-Ref defections, as has-beens and wannabes on the right saw Reform as their path back to power. In Labour, losing a suite of councillors to the Greens will make urban MPs twitchy, while more suburban ones will eye the rise of Reform eagerly. Seeing the challenge numerically represented on their patch is likely to make them more nervous and more worried about where the party is headed. For the parties that claim those seats, winning will provide a huge morale boost.

It will also deliver practical advantages. One of the persistent problems for challenger parties is converting broad popularity into campaigning action. Winning helps with that. Councillors have a vested interest in laying the groundwork in seats. They will drag their friends and families out. They provide a boost of energy for local organisations to coalesce around. Well-managed, this translates into campaigning activity, voter intentions, and groundwork for effective General Election campaigns. At the same time, it sucks these things away from your opponents, cutting energy out of their ground campaigns. It is a success that compounds- especially in areas that have been politically neglected as “safe”.

All of the challengers stand to gain this electoral momentum and use it to sustain their challenges from this year into next. For the incumbents, the problem is how to reverse this trend. Each needs to reestablish dominance within its own bloc. Doing this will yield huge electoral gains if the other bloc remains divided. That task now looks very different for the government and the opposition, however.

For Labour, being in power offers the best opportunity to address this. Their track record, however, points towards the challenges in doing so. This year will be a vital transitional year for them – one where they should feel the relentless pressure of time. This may seem an odd thing to say three years before a likely General Election date, but Labour need to realise it isn’t. Delivering things that improve lives and win support takes time. Legislation is slow to progress through the Commons, and programmes take time to implement. Results take even longer. If Labour has initiatives that are likely to move the dial, unless they get them underway this year, they will not be noticeable by election time.

To get this right, the party needs to recover its sense of strategic purpose. So far in government, it has seemed listless. The party’s programmes have not been aligned, producing confusing outcomes. They have also failed to understand to whom and for whom they are speaking. Such an error is fatal in bloc politics, and it is proving so for Starmer’s government, as it fails to win over voters from the right while losing them to the left. The party needs a clearer sense of whose lives it wants to improve in 2029, and a strategy to achieve that.

Their job will be made more complicated by international affairs. This year has already been marked by further chaos from the Trump administration. The ongoing claims to Greenland are at best going to prove an additional distraction, at worst, the greatest schism in international politics since the Second World War. At the same time, the war in Ukraine continues. Whether it inches towards a ceasefire or not, Starmer will be spending considerable time on international coalition-building. This is a problem for domestic politics. Doing it effectively requires the focus of a PM, or a clear strategy and system that can operate without one. So far, Labour has demonstrated neither.

For the Conservatives, the problem remains as before, but it is more difficult. They enter 2026 in a worse position than they did 2025. The party is less popular with the public, and the Reform Party has had a good year of consolidation. Farage’s outfit has picked up councils and the advantages that come with that incumbency. They have also capitalised on media attention and are gradually winning over bits of the wider right-wing establishment, especially the press. They will seek to use this year to establish themselves as the de facto opposition.

The Conservatives need to find a way of addressing this. The first is determining whether they really want to fight Reform, an internal struggle that still seems in its Phoney War stages. Much like last year, a swathe of the right seems pretty content to become a junior partner to a Farage government. That is the sort of attitude that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and ultimately spells the surrender of the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Those who reject it must win the internal battle and also have a plan to reverse the facts on the ground that give rise to this fatalism.

If they have the fight, they must then choose which voters to take it to. Like Labour, the party needs a clearer idea of who it is standing for and what it is offering them. This work helps differentiate them from Reform and attract voters who have been lost to both the right and other directions. It also needs to reinvigorate and rebuild the electoral machine to capitalise on its remaining strengths and to give it a chance of surviving beyond May’s electoral cycle. Without this, the longstanding benefits of incumbency will ebb away.

Taken together, this suggests that 2026 is unlikely to bring any clean resolution to Britain’s current political uncertainty. Challenger parties will continue to build organisational strength and normalise multi-party competition at local and devolved levels. In contrast, the major parties remain caught between the need for long-term renewal and the short-term demands of leadership, media cycles and internal management.

Labour needs to regain an understanding of what constitutes successful government and to deploy it. By both failing to deliver and alienating many existing supporters, they have diluted their own presence in the left bloc. Correcting both may restore it, but it only works if there is a fully fledged plan focused on who they want to feel good in 2029. The Conservatives need to decide whether they wish to respond to Reform and, if so, what that response will be. There’s every chance each party will react to May by changing leader, but even if they do, these fundamentals will remain similar.

There is, in short, no obvious mechanism by which the system returns to stability in the short term. If neither party can rebuild coherent coalitions, restore local organisational strength, and translate authority into visible improvement, fragmentation will cease to appear as a temporary disruption and begin to resemble the normal condition of British politics. That does not mean constant crisis, but it does mean thinner mandates, more contested authority, and governments operating with less political capital to spend. In that sense, 2026 is less likely to be remembered as the moment things changed than as the year it became clear that they already had.