The Chaos Has Shape

What does the new political landscape mean for progressive civil society, and what should we do about it?

I've never known a time when so many people feel politically homeless, frustrated and confused, while equally fearing the threat of the far-right surge. The fracturing of British party politics is real. But the conclusion most progressives are drawing from it, that we're in an era of pure volatility, with voters bouncing and nothing yet settled, risks leading us toward the wrong strategy. Underneath the noise, British politics has sorted itself into two durable blocs, and understanding that changes what civil society should actually be doing. The progressive bloc is larger and more energised than the current mood suggests.

Fractured politics and the relentless rise of Reform UK

On the face of it, the results of last week’s local elections look like chaos and a fracturing of our two-party system. There feels like no end to the surge in Reform support, the Greens upending Labour in its metropolitan heartlands and sweeping the board in Hackney, Plaid Cymru ending decades of Labour dominance in Wales.

Labour and the Conservatives are each defending positions that look increasingly like managed decline. Everyone assumes it is a matter of when, not if, Prime Minister Keir Starmer will go despite a decisive landslide victory and a parliamentary majority won less than two years ago.

British politics is fractured. We suddenly seem to have multi-party politics squeezed into a two-party, first-past-the-post system. It is hard not to read this as unprecedented volatility with voters bouncing around, nobody loyal to anyone, the old two-party system finally and irreversibly broken. With the sudden and very frightening prospect of a populist far-right party forming a government in three years’ time. I’ve never known a time when so many people feel politically homeless, frustrated and confused, while equally fearing the threat of the far-right surge.

But what matters is what is happening under the surface. The fragility and breakdown of traditional party loyalties is real, but it’s describing the right phenomenon at the wrong level.

The deeper shift - two blocs, not just multiple parties

Underneath the multi-party noise, British politics has sorted itself into two fairly stable blocs. And the organising axis, if you squint at it, looks a lot like Leave versus Remain.

Not in the sense that Brexit is still the headline issue it obviously isn’t. But the social and psychological sorting of people across new lines, divided by demographics, politics, and values, that Brexit catalysed never really went away and is still shaping our politics today.

Brexit was never really just about the EU. It acted as a kind of glue that stuck together a whole set of other identities: your party affiliation, your values (whether you’re socially liberal or conservative), and your sense of who “your people” are. Once those identities aligned under the banner of Remain or Leave, something psychologically powerful happened people stopped seeing the other side as just political opponents and started seeing them as fundamentally different kinds of people. We all felt it, and many still do.

Whether someone voted Remain or Leave seemed to say something about who they were and what sort of society they wanted to live in. These labels became a powerful part of our identity. This is a phenomenon called affective polarisation, and you only have to look at how it is playing out in the US to see the damage of us-versus-them politics. I have family members who didn’t speak to each other for a decade after Brexit; the strength of feeling was that visceral.

Arguably, what Brexit did was give an identity to new political and social cleavages in our society. The fascinating book Brexitland maps the decades that led up to Brexit and traces the shift back to the 1960s and 70s, when mass immigration, neo liberal economic politics and rising university attendance began slowly sorting voters by identity and values rather than class interest. Education level became a stronger predictor of voting behaviour than class. The significance of this work is that it shows these shifts to be both durable and structural not just a momentary alignment under the banners of Leave and Remain.

After Brexit, something strange happened in British politics. Brexit itself basically disappeared as an issue. By 2024, barely anyone listed it as their main concern. But the division it made salient didn’t go away. In the 2024 election, people were still voting in the same two camps a left-liberal, pro-Remain bloc and a right-conservative, pro-Leave bloc.

That’s the fault line Brexit cracked open, and it’s the fault line that continues to produce two blocs. That moment locked a set of identities into alignment and created two camps that are now self-reinforcing, almost regardless of what’s actually on the political agenda. Crucially there is very little voter movement of voters between the blocs. This was the case at the 2024 General Election and while we’re yet to see the full detailed breakdown of last week’s local elections, some election night analysts are already suggesting that beneath the fracture of our party politics, people remain set in these two blocs rather than moving between them.

Labour tried to bring its electoral coalition back together. It isn’t working.

For Labour, this new alignment was bad news, and they have tried to move past it. For the last few years, Labour’s strategic gamble was that you could hold enough of the left-liberal bloc while peeling off significant numbers from the right-conservative bloc with a socially conservative politics and a return to their traditional electoral coalition. Being tough on immigration, the primary concern of Reform voters. Not rocking the boat on Brexit. Not giving Reform the culture war ammunition.

The problem for Labour is that those voters don’t look like they’re coming back any time soon. Reform’s support is sticky and, critically, it’s salient. The voters in the right-conservative bloc who prioritise immigration as their top issue don’t hold that position loosely, it’s an identity. Policy concessions don’t move them, because the issue isn’t just about policy; it’s about who they are and who we are as a country. Reform understand this and are making the most of it.

What Labour’s first two years in power did achieve was making a significant chunk of the left-liberal bloc feel like the party was basically hostile to them and people who might have voted Labour looking around for alternatives. That’s the electoral arithmetic that Labour is now quietly and slowly beginning to accept.

Labour’s pale imitation of Reform won’t work.

Let’s be honest about what the last two years of Labour government have actually looked like from inside the left-liberal bloc.

People didn’t expect Labour to have an easy time in government. They understand the challenges the country faces. But a party that came to power on a wave of relief, finally not the Tories after 14 years, spent a significant portion of its early political capital trying to sound like Reform-lite. Welfare cuts that hit disabled people hardest. Rhetoric and action on immigration that borrowed the framing, if not quite the volume, of the people they were supposedly distinguishing themselves from. A studied avoidance of anything that smelled too “metropolitan.” The message to the left-liberal bloc that delivered their 2024 win was, we know you have nowhere else to go.

It was a strategic bet. It was also, by any honest reading of the evidence, a failure.

When your political identity is built around cultural threat, when immigration isn’t just a policy preference but a signal of who you are and what side you’re on, a centre-left government gesturing in your direction doesn’t reassure you. It just confirms that the threat is real. Labour legitimised the frame and then lost the argument within it, because nobody beats Reform at being Reform.

What Labour did achieve was alienating a substantial chunk of the progressive bloc. The internal polling Labour’s strategists are now staring at isn’t just about Reform. It’s about the progressive vote fragmenting at exactly the moment it needed to coalesce.

In this new political reality, you cannot hold the progressive bloc while being actively contemptuous of a significant chunk of it. Labour is going to have to decide whether it wants to be the anchor of this bloc, or whether it wants to keep trying, unsuccessfully, to be the slightly more competent version of the people it’s supposedly opposing.

Popular front logic is needed to challenge Reform

What the local elections have made clear is that the Conservatives are not in a position to challenge Reform UK effectively within the right-conservative bloc. The left-liberal bloc needs a popular front logic, and the parties need to start acting like they understand that. Loyalty to parties may have diminished, but loyalty to blocs that feel like they reflect our values and identity hasn’t. The fracturing of party politics in a system unaccustomed to it means we need to look at how others manage it.

In France, this threat isn’t new, and the politics of uniting fractured progressive movements in the face of far-right politics is part of the political fabric. The Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), a broad left-wing alliance, formed in 2024 to unite the left against the far-right National Rally and won. The NFP didn’t emerge from everyone agreeing on policy. It emerged from everyone agreeing that the alternative was worse, and from enough discipline on all sides to make the maths work. This may not be quite where we’re heading in the UK, but it is certainly the mindset we will need.

Labour demonising the Greens isn’t just nasty politics it’s strategically self-defeating. You cannot ask people to unite to stop Reform and lend their vote to you tactically in 2029, while spending the years beforehand briefing against their first preference.

So what does civil society do?

This is the part where I’m supposed to say something hopeful. I will. But I want to start somewhere harder.

The rise of Reform and the broader authoritarian-populist politics it represents is a genuine, serious, structurally embedded political force, rooted in real economic abandonment, cultural anxiety, and the very effective exploitation of both by people with money who are promoting an ethno-nationalist, deeply racist politics that causes real harm to real people.

I don’t have all the answers. But I think the same psychology that is shaping our political landscape can teach us something about how to navigate this moment.

1. Think blocs, not just parties

The single most important reframe for progressive civil society is this: stop organising your political engagement around individual parties and start organising around the new stable blocs.

That means understanding what the two blocs actually look like their internal diversity, their fault lines, the values that hold them together. More in Common and Hope Not Hate’s research is invaluable here. Neither bloc is monolithic. It’s no good dismissing Reform voters, but neither is it helpful to see Labour and the Greens as representing wildly different politics. Both blocs contain people with quite different emotional profiles and political motivations. What the left-liberal bloc shares what makes them a bloc rather than just a set of overlapping demographics is a broadly open, outward-facing orientation, and a sense that the authoritarian-populist offer is a threat to their values and to society.

Build your campaigns to speak to that shared orientation. Not to one party’s activist base.

This is not the moment to retreat into the perfectly curated campaign, the meticulously targeted message, the activist network that knows exactly what it thinks and isn’t particularly interested in hearing from anyone outside it.

The left-liberal bloc is large and internally diverse. Some of it is not very online. Some of it doesn’t use the language that progressive civil society has spent twenty years developing. Some of it is tired, frightened, and not especially interested in a seminar, or in being made to feel bad for not having the right language, the right politics, or the right analysis.

If you only speak to the already-converted, in the already-converted’s language, you are running a loyalty scheme for people who were already on your side. That is not nothing you need to keep the bloc energised. But it is not enough.

Just as the parties need to think with popular front logic, progressives also have a choice at this moment: wait until 2029, infighting within parties and among themselves or start telling a story that unites them, and unites society, that rises above the fractured politics and is bold enough to take on Reform as a party and the politics it represents.

2. Arguments alone won’t cut it

People in the right-conservative bloc don’t hold their views because they’ve calculated that restrictive immigration policy is economically optimal. They hold them because those views are expressions of identity of who they are and how they understand the world.

The same is true, to a significant extent, of the left-liberal bloc. We are no more likely to support ideas because they are well-argued than because they’re part of how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

What this means for campaigners is uncomfortable but important. Leading with facts and arguments will not, on its own, shift anyone. The emotional and identity dimensions of political commitment are not the soft stuff you get to after the real work thinking at the level of feelings, values and identity is the real work.

Good campaigns operate on both levels. They make the rational case and they speak to identity, community, belonging. They don’t treat people as policy-processing machines.

A good example of this approach, one I was involved in, was a campaign Amnesty Poland ran ahead of the 2023 election. For Amnesty and many Polish activists, this was a moment to challenge the near-total ban on abortion. The campaign was built on an understanding that young women in small towns would not want to join loud marches, but would want to talk to their family and friends about the election and about the right to make choices about their own bodies. It was this appeal to values, and this understanding of motivation, that drove the successful mobilisation of that group against the tide of anti-abortion politics. Law and Justice, a Polish party in the vein of Reform UK that had dominated Polish politics for years, was beaten in that election.

3. Do not legitimise Reform. Not ever. Not even a little.

I will say this as plainly as I can, because I have heard sensible, well-meaning people in progressive people say things in the last two years that made me want to put my head through a wall.

Framing international development as “addressing the root causes of migration” to make it palatable to Reform-adjacent audiences. Softening your language on climate to avoid sounding “too green.” Incorporating Reform’s immigration framing into your comms because you think it signals seriousness.

Every time a progressive organisation borrows Reform’s frame, it does two things. It validates the frame tells the public that this is the correct lens through which to understand the issue. And it moves the Overton window in exactly the direction Reform wants it moved.

Labour’s last two years are the cautionary tale. They didn’t bring Reform voters back.

Don’t reinforce the frame. Build a better one. People might not find a home in a party the way they used to, but they can find a home in knowing there is a positive, hopeful and unifying story about our society.

4. On “sharpening the contrast” versus “more in common” be intentional

There are two broad strategic options for how progressive civil society operates in a polarised landscape, and they are genuinely in tension.

The first is more-in-common politics that is emphasising shared values across the blocs, talking to people across divides, refusing to write off the right-conservative bloc and its Reform supporters as simply unreachable. Talking with people rather than at them, being prepared to engage and actively listen. Party politics is fracturing, but society doesn’t have to.

Reform voters have not been reached by Labour telling them hostility to migrants is valid but neither will they be reached by being told they are racist or wrong. Nobody changes their mind because the other side tries to make them feel bad. Projects like Deep Canvassing in the US have shown that listening, connecting and finding our shared humanity is hard but more effective than any clever argument will ever be.

This approach is also about finding common ground in communities working on what unites people and thinking at the level of shared social and economic challenges. Decent work. A functioning NHS. Rebuilding high streets. These are things most people agree on, and community-level campaigns will do more to break down the sense of us and them than almost anything else.

The second approach is about sharpening the contrast, building solidarity within the left-liberal bloc, making the stakes of the choice viscerally clear. This has its place too particularly in mobilising people who are already in the bloc but disengaged, or more likely feeling hopeless. This is the politics of building energy and momentum. It can look like protest and solidarity, and it is about protecting communities who need to know that civil society sees what’s happening to them.

The mistake is treating these as morally opposed, or imagining that you or your organisation has to pick one forever. We often feel more comfortable with one or the other. Reaching out across the divide can feel compromised, or somehow too soft given the urgency of the situation. Sharpening the contrast can be dismissed as the politics of protest. The fact is we need both. The question is which one you need for which purpose, with which audience, at which moment. Know which you’re doing and why and respect the different approaches we’ll need to take.

The shape beneath the chaos

Here’s what actually gives me hope. It’s the number of people I meet who are furious and engaged and looking for somewhere to put that energy. The progressive bloc is not small and it is not defeated. It is, right now, badly served by a political culture that is itself confused and disorientated by the scale of change in our politics.

There’s a quote I keep coming back to. Darren Jones, speaking at the Progressive Britain Annual Conference last year, said this:

“We may be in an era of five-party politics. But there’s only really two sides. Our side: a politics of love, compassion and community, with the ideas to transform Britain. And their side: a politics of anger, division and blame.”

He didn’t mean it as political science, and his framing risks feeding the very us-and-them dynamic that does so much damage. But he is pointing at something real. Strip away the rhetoric, and he’s describing a structural shift in British politics that the May local elections have just made a lot harder to ignore.

Understanding that beneath the fracture and the chaos something more stable is happening. That means we can get strategic and tactical. But it also means we can afford to be generous. This moment asks for both.