Don’t dismiss the ‘other’ political parties: they might be the future

In the 1970s, when I was still at primary school, I was convinced that Britain had four parties: Conservative, Labour, Liberal and Others. Those were the parties listed by the BBC when it showed the running totals of seats on election night.

When I realised my mistake, the word “others” continued to intrigue me. And I’ve come to think that one way of understanding the last quarter-century of British politics is as the slow reveal of what lay behind that label. In our fragmented political culture, parties that once didn’t warrant a namecheck now help make the running.

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We all know the SNP – the third-largest party in the last Commons – and the DUP, which decisively shaped the fate of Theresa May. The Greens have an MP, appear on BBC Question Time and lead on an issue most of us now recognise as fundamental. Plaid Cymru has taken part in leaders’ debates while Ukip, which only ever won a single seat at a general election, and has been eclipsed by the Brexit party, has a fair claim to have been the most influential political party of the last five years.

We know, then, who the Others are. Yet that’s only part of the story. There are 344 parties registered in Great Britain with the Electoral Commission, with a further 32 in Northern Ireland. Sixty-four parties are standing candidates in the General Election. There are, it seems, Other Others. Who are they? Do they matter?

Let’s go back to the 1992 election. Few will remember that a party called the Anti-Federalist League, opposed to the UK signing the Maastricht Treaty, stood 17 candidates. They got 4,849 votes between them and all lost their deposits. The next year it changed its name to the United Kingdom Independence party. The Greens’ England and Wales general election speaker in 1992 was Caroline Lucas. The SNP won just three seats; in Glasgow Shettleston, 21-year-old Nicola Sturgeon lost to the Labour candidate by 14,834 votes.

An intriguing footnote to that election is the Revolutionary Communist party, which stood eight candidates (and lost eight deposits). Nobody cared. Where are they now? One of them, Kenan Malik, is a well-known broadcaster and an Observer columnist. The RCP is defunct but many of its activists are still in politics: Claire Fox, also a prominent journalist, is an MEP for the Brexit party and Munira Mirza is credited with co-writing the Conservative party manifesto.

Since 1992, a number of things have provided Others with more opportunities. Devolution has given regional parties a higher profile. And since 1994, the use of a form of proportional representation in EU elections has given smaller parties a chance to be heard that they don’t usually get in first-past-the-post Westminster elections.

As political opinion and identification in the UK have fragmented, what looked in 1992 like an insignificant fringe has turned out to be an avant-garde. Beneath the surface turbulence of daily events, change happens slowly within the body politic. The formation of small parties, and the votes they receive, might be the last residue of a dying part of our political culture. But they might also be early intimations of resentments, fears and hopes that mainstream politics has yet to articulate. Ahead of the curve, by luck or instinct, tenacious activists (and some incredible self-publicists) have found and made their moment. They weren’t relics. They were portents.

What, then, of the great winter election of 2019? Beyond Brexit, are there portents of the future? Some parties certainly do look like relics of a lost era. The Workers Revolutionary party will stand five candidates and the Liberal party, formed from opposition to the 1988 merger with the SDP that created the Liberal Democrats, 19. They will get few votes but perhaps one of their candidates is a future panellist on The Moral Maze. The Young People’s party, a group of Georgists (followers of 19th-century economist Henry George) who want to rebalance taxation towards tax on land and introduce a universal basic income, will run in three seats.

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But my guess is that hints of our political future are to be found in local and regional parties. The class and cultural divisions of the UK now have a markedly geographic dimension to them. And a number of councils are run by local parties. The Residents Associations of Epsom and Ewell have controlled the borough council since 1937. In Nottinghamshire, the Ashfield Independents won 30 of 35 seats at this year’s local elections and their leader will stand in the constituency.

There are also regional parties with a Westminster focus: the North-East party, the Lincolnshire Independents. In Yorkshire, the Yorkshire party got more votes than Change UK in the European election and in December will have 28 candidates on the ballot. It’s not a great comparison, but who would have thought at its formation in 1991 that a federation of Italian regional parties, Lega Nord, would one day come third in a general election and that its leader would be deputy prime minister?

What will dominate our politics in two decades is likely to be quite visible already. We just don’t know that we are looking at it. When you vote, take a moment to scan that longer-than-you-expected list of candidates. You might get a glimpse of the future – of a time when Brexit really is done and the debacle of December 2019 a distant memory.

• Alan Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia