If Labour can’t make things better, Britain may be ready for its own Trump

The electorate is now so volatile that a 'British Trump' is a possibility
The electorate is now so volatile that a ‘British Trump’ is a possibility - Spencer Platt/Getty

Ever since 2016, when Donald Trump hailed the Brexit vote on his way to winning the White House, there has been much concern about the transatlantic rise of Right-wing populism. This speaks to a real shift, as visible in the much greater push to appeal to “cross-pressured” voters who are socially conservative, but lean left on the economy.

And now, here we are again – in the wake of a seismic summer vote in the UK, on the way to a US election day which may see Trump win the presidency. But these parallels have distracted us from something crucial. Our two democracies are developing in opposite directions.

America has become so polarised that if you saw someone wearing a mask during the pandemic, you likely knew which party they voted for, their view on abortion, and much else. These “stacked identities” did not start with Trump; he just saw how to play them.

The journalist Bill Bishop has charted how the “Big Sort” has been slowly tearing America into mutually uncomprehending camps ever since 1976, as greater mobility and prosperity allowed Americans to cluster in communities of like mind. Party identification is now more interwoven with race, religion and ideology. According to research by political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, by 2021 more than half of Republicans saw the Democrats as “evil”, with Democrats’ views not far behind.

So once again, a presidential election will come down to a handful of swing-state voters, with the prospect of violent disputes over the basic mechanisms of the electoral process, to the point where American democracy itself seems to be in danger.

That is not what happened here. On 5 July, Americans on X could be seen marvelling at the seamlessness of July’s handover of the keys to Number 10. Sunak did not whip up a mob to march on parliament in a desperate bid to stay. Despite Elon Musk’s ominous prophecies, no one has lately made a movie set in Britain called Civil War.

So do we Brits get to be smug about the state of our politics for once? Now steady on! We have the opposite problem: volatility.

For a new series on BBC Radio 4 exploring the health of US and UK democracy, I spoke to the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of the University of Manchester, who sets out how Britain has seen a long-term decline in tribal party loyalty. This has fused with growing disillusionment with politics, to the point where many British voters are ready to switch their choice of party each election.

As the British Election Study has identified, all three of the most volatile elections since the 1960s have occurred in the last decade: 2015 (which saw fully 43 per cent switch), 2017, and 2024. This lurching instability, which has seen the erosion of the “safe” seat, makes it very hard to build a stable political career. And it has now produced a government with a massive majority balanced on a razor’s edge, chosen by only one in five British adults.

In the wake of 2016, it seemed Brexit was driving a US-style polarisation of our politics, but its effect now seems more in line with other shocks to the system, from the crash in 2008 to immigration. This has interacted with the rise of smaller parties – a phenomenon largely absent in America – which have lured once-loyal supporters of the big parties, but struggled to retain them.

And as the pollster Peter Kellner told me, research for Deltapoll in 2022 suggests this radically transactional mindset has spread to British attitudes to democracy itself. People are less inclined to think democracy is marvellous per se: they tend to support it much less readily when it doesn’t deliver what they want.

While we wait to see what happens in America on November 5, politicians here are struggling with the fact that voters are desperate for change, but don’t believe mainstream politics can deliver it. This may yet open the way to a form of Trumpian demagogy here. But the way for Labour to stop that happening is to recognise that the drivers are very different – and then to make people’s lives better, to the point where they deserve to be voted for more than once.


Phil Tinline’s series How Would We Know If Democracy Had Died? is on BBC Radio 4