The two-party system is dysfunctional, outdated—but worth hanging on to

The two-party system, I keep hearing, is no longer fit for purpose. It is dysfunctional and obsolete. “You can’t put jump-leads on a dinosaur,” as the writer John Harris put it recently. 

I don’t love political parties. Their meetings are tedious, they bombard you with emails, and the other members are often objectionable. But to those who want to sweep them away, I say: be careful what you wish for. The alternatives may look shiny and spontaneous, but they’re actually oligarchy in disguise. 

European elections have always been an opportunity to give the main parties a kicking, but this time the punishment felt existential. Amid mixed results across the continent, one thing was clear: established parties are deeply unpopular. “For the first time in 40 years the two classical parties, socialists and conservatives, will no longer have a majority” observed Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the EU Parliament. In the UK, the old duopoly performed catastrophically: the Conservatives and Labour took less than a quarter of British votes between them.

In the wake of his gains, Nigel Farage gloated: “The two-party system now serves nothing but itself. I think they are an obstruction to the modernising of politics.” The only constant for comically shape-shifting Change UK is rage at the old system. Returning Green MEP Molly Scott Cato concluded that people “are disillusioned with two-party politics.” And when it comes to knocking the old order, liberals are populists too: Vince Cable decreed it “moribund.” 

Commentators from the right, left and centre jumped in to agree. Describing the old parties as defunct has become an op-ed truism. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland wrote that their handling of Brexit represented “an indictment of our entire political class.” Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph pictured Farage “ready to rip fatal chunks out of our ailing two-party system.”

Pundits might think that they are offering a helpful diagnosis rather than prescription, but in politics, where momentum counts for so much, it is easy to confuse an “is” with an “ought.” There is little practical difference between reading the traditional parties’ eulogies and dancing on their grave. We should hesitate to do that, because they served a crucial purpose: containing broad social interests and facilitating the unavoidable contest between them. They can focus politics on the divides that matter most, and avoid the fixations of (hopefully) passing pop-ups like the Brexit Party. 

The real question is whether the old parties can be revived. The answer is yes—if they stick to their guns. They began to fail when they stopped stating clearly what they stood for. Tony Blair started the rot with his abdication to pollsters and focus groups. Listening to ordinary people is offered endlessly as a cure for our ailing politics, but it perpetuates the spiral. The commentariat misses the real paradox. “Listening” is indistinguishable from power-grabbing PR: saying anything voters want to hear, just to win elections.

Ideological distinctiveness should not be dismissed as old-fashioned tribalism, but as the foundation on which a party can be built into a real political home. Some shrill upstarts offer a simulacrum of commitment because they sound like they tell it like it is, but even when they have ideals they tend to be single issue. The Brexit Party has no policies other than leaving the EU without a deal; Farage will decide its manifesto now that the Euro elections are out of the way. 

We are often told that the left-right binary has been superseded by divisions based on location, age, education and social values. But in truth, the economic divide is the greatest chasm of all. Which is why the old parties still matter—or should do. 

Of course, the populist critique contains a grain of truth. The old duopoly has become sclerotic. The Conservatives, in particular, are a shadow of the mass membership party they once were, and sustained by big donors. But shortcomings in retaining activists should not be conflated with their raison d’être. The parties can still thrive if they reconnect with social movements and democratic formations fit for the 21st century. For a time, Jeremy Corbyn demonstrated that: his grassroots engagement helped Labour become the biggest party in Europe before it haemorrhaged activists over Brexit dithering. 

Among the start-ups, by contrast, the “grassroots” are astroturf. Along with the Italian Five Star Movement on which it is modelled, the Brexit Party employs the rhetoric of bottom-up digital democracy, but is tightly controlled by Farage and its funding is undeclared. Populist posturers disparage parties as middle men: groups from Podemos in Spain to the now-defunct Crowdpac, the creation of David Cameron’s one-time brain Steve Hilton, have advocated apps and platforms to achieve the chimera of unmediated people power. 

Single-issue groups resemble life online, where we search for micro-niches tailored to individual needs. But the broad coalition of a party offers a place to work out minor differences rather than being fractured by them. Ephemeral protest groups bound by weak ties—whether it’s Ukip or Occupy—fall apart before long. Parties are organised—such an unfashionable quality in Silicon Valley’s barefoot utopia—and they endure over time. The presence of the opposition in parliament ensures that even if we lose, our voice continues to be heard. Parties are imperfect, but we replace them at our peril.