Across north-western Europe, populist-right parties have surged in popularity. In some cases, they have entered government including Sweden, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. Yet in none of these countries have they come close to securing unchecked power. Coalition politics forces them to bargain and share power, which ultimately moderates their influence. It’s a completely different story in the UK.
Unlike our mainland peers, the UK’s voting system compresses politics into two parties and the fragile political re-alignment now under way is pushing that system toward a breaking point it was never designed to handle. The question is not simply why populism has risen. It is why Britain alone appears structurally capable of delivering it such sweeping power. The answer lies not in culture but in institutions, shaped over 4 decades by four distinct stages of failure.
Capture
When the post-war economic settlement collapsed in the 1970s, most advanced democracies moved toward more market-oriented policies. But how far those policies went depended heavily on the electoral system.
In countries like Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, where multiple parties share power through coalition governments, neoliberal reforms were forced through negotiation and compromise. Parties representing workers and lower-income voters retained leverage. In Britain, under First Past the Post (FPTP) — where a single party can win a majority on a minority of votes — there was no such check. Privatisation ran deeper, the state shrank further, and public investment fell further behind European peers than almost anywhere else. The electoral system didn’t invent these ideas. But it allowed them to embed more deeply and last longer than anywhere comparable.
Neglect
FPTP doesn’t just shape who wins. It shapes who gets ignored. Under this system, elections are effectively decided by a small number of swing voters in marginal constituencies. Safe seats, whether Labour heartlands in post-industrial towns or Conservative strongholds in coastal and rural England, are not seriously contested and so they are not seriously served.
The deeper irony that gets exposed in the long run is that loyalty gets ultimately punished. Over the period from 1980 to date, the more reliably a community voted for a party, the less attention it received. Governments learn quickly that they can cut local services, close bus routes, and reduce investment in communities whose votes are guaranteed regardless. For young people growing up in those places, this is not a theory; it is the lived experience of a system that has learned it can take you for granted.
Rupture
The first signs of breakdown went largely unnoticed. As Labour repositioned itself toward middle-income voters in the late 1990s, millions of lower-income supporters in its safest seats simply stopped voting. A silent rebellion. Because their departure didn’t change the outcome in safe seats, the political class barely registered it.
Then came Brexit and this time the rupture was impossible to ignore. The strongest concentrations of Leave votes were not in the poorest areas but in communities that had experienced the sharpest relative decline in living standards. Many of these were loyal Conservative constituencies across southern and eastern England that had slipped dramatically down national deprivation rankings over preceding decades.
Despite this, Brexit was widely explained as a story about identity, culture, and sovereignty. But that explanation was itself a product of the same system failure, shaped by politicians and commentators whose assumptions had long been calibrated to serve a different electorate. The data tells a simpler story: Brexit was neglect, finally made visible.
Meltdown
Today the pressures that produced Brexit are intensifying. Voters abandoned first by decades of underinvestment are being joined by a new group — younger, more middle-class, experiencing for the first time the erosion of the security and opportunity their parents took for granted. Under Britain’s electoral rules, those pressures are being allowed to fuse into a single political bloc large enough to deliver a parliamentary majority.
What makes this so alarming is the paradox at its heart. The Reform movement now benefiting from decades of neglect and inequality is more fanatically committed to the policies that produced them than either of the main parties; more deregulation, more privatisation, deeper spending cuts. For young people, a government built on that programme would not release the pressure. It would turn up the heat.
The health of British democracy depends on whether its institutions can correct themselves before that happens. For the generation now entering political life, it is the most consequential question of our time.
Stuart Donald is a data analyst and researcher based in Edinburgh, specialising in electoral systems, political economy, and inequality. His paper Lifting the Lid on Britain’s Pressure Cooker Politics, published by Compass in March 2026, was covered by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian on publication.
