For George Brown, election days always came with at least one bit of certainty. He would vote Labour. His family voted Labour. And along this working-class stretch of North Street in Bristol, where kebab shops jostle with tattoo parlors and Chinese takeouts, pretty much everyone else voted Labour, too.
Not anymore.
Mr. Brown has lost his faith not only in Labour, but the whole political system. New taxes are hitting the taxi company he works for, which he expects will be passed on to him to protect the company’s profits. Meanwhile, the nation’s beloved health-care system is so broken he has given up trying to get an appointment for anything that is not life-threatening. Everything, he says, is getting more expensive – and worse.
Why We Wrote This
With political dissatisfaction running rampant nationwide, England appears to be on the verge of a massive shift away from its traditional Labour-Conservative axis, in favor of more radical parties such as Reform UK and the Greens.
“It seems like the harder you work, you still don’t get ahead,” he says as he waits for his next customer. When it comes to politics, “I really don’t trust any of them anymore.”
Britain is perched on the precipice of historic political upheaval. Half of Britons want “radical change,” according to a November poll by Ipsos. In its “Shattered Britain” study, opinion research firm More in Common says many British voters have reached a “roll the dice” moment. For a nation where the traditional political order – dominated by the Conservatives and Labour – has had the constancy of the cliffs of Dover, everything appears chaotically uncertain.
For now, the Labour government retains a large majority in Parliament, thanks to its 2024 landslide election victory. But the speed of the party’s collapse in the polls is unprecedented, political scientists say. Its support among voters now sits at 18%, Ipsos finds.
The biggest winner so far has been the far-right Reform UK Party, which is polling at 33%. But the story of England’s political transformation goes deeper. For the first time ever, five parties are polling at over 10%, with a sixth trying to elbow its way in. It speaks to a crumbling of the old order as voting blocs that have held firm for generations fracture into new configurations, desperately seeking change.
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England’s West Country offers an intriguing portrait, from the fervid radicalism of left-wing Bristol to the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, which has seen the summers of its prosperity fade into decline and neglect. How they are coping, and to whom they are turning for answers, speaks to a new country now starting to emerge.
“What is new is that some people are now willing to take risks,” says Ed Hodgson, deputy director of research for More in Common. “The situation in Britain is so miserable that people are very fed up.”
A stagnant England
The picture is broadly similar across the United Kingdom, but England’s political dynamics are distinct from those of the U.K.’s other nations, due to its lack of separatist parties such as Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Scottish National Party. Moreover, the rise of English nationalism points to a uniquely English element of these political trends.
Similarly, Britain’s challenges are similar to those seen across Europe: a stagnant economy, rising stress on social services, and growing public debt. But Britain has a unique added variable: Brexit, which took effect just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to wreak havoc on the world economy. Combine that with a puzzling and persisting drop in worker productivity, and the country has never recovered.
Previous Conservative governments responded with cuts and austerity. The 2024 election was more a resounding rejection of that path than a true win for Labour, political experts argue. Now, Labour is largely treading water hoping for economic growth – which hasn’t come – and adopting tough anti-immigrant policies to try to attract centrist voters.
©Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters
But that appears to be part of the problem. Is Labour is trying to win over voters who are disappearing?
At the For All Healthy Living Centre in Weston-super-Mare, Shane O’Connell and Mandy Townsend are arguing. Again. No one else in the community center’s café is in the least concerned. This is what they do, two friends sitting over a cup of tea, disagreeing (and sometimes agreeing) with great affection.
Politics is a hot topic. The conversation wanders in enthusiastic bursts, from theories about propaganda campaigns to keep voters under control to the potential effects of the video game “Grand Theft Auto” on local youth.
The two are from different political spheres. Ms. Townsend says politicians should give 5% of their salaries to help those less fortunate – something she says she would gladly do, too. “People shouldn’t open the fridge and have no food.”
Mr. O’Connell wants a leader with backbone. “We’ve only had one good leader in this country” – Conservative icon Margaret Thatcher. “She was powerful. You make a decision, you stick to it.”
Though mutual fondness bridges the gap between these two friends, their politics are moving in opposite directions. Ms. Townsend is considering shifting further to the left, saying she likes what she hears from the Green Party. “If they can keep what they’re saying, that wouldn’t be so bad.”
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Mr. O’Connell pauses before sharing his political preference: “If he had help, Nigel Farage.”
Ms. Townsend groans. Mr. Farage is the leader of Reform UK, and while his party is top of the polls, he also generates the highest unfavorability ratings outside the two main parties. Mr. O’Connell is undeterred, expressing support for Mr. Farage’s strong anti-immigration platform.
“He’s going about it the wrong way,” Mr. O’Connell says. “He makes it sound racist. But it’s just fair.”
The center cannot hold
In important ways, Ms. Townsend and Mr. O’Connell represent a crucial shift in the British electorate. The battle is no longer between right and left: Conservatives versus Labour. It is right versus right and left versus left: Conservatives versus Reform and Labour versus the Greens, for instance.
Research shows that voters have sorted themselves into two distinct ideological blocs and don’t shift between them much. Centrist voters are disappearing. Voters are abandoning generations-old allegiances based on social class and aligning more according to age and education.
This is the new world that Brexit has made – or at least revealed. “What happened is that Brexit itself brought to the fore these two different worldviews,” says James David Griffiths, a research fellow at the British Election Study. “They were long-term trends that Brexit catalyzed.”
In Weston-super-Mare, signs point toward a shift to Reform. The story of Weston-super-Mare is the story of England’s embattled seaside towns. For generations, they were England’s communal watering holes – charming coastal getaways where working-class families gathered every summer when factories closed for two weeks. They became the iconic vacation postcard of beaches and boardwalks, long ocean piers and kitschy ice cream parlors.
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Then came cheap vacation packages to Spain, and two weeks in the British drizzle began looking less appealing. Weston-super-Mare and its cousins became a part of wistful national memory.
On the eastern side of England, another seaside town, Jaywick, ranks as the most deprived of the 33,000 areas measured by the British government. It is Mr. Farage’s home constituency. For its part, Weston-super-Mare is 86th. And Bournville Estate, the neighborhood surrounding the For All Healthy Living Centre, is the most deprived area in the county of Somerset.
The red-and-white cross of the English flag – which has been seeing a resurgence as a symbol of nationalism – hangs from rooftops. Locals talk of the growing number of charity stores along the high street downtown. Fewer and fewer people can afford the retail prices.
“I’ve seen kids have to go without gas [for heating and hot water] for weeks because they had to pay for electric,” says Amber Williams, a Bournville resident. “That’s not normal.”
“We’ve had enough of the boats”
To many, it feels like the nation is coming apart at the seams. The key question is whom to blame.
James Clayton is a Labour city councillor for Weston-super-Mare, though on this day he is dressed in the neon vest of a community warden. His knuckles are tattooed, his hands the oaken tools of the boxer he still is, now as a coach. His craft taught him the lesson he still lives by in tough times: “Bite hard on my gum shield and keep fighting.” It could be a motto for his town.
His task as a warden is to police the streets to protect local businesses. These days, he is much less certain how to protect his own party.
He is hearing one thing repeatedly from many of his constituents: “I’ve never voted before, but I’m registering to vote for Farage.” The reason is always the same. “We’ve had enough of the boats.” “The boats” are crossing the channel from France, carrying clandestine migrants, and Mr. Farage has made them the centerpiece of his explanation for why England has fallen on such hard times.
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His argument has struck a chord, though many migration experts dispute his conclusions. From Weston-super-Mare to Bristol, voters talk about a decline in responsibility. At the For All Healthy Living Centre, Ms. Townsend says people are collecting disability allowances despite not really being disabled. On North Street in Bristol, Mr. Brown, the cab driver, talks of someone living in his complex who is receiving state benefits that have paid his rent for six months and paid for a new Volkswagen Golf. “What’s the point” of working? he asks. “I work six days a week, and he’s getting the same as me to play PlayStation.”
The comments aren’t aimed against any specific people – or even the value of the benefits themselves, which most acknowledge. Rather, they point to a growing sense that not everyone is doing their fair share.
This is often most acutely directed at migrants, whom many see as coming to take advantage of Britain’s benefits. Studies show the reality is more complex, with migrant flows influenced by various factors. But “the boats” are simple answer for many trying to understand what has gone wrong.
“Part of it is the deluge of information. People don’t know what to believe,” says Gavin Esler, an author and former BBC political analyst. “They’re looking for a leader who can cut through that. [Boats are] the one thing you can point to that cuts through.”
Bristol goes Green
That lesson of cutting through the noise with simple messages appears to be working in a different way on the left, too.
Not far from North Street in Bristol’s Dame Emily Park, Miritte Ben Yitzchak sits on a bench with a friend enjoying a spell of December sunshine. They identify themselves as longtime Labour supporters, but, recently, the party’s “every step is in the wrong direction,” the friend, who identifies himself only as Tahl, says.
The one person who is talking sense, says Ms. Ben Yitzchak, is Green Party leader Zack Polanski. “I really like what he stands for.”
What Mr. Farage is to the right, Mr. Polanski seeks to be for the left. And if Mr. Farage is pointing to the boats, then Mr. Polanski is pointing to the rich, saying they are not paying their fair share. Instead of reaching out for centrists, he is attempting to out-Labour Labour and make the Greens the new standard-bearer for the British left.
In Bristol, at least, it appears to be working. That shouldn’t be too surprising.
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Bristol is a city of paradoxes. It is a city that built its wealth trading slaves and tobacco, and the scions of the families enriched by that business still enjoy considerable influence through the charitable Society of Merchant Venturers, which traces its roots to 13th century.
But it is also the city of Banksy, the anonymous street artist whose subversive graffiti has become a worldwide phenomenon. In the words of one local journalist, Bristol “likes a good riot.”
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, protesters in Bristol pulled down a statue of Edward Colston, one of the city’s favorite sons – and a slave trader – defaced it, and rolled it into the harbor. A Bristol neighborhood once rioted to protest the opening of a Tesco, a chain grocery store.
The desire for change is no less potent here than in Weston-super-Mare, though Palestinian flags flutter above the city, not the English St. George’s Cross. One of the ceremonial names for the square in front of city hall is Hannah-Arendt-Platz, honoring the German philosopher famous for her writings against authoritarianism.
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The Greens are now the largest party in city government, and in October, they added one more councillor to their ranks. Al Al-Maghrabi had been with Labour. Now, he is a Green. Born in East London, he came to Bristol for university and never left – a portrait of Bristol’s increasing profile as a university town, Britain’s Berkeley. Along the way, he also became a portrait of the city’s Green-ward turn.
As soon as Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer got into office, Mr. Maghrabi says, “it seemed like he just acted as though he was pro-Reform.”
“The people who are causing the problems in our country, it’s not the immigrants. It’s those on top,” he adds.
It is a message that plays well here. Harry Simpson is a university student and a member of the Young Greens in Bristol, and the moments that pushed him into politics are indelible – hearing Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at a rally in Bristol, seeing his mom crying in front of the television the morning Brexit passed.
That morning, he says, “I realized the role of politicians and how they are leading people.”
He can feel the change. “For a lot of people, voting Labour is a familial thing, and breaking that is very emotional,” he says.
But what people want from politics today is different. And Britain’s traditional parties have been slow to learn that lesson, he suggests. “Politics is becoming a lot more emotional. People are not connecting with the managerialist aspects. Conservatives and Labour are just talking about managing the status quo differently.”
