Britain’s local elections and Reform’s staggering success have exposed the volatility that political parties need to view as an opportunity rather than a threat. 

This year’s local elections held across parts of England saw Reform UK sweep almost all before it, with questions rightly being asked about the state of the traditional two-party system in Britain. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, won the Westminster by-election in Runcorn and Helsby (by just six votes), won control of 10 new councils, and saw an expectation-defying 677 new councillors elected. It was a shockingly poor night for the Conservatives, and not much better for Labour.  

Local elections are not always to be taken at face value as incumbent governing parties often perform badly mid-term and smaller parties can perform better than they typically would at general elections. But these local elections can also give an insight into important broader trends and patterns. And what we see is a combination of widespread pessimism about the state of the country and a fragmented and volatile political environment, in which political parties face opportunities and threats in equal measure. 

Volatility has become a feature of modern politics, as well as life more generally. We know that voter coalitions are often volatile – just as customer bases change – and so success is driven by how you manage that volatility. 

British politics has become more volatile over the past 30 years, with voters more readily swapping party loyalties and parties themselves more readily changing leaders and offers. The local elections are simply the latest piece of evidence of this new world. In the 1950s, more than 95% of voters would vote for either Labour or the Conservatives but that is now in the distant past. At the 2024 General Election, the two main parties collected just 57% of the combined vote. At that 2024 election, the Conservatives only managed to hold on to 53% of those that voted for them in 2019 according to Ipsos – and they lost a quarter of their voters to Reform UK. Fast forward a year from the 2024 General Election, and our latest polling (driven by Yonder Omnibus) has found that another 27% of the Conservatives’ 2024 voters (which was a small group anyway) now say they are likely to vote Reform UK at the next election. 

Labour are facing a similar problem. Labour may have won a landslide majority at the 2024 General Election, but they received a lower vote share than any party forming a majority government since the Second World War. And our polling has found that just 54% of Labour’s 2024 voters now say they are likely to vote for Labour next time. That Labour voter coalition is fragmenting in all kinds of different directions – with Greens, Lib Dems, Reform UK and Conservatives all benefitting to different degrees. 

A clue as to why voter coalitions are so volatile might be the level of discontent and frustration with the state of the world and the direction of the country. 52% of Britons think that life in Britain is worse than 30 years ago, compared with just 21% that think it is better. 55% think the future will bring more threats to their standard of living than opportunities to improve it. Unless a party can dispel this pessimism (and good luck to them), we are likely to continue to see voter frustration and political volatility. 

We can see and analyse this volatility through the Yonder Clockface, which is an analytical model that demonstrates how the political map is rotating (as shown in the chart below) and how voter coalitions are fragmenting, as well as revealing voter motivations in a way that allows campaigns to communicate more effectively.  

The Yonder Clockface model distributes the British population on the face of a clock, using a combination of factors that together form two fundamental predictive forces: ‘Security’ (a measure of our health, wealth and well-being) and ‘Diversity’ (a reflection of our physical proximity to and similarity with our closest neighbours). Using the model, we then plot real-world outcomes or opinions on that clock – for example, the way people voted at every UK general election since the 1980s.

This rotating political map demonstrates the volatility that has affected British – and global – politics. Over the past 40 years, traditional voter allegiances have weakened, and patterns of behaviour have changed. Since the 1980s, the Conservatives’ electoral appeal and voter base had been moving away from its traditional grounds (12-3 o’clock: high security, low diversity) towards a different part of the population (3-6 o’clock: low security, low diversity) which then largely rejected them in 2024. And Labour’s electoral appeal and voter base had been moving away from its traditional grounds (6-9 o’clock: low security, high diversity) towards a different part of the population (9-12 o’clock: high security, high diversity). At each recent election, the two parties were attracting different types of voters. Nothing was stable. 

Why is this rotating map a potential problem for Labour and the Conservatives? Because it means that these political parties – in the sense of both their voters and their MPs – are now an uneasy mix of the old and the new, of people from different walks of life with different values and outlooks. And it means that voters who might otherwise have instinctively felt drawn to a party – perhaps the party their parents had voted for – are shopping around and looking for new solutions. Mainstream political parties cannot rely on their traditional voter coalitions, which means building new coalitions.  

Over the coming weeks, we will dive into the particular threats and opportunities facing each of the parties in this fragmented political world. Each will be looking at this volatility and determining their own strategies for pulling together a coalition of voters through to the next election. Of course, parties – like brands – have different ambitions. Labour and the Conservatives are seeking to form governments and so need to pull together larger and more disparate voter coalitions. The Greens and Liberal Democrats will be seeking to deepen their appeal with smaller parts of the electorate with the hope of holding the balance of power. On the back of the staggering success at the local elections, Nigel Farage and Reform UK will need to make up their mind which of these two groups they want to belong to: government in waiting or party of protest. 

At Yonder, we specialise in helping brands, businesses and political parties to succeed, particularly during times of volatility. And we know that success is most likely to come when there is clarity about three core themes:  

• Authenticity – what do we fundamentally believe and what are our core objectives? 

• Audience – who are our audience, what do they need and how can we connect with them?  

• Advantage – what can we do or offer that is clearly superior to our competitors?  

Clarity on these three points can allow a political party to look at the fragmented voter landscape and have confidence in the opportunities that it provides. After all, volatility is now a function of the modern political and economic world – so success is determined by how you manage it.