Seven of this month’s polls were conducted since Andy Burnham was elected leader of the Labour party, becoming Prime Minister shortly after. All of July’s ten polls took place after Keir Starmer announced that he would resign and it quickly became clear that Burnham was highly likely to take over.

So what impact, if any, has this massive change at the top of UK politics had on public opinion? Well, in polling terms, we are back in March 2025. This was before Reform UK’s big electoral breakthrough at the English local elections of May 2025, after which they received a polling boost of around six percentage points.

In our March 2025 polling averages, the vote shares of the three largest parties were as follows: Labour: 24.9%; Reform UK: 24.0%; Conservatives: 23.3%.

As we can see below, these are very similar to the figures for July 2026, which look quite different to the polling we witnessed in the intervening 14 months. See below for more details.

July 2026 UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent July poll by each of the ten polling companies who published a UK general election poll conducted during July, is as follows:

Labour: 24.9% (+3.9*)
Reform UK: 24.3% (-2.1)
Conservatives: 19.8% (+0.7)
Greens: 11.3% (-1.0) resign,
Liberal Democrats: 11.0% (-1.0)
Others: 8.7% (-0.4)

* Compared with June’s average - Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change.

July’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Deltapoll; Find Out Now; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos (fieldwork: 25-30 June but included with July data as was published too late to be included in June data); More In Common; Opinium; Survation; Trajectory Partnership; YouGov.

What do these results mean?

• The party with the highest vote share, Labour, has the support of fewer than a quarter of voters. At 24.9%, this is the joint lowest we have seen for the top party since we started collating monthly polling averages in February 2025.

• This is the first time that a party other than Reform UK has topped our monthly polling average since March 2025, which is also when Labour last topped the poll, with 24.9%, the same vote share as they have achieved this month.

• There is only a 13.9-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data.

• Reform UK’s vote share (24.3%) represents its lowest monthly average vote share since March 2025, when they recorded 24.0%. Reform are down 7.5 points from their monthly average vote share peak, which was 31.8% in September 2025.

• The Conservative’s vote share (19.8%) is their highest since April 2025, when they recorded 21.7%.

• The Liberal Democrats’ vote share (11.0%) is the lowest since we started collating polling averages in February 2025.

It is obviously early days in Andy Burnham’s premiership, but so far we have seen a fairly significant shift, with Labour knocking Reform UK off top spot for the first time in over a year.

There has also been evidence of changes in real votes in ballot boxes too. Labour achieved a comfortable victory in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, held on 30 July 2026. The first preference vote shares for each party represented a big swing towards Labour compared with the results across Greater Manchester at the May 2026 local elections (see below). It should be noted, though, that around 300,000 fewer people voted in the mayoral election compared to the local elections.

Greater Manchester Mayor first preference vote shares

(and changes compared to vote shares across Greater Manchester at May 2026 local elections)

Labour: 47.1% (+23.4)
Reform UK: 21.0% (-9.7)
Greens: 12.2% (-6.8)
Restore Britain: 8.7% (+8.7)
Conservatives: 7.7% (-2.5)
Liberal Democrats: 2.8% (-6.6)

It is also worth noting that this was the first mayoral election held since the welcome return to the Supplementary Vote electoral system. This meant the counting of second preferences of those who voted for eliminated candidates, with 58,076 votes transferred to Labour’s Bev Craig and 45,250 votes transferred to Reform UK’s Sian Astley. After the transfer of second preferences, Craig had the support of 58% of people who had cast a valid first preference vote.

Turning back to the national opinion polls, while there has been a bump in the combined Labour + Conservative vote share, to 44.7%, the highest since April 2025 (46.0%), we are still very much in a multi-party world, with five parties remaining in double digits, an unprecedented situation prior to the last few months.

Let’s see how things develop from here…

On the same day as the Makerfield by-election, the Conservatives won a by-election in Aberdeen South. This was the Tories first UK parliamentary by-election victory in Scotland since 1967.

These two by-election results triggered some commentary along the lines of ‘the death of two-party politics has been greatly exaggerated’, as the headline of Matthew Parris’s Spectator article put it.

Given that this blog series is charting what we see as the unprecedented fracturing and ‘breakdown’ of the British party system, it seems only right that we engage with the suggestion that two-party politics is not dead at all.

Firstly, it is worth looking at June’s polling averages, where there are some small signs of encouragement for the traditional two big parties of British politics. The combined Labour + Conservative vote share has crept above 40%, for the first time since July 2025. Labour’s score of 21% is their highest since August 2025, while separate YouGov leadership polling shows Kemi Badenoch’s favourability improving and also that she has a comfortable lead over Nigel Farage as ‘best PM’.

Meanwhile, Reform UK has recorded their joint lowest vote share (26.4%) since April 2025 and the Greens (12.3%) their lowest since December 2025.

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June UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent June poll, by each of the nine polling companies who published a UK general election poll during June, is as follows:

Party / Polling average / Change*

Reform UK 26.4% -1.4
Labour 21.0% +1.1
Conservatives 19.1% +0.8
Greens 12.3% -1.3
Liberal Democrats 12.0% -0.1
Others 9.1% +0.8

* Compared with May’s average - Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

June’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Deltapoll; Find Out Now; Good Growth Foundation; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Survation; YouGov.

We will have to wait to see how polling data develops in the early weeks and months of an Andy Burnham premiership, which now looks all but inevitable. It is of course conceivable that Labour will continue to build on what has already been a small bounce in support since Starmer’s resignation announcement. It is also perfectly possible that Kemi Badenoch’s improved personal ratings will start to translate into improved vote intention polling for the Conservatives.

However, there would have to be very dramatic polling changes to go from the situation as it stands to one in which the return of two-party politics could be reasonably declared. It’s not only polling data either, just two months ago we saw the most fragmented set of English local election results on record, with five parties recording over 15% in the Projected National Share (PNS) of votes.

While obviously impossible to know for certain, there are a couple of underlying factors that indicate a return to two-party politics is unlikely.

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Move away from two-party politics is a long-term phenomenon

Although the ultra-fragmentation of British politics that we have seen in the last couple of years is unprecedented, the trend away from two-party politics is actually a long-term phenomenon, decades in the making.

Over the course of the last 80 years, allowing for inevitable fluctuations, the combined Conservative and Labour vote share at UK general elections has been on a steady decline, from more than nine in ten votes during the 1950s, to fewer than six in ten votes at the 2024 UK general election.

Chunking up the elections into three blocks shows how the trend has progressed.

In the eight general elections between 1945 and 1970, the average (mean) combined Conservative and Labour vote share was 91.3%.

At the February 1974 general election, the combined Conservative and Labour vote share fell below 80% for the first time in the post-WWII era and at the eight general elections between Feb 1974 and 2001, the average (mean) combined Conservative and Labour vote share was 74.6%.

At the 2005 general election, the combined Conservative and Labour vote share fell below 70% for the first time in the post-WWII era and at the six general elections between 2005 and 2024 (when the combined Conservative and Labour vote share fell below 60% for the first time in the post-WWII era), the average (mean) combined Conservative and Labour vote share was 69.2%.

As they say in financial adverts, ‘past performance is not indicative of future results’, however this data clearly shows how the recent ultra-fragmentation of British politics is the continuation of a trend stretching back decades.

It also highlights how far the combined Labour and Conservative vote share would have to climb from its current polling position of 40.1%, just to reach the record post-WWII low of 57.4% recorded at the 2024 general election.

Two-Party Vote Share 1945-2024

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Multi-dimensional attitudinal divides driving multi-party politics

The long-running British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey has two batteries of questions that measure people’s positions in relation to two separate ideological dimensions: left-right (economic relations) and liberal-authoritarian (social relations).

A BSA report, ‘One-dimensional or two-dimensional? The changing dividing lines of Britain’s electoral politics’, written by Professor Sir John Curtice, in 2024, explores how over recent years, the liberal-authoritarian divide has become much more important in understanding voting behaviour than it used to be.

The liberal-authoritarian divide is now equal in importance with the left-right divide, when it comes to understanding support for Britain’s political parties. This is a big change, as historically the left-right divide was the dominant dimension that underpinned support for the two traditional big parties, with ‘left-wing’ voters supporting Labour and ‘right-wing’ voters supporting the Conservatives.

The EU referendum was the trigger for the increase in salience of the liberal-authoritarian dimension when it comes to voting behaviour. Whether someone voted Leave or Remain was far more correlated with their position on the liberal-authoritarian dimension than where they stood on the left-right axis. BSA data from 2016, indicated that there was a 51-point gap between the percentage of authoritarians who voted Leave (72%) and the percentage of liberals who did so (21%). In contrast, there was just a 7-point gap between those of a left-wing disposition who voted Leave (52%) and those of a right-wing disposition (45%).

Ironically, for a time, it appeared that this increase in the salience of a second attitudinal dimension may contribute to a resurgence of two-party politics, with the 2017 and 2019 general elections seeing the highest combined Conservative and Labour vote shares for many years.

As well as each of the two major parties continuing to dominate one side of the left-right divide, in these immediate post-Brexit years, they also managed to consolidate support among separate sides of the liberal-authoritarian divide.

By the time BSA data was collected in 2020, Labour had the support of 49% of left-wing voters and a commanding 35-point lead over the Conservatives among this group, as is traditionally the case. However, they also had the support of 47% of liberal voters and a 34-point lead over the Conservatives, something altogether new.

It was a mirror image on the other side of politics, with the Conservatives having the support of 54% of right-wing voters and a 37-point lead over Labour but also dominating among authoritarians, with 49% support and a 28-point lead over Labour.

As it turns out, it looks like the ability of the two traditional parties to retain and contain mass support, in an era of salient multi-dimensional attitudinal divides, was a short-lived one. BSA data collected in 2025 indicates that this has now broken down spectacularly, as can see by looking at each ideological segment in turn.

Firstly, if we look at party support among authoritarians, the Conservatives commanding position has been smashed and it is now the insurgents of Reform UK who enjoy the most support among authoritarians (34%), with a 16-point lead over the Tories.

Next, if we look at right-wing voters, we can see that although the Conservatives have retained their position as the largest party, their level of support among this group (26%) is half of what it was in 2020 and they have just a five-point lead over Reform UK.

Moving to the other side of politics, Labour continues to be the best supported party among both liberal voters and left-wing voters but in both cases support is down sharply compared to 2020, at 32% and 30% respectively. Among both groups, it is another insurgent party, the Greens, who are in second place, on 17% in each case.

With two challenger parties able to win significant support among ideologically defined sections of the population and with all parties having to compete across two highly salient attitudinal divides, it feels unlikely that we will see a return to traditional two-party politics any time soon.

But what affect did this have on the polls the weeks following the elections? The overall picture remains one of a highly fragmented political landscape, with a multi-party system firmly entrenched.

The days of Britain’s traditional two-party system now appear to be firmly behind us. Yet the country continues to use a voting system – First Past the Post – designed for a very different political era. As voters increasingly spread their support across a wider range of parties, the system comes under greater strain, producing outcomes that can appear increasingly chaotic and often fail to reflect accurately how people have voted.

May UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent May poll, by each of the eleven polling companies who published a UK general election poll during May, is as follows:

Reform UK: 27.8% (+1.4)
Labour: 19.9% (+0.8)
Conservatives: 18.3% (-0.3)
Greens: 13.6% (-2)
Liberal Democrats: 12.1% (-0.1)
Others: 8.3% (+0.2)

*Compared with April’s average – Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

May’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Deltapoll; Find Out Now; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Techne; Trajectory Partnership; YouGov.

Parties can win with fewer than three in ten voters’ support

May’s polling averages are based on opinion polls conducted after the elections held on 7 May 2026. Compared with April, there is evidence of a modest increase in support for Reform UK and a slight decline in support for the Greens.

But one of the most striking features of today’s political landscape is that the most popular party, Reform UK, is supported by fewer than three in ten voters. Historically, such a vote share would have been regarded as a poor result for a party hoping to form a government. In Britain’s traditional two-party era, winning power usually required support from well over a third of voters.

This is no longer necessarily the case. The reason being that the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system does not necessarily reflect the objective popularity of a party. If this was the case, a party that gets around 30% of votes would get around 30% of seats, which is what happens under proportional voting systems, such as the Single Transferable Vote.

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Why First Past the Post can produce majorities from minority support

Under First Past The Post, it is not the overall popularity of parties that shapes outcomes but their popularity in relation to their competitors. What this means in effect, is that it does not matter how low a parties overall vote share is, if they manage to finish say 6-9 points ahead of the nearest competitor party, in a crowded field, there is a good chance that they can win a majority of seats in a First Past the Post contest.

This is exactly the situation we see reflected in May’s polling data, with Reform UK comfortably below 30% support but still around 8-points ahead of their closest competitor, Labour.

What the local elections in England have shown us

A look back at some of the English local election results in May, which were held under FPTP, reveals numerous examples of parties winning a majority of seats in council chambers, with under 30% of votes or with just a touch over 30% in some cases.

Here are some examples. In each case, despite receiving a relatively low overall vote share, the party that received a majority of seats finished 6-10 points ahead of the nearest competitor party, in a very crowded field.

Note on Ealing: Many councillors are elected in wards where each voter has as many votes as there are positions to be filled. When voters have between 1 and 3 votes, depending on which ward they are in, and some decide to not cast all their votes as well, you can’t simply add up all the votes to calculate the vote shares. For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor (multi-member wards), we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Professors Rallings & Thrasher of The Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK.

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Is First Past the Post really fit for purpose?

Do parties that receive the support of fewer than three-in-ten voters deserve to have an overall majority of seats on local councils or indeed in the House of Commons, in Westminster? The answer to that is a resounding ‘no’.

It’s clear that urgent reform of our electoral system, at both UK level and at local level in England and Wales, is required, as otherwise, in our new multi-party world, the types of outcomes we saw in May will keep happening.

In terms of local elections, there is an off-the-shelf model of Proprotional Representation that is already in use in two nations of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland – the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

This system should be introduced for local elections in England and Wales as soon as possible. It would ensure that voters preferences are translated into representation on local councils in a much more accurate way, reflecting the reality of people casting their votes for a much wider number of parties than was previously the case.

Different areas of Britain vote differently, and each year’s local elections happen in different parts of the country. If a party does well in the local elections, it might just be that elections were happening in areas where their supporters are more likely to live.

So, in my last email, I suggested keeping an eye on two sets of data produced by separate academics after the English local election results were in. Both datasets have been running for around 45 years, and both seek to do the same thing – estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole of Britain, rather than just in certain parts of it.

The Projected National Share (PNS) is produced by Professor Sir John Curtice for the BBC, and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) is produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher for Sky News.

We expected that both measures would indicate that UK public opinion is now unprecedentedly fragmented, with support spread more thinly across more parties than ever before. This is exactly what happened.

Professor Sir John Curtice’s Projected National Share

The results of the May 2026 PNS are as follows:

Reform UK: 26%
Greens: 18%
Conservatives: 17%
Labour: 17%
Liberal Democrats: 16%
Others: 6%

May 2025’s PNS was the first in which five parties scored over 10%. One year on and five parties have scored over 15%.

Other things to note:

• The 26% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the PNS series. The previous lowest was the 28% recorded by both Labour and the Conservatives, in May 2019.

• It is the first time in the history of the PNS that neither Labour nor the Conservatives feature in the top two parties. The Greens are in second place, with 18%.

• There is only 10-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 26%) and the fifth-placed party (Liberal Democrats: 16%).

Although not showing quite as fragmented a picture as the PNS, the NEV still breaks a number of records.

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Rallings and Thrasher’s National Equivalent Vote

The results of May 2025’s NEV are as follows:

Reform UK: 27%
Conservatives: 20%
Labour: 15%
Greens: 14%
Liberal Democrats: 14%
Others: 10%

Things to note:

• The 27% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the NEV series. The previous lowest was the 29% recorded by Labour, in May 2013.

• It is the first time in the history of the NEV that five parties received more than 10% of votes.

• There is only 13-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 27%) and the fifth-placed parties (Greens: 14%; Liberal Democrats: 14%).

The different order of the parties in the NEV and PNS just shows the impact a few percentage points has when the parties are so close together. These data sets don’t mean that, for instance, Reform UK would win 26% or 27% of MPs in a UK general election. With First Past the Post it’s really complicated for voters to work out how their votes will translate into representation.

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Calculating the random results from England’s local elections

There are numerous examples of this multi-party politics playing out in individual council elections across England, with seat after seat seeing the largest party receiving the support of barely a third of local voters. With these sorts of voting patterns, First Past the Post throws out some pretty random and bizarre results, making it hard for voters to know how votes will translate to representation in their area. A flavour of last week’s local elections is below:

• Sefton = Lab majority of 55% of seats on 29% of votes*

• Calderdale = Reform UK majority of 63% of seats on 31% of votes

• East Surrey = Lib Dem majority of 56% of seats on 28% of votes

• Bexley = Conservative majority of 64% of seats on 33% of votes

• Lewisham = Green majority of 74% of seats on 42% of votes

Many councillors are elected in wards where each voter has as many votes as there are positions to be filled. When some voters have 2 votes and others 3, and some decide to not cast all their votes as well, you can’t simply add up all the votes to calculate the vote shares. For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor (multi-member wards), we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Professors Rallings & Thrasher of The Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK.

Now that the elections are over, we will continue to keep a close eye on the opinion polls and see where our multi-party politics heads next.

England’s First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is likely to deliver numerous highly disproportional results, with parties possibly taking control of councils where they didn’t win the most votes and councillors elected on tiny vote shares. First Past the Post simply cannot cope with this new reality of multi-party politics.

As can be seen below, we have hit another milestone in terms of electoral fragmentation, with no fewer than five parties separated by just 14.2 percentage points in our April polling averages data – a new record.

Scroll down for the polling averages.

First Past The Post is designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to splutter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted. We will be watching closely as the English local elections results come in and will report back on what happens.

Two sets of numbers to keep an eye on in the aftermath of the English local elections are the Projected National Share (PNS) produced by Professor Sir John Curtice, for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher, for Sky News.

Both the PNS and the NEV have been published every year for around the last 45 years. What these data attempt to do, via slightly different methodologies, is to estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole country, rather than just in certain parts of it. This makes it possible to compare local elections vote shares from one year to the next, even though the types of places where English local elections take place varies significantly from one year to the next.

In May 2025, the PNS recorded five parties on over 10% of the vote for the first time and placed those five parties within 19 percentage points of each other. This year we expect to see both the PNS and NEV reflect an even more fragmented political landscape, in line with how the opinion polls have moved over the last year.

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April UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent April poll by each of the ten polling companies who published a UK general election poll during April, is as follows:

Reform UK: 26.4% (-0.7*)
Labour: 19.1% (+0.3)
Conservatives: 18.6% (+0.3)
Greens: 15.6% (-0.2)
Liberal Democrats: 12.2% (+0.1)
Others: 8.1% (+0.2)

* Compared with March’s average - Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

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What do these mean?

• The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters.

• There is only a 14.2-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data.

• The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.7%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.

• Reform UK’s vote share (26.4%) represents its lowest monthly average vote share in the last 12 months, since they recorded 24.9% in April 2025. They are down 5.4 points from their monthly average vote share peak, which was 31.8% in September 2025.

April’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Freshwater Strategy; Good Growth Foundation; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Techne; YouGov.

With growing fragmentation, it becomes harder and harder to work out how polling will translate into seats in Westminster, at UK general elections. Something that pollsters have tried to get round with MRP polls. These MRP polls take data from a bigger than normal sample of people. For example, the sample for YouGov’s most recent UK general election MRP was 13,000.YouGov’s MRP model looks for relationships between people’s characteristics and how they intend to vote. It then combines these relationships with information about the characteristics of people living in different constituencies, in order to produce estimates of voting intention in each constituency.

Both YouGov and More In Common have published MRP polls for this week’s London local elections. However, both companies have stuck to estimating vote shares for each party, in each London borough, rather than attempting to estimate the number of council seats each party will get in each borough. This highlights just how difficult it is becoming to understand how party vote shares will translate into representation in elected chambers, under FPTP.

Polling Breakdown

Since February 2025, we at the Electoral Reform Society have been collecting data on UK general election voting intention polls published by British Polling Council (BPC) members.

The year since has seen the continuation of a trend decades in the making but which has now reached unprecedented levels: the breakdown of the UK’s post-war two-party political system and its replacement with a multi-party system, which is the norm throughout Europe.

Unfortunately, unlike in the rest of Europe, we have a voting system – First Past The Post – designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to sputter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted.

To see evidence of the extent to which the UK is becoming a multi-party nation, let’s turn our attention to the polling data for March 2026. This month saw a bumper crop of polls from BPC members. Twelve different companies published polls, a monthly high since the ERS started collecting this data a year ago.

March UK Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent March poll by each of those twelve companies, is as follows:

Reform UK: 27.1% (-1.3*)
Labour: 18.8% (-0.1)
Conservatives: 18.3% (-1.0)
Greens: 15.8% (+2.2)
Liberal Democrats: 12.1% (-0.9)
Others: 7.9% (+1.0)

* Compared with February’s average - Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

What do these mean?

• The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters.

• There is only a 15-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data.

• The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.1%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.

• The Green Party’s vote share represents its highest monthly average vote share since the party’s formation. Indeed, this week’s YouGov poll had the Greens in joint 2^nd place, behind Reform UK.

March’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Focaldata; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Survation; Techne; Verian; YouGov.

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First Past the Post: A system under strain

The days of a vast majority of people voting for one of two ‘major parties’ are gone. Unfortunately, the electoral system designed for those days, First Past The Post (FPTP), is still very much with us for UK general elections.

First Past the Post resulted in the most disproportional general election result ever in 2024, when Labour won almost two-thirds of seats, from just over one-third of votes. With the continued rise of multi-party politics since then, it is likely to result in even more random and chaotic results in future.

This outdated system simply cannot cope with how people are expressing their democratic preferences in 2026. We are seeing increasing numbers of MPs and councillors elected with under one-third of votes, meaning the views of over two-thirds of voters are simply ignored.

In addition, First Past the Post often causes voters to feel under pressure to vote ‘tactically’, where they have to consider voting for a party that is not their favourite, to try to stop a party they really dislike from winning. This is not how democracy should work, but there is a real danger that our next general election will be dominated by tactical discussions of who people should vote for to keep out other parties, rather than a debate about competing visions for the country.

Next Month

Next month’s email will be just before the local elections on Thursday 7th May, where both the Greens and Reform are hoping to make major breakthroughs. Can the Greens sustain their growth? Will Reform be able to maintain their position? Find out next month.

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A ringside seat on the break down of the two-party system

Poll after poll has shown that we are in an almost unprecedented period of UK politics. Where elections often used to be a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, voters are now spreading their support across an increasingly crowded field – and our voting system is struggling to keep up.

The internal analysis we use, free for you

At the Electoral Reform Society, we keep an eye on all polls published by British Polling Council (BPC) members. Individual pollsters have their own methodologies, and all polls are subject to a small margin of error.

Therefore, a good way to get a broad sense of public opinion is to look at polls from a range of pollsters. This is why we are launching this monthly Substack featuring our analysis of which way the polls are going. Each month, we will base our analysis on the latest UK general election vote intention poll from any BPC members that have published a poll where fieldwork took place during that month.

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Who’s writing this?

The Electoral Reform Society’s research team is led by Dr Jess Garland with Ian Simpson as the senior research officer. Ian will be taking writing duties for most of the articles we publish.

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We already have a mailing list, so why start another? And should you subscribe to both? Our Substack will just be elections and polling analysis; we won’t send you articles on other topics or emails about our campaigns.

If you are already subscribed to our main mailing list, you will get these articles along with others in our weekend ERS News emails, but we’ll be publishing them on Substack first.