When a Shake-Up Becomes a Spiral

I heard a voter in Makerfield say he was fed up with two-party politics and might vote Reform because the system needed a shake-up. There’s a certain logic in that.

We've all stood in front of a vending machine that has swallowed our money. After a while, giving it a shake starts to seem entirely reasonable. Sometimes the chocolate bar drops. Sometimes the machine falls over. But of course a vending machine is a harmless example. If it falls over, the worst outcome is embarrassment and a dented Twix.

Politics is not a vending machine. It is more like shaking a ladder because you are annoyed the gutter still leaks. You may get movement. You may even get the attention of the person at the top. But you may also bring the whole thing down, injure the person doing the job, smash the greenhouse underneath, and still have a leaking gutter when everyone has finished shouting.

That is the part of the shake-up argument that tends to get skipped. Movement is not the same as repair. Disruption is not the same as progress. And once things start falling, they do not always fall neatly in the direction intended.

When the same two parties take turns managing disappointment, people stop treating politics as a choice between programmes and start treating it as a means of punishment. The vote becomes less "I believe in this" and more "I no longer believe in you." That is a serious moment for the two-party system.

But not every shake-up has to arrive wearing the clothes of an insurgency. One of the more interesting recent developments has been Prosper UK, an attempt by centre-right figures to rebuild a serious, pragmatic conservatism around competence, economic realism and governing rather than grievance. Whether it succeeds is impossible to know. New political movements fail more often than they flourish. But Prosper UK may go nowhere and still serve a useful purpose: it shows there are different kinds of shake-up. One tries to repair the system. The other tries to frighten it into working.

"Burn it down and start again" has the faint smell of Dominic Cummings about it: thrilling in theory, expensive in practice, and somehow always leaving someone else to find the dustpan. Countries are not usually improved by theatrical demolition. They are maintained by the duller work of repair, competence and restraint.

But there is another question sitting underneath it, and it is not entirely comfortable. If someone feels they are not being listened to, they also need to ask what exactly they are asking politicians to hear. Are they asking for better government, less waste, more competent administration and a clearer sense of direction? Perfectly reasonable. Are they asking for decent wages, affordable housing, functioning public services and economic security? Also perfectly reasonable. Or are they asking for something no government can realistically deliver?

Because many of the complaints one hears today are accompanied by demands that simply don't fit together. Lower taxes and better services. Higher pensions and lower government spending. Higher wages and lower prices. Less immigration and faster economic growth. More healthcare, more social care, more defence spending and no increase in taxation.

It sometimes feels as though voters have come to believe government has access to some vast hidden pot of money, sitting somewhere in Whitehall, entirely unconnected to tax, borrowing or economic growth. A sort of magic fiscal biscuit tin, kept for emergencies, election campaigns and moments when somebody on a phone-in demands Scandinavian public services with American tax levels. At some point the problem may not be that politicians aren't listening. It may be that voters are asking for arithmetic to take a day off.

That matters because the desire for a shake-up is a two-edged sword. It can force renewal. It can remind Labour and the Conservatives that loyalty is earned rather than inherited. It can expose complacency, punish incompetence and force old assumptions to be re-examined. But it can also encourage something much less healthy.

If the lesson politicians learn is not "govern better" but "promise harder", then the entire political system starts to change. Parties stop competing on competence and start competing on fantasy. The question ceases to be who can solve problems and becomes who can construct the most attractive version of reality. And then, inevitably, disappoint.

Because fantasy is wonderful in opposition. It survives speeches, interviews, slogans and doorstep promises. What it does not survive is contact with budgets, staffing levels, trade-offs, interest rates, courts, markets, councils, hospitals, demographics and the irritating persistence of arithmetic. That is how populism spreads through a political system. Not necessarily because populists win, but because everyone else starts talking like them.

The result is that Labour and the Conservatives don't disappear. Instead, they adapt. They become more reactive, more theatrical and less willing to explain difficult trade-offs. They discover that telling uncomfortable truths loses votes while offering painless solutions gains them. That is a dangerous lesson for any democracy.

So yes, there is logic in the argument for a shake-up. If people feel ignored, frustrated and increasingly detached from the political class, it is hardly surprising that they start looking for ways to rattle the cage. But a mature democracy requires something from voters as well as politicians. It requires the willingness to distinguish between what is desirable and what is possible.

Because if enough voters demand the impossible, politicians eventually stop offering the possible. And at that point the two-party system may indeed change. Not because it has been repaired. Because it has learnt to fail in a louder voice.