Swing time

The age of two-party politics is over: we know that because everyone keeps saying so. We are entering an era of coalitions, apparently, where compromise is king and a wider variety of views will be represented in parliament. These barely comprehensible seven-way television debates are the future, we are assured, and decisive general election results a thing of the past.

Look deeper and this analysis falls apart. Even now, Labour and the Conservatives between them have about two thirds of the vote, just as they did at the last general election. What we are witnessing is the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, who have been reduced — on a bad day — to being the UK’s sixth most popular party. This is the paradox of the 2015 election: the country seems destined for messy, multi-party coalition negotiations, yet Labour and Conservatives stand to hold, between them, a higher proportion of English seats than at any time since the 1980s.