That’s partly because the barriers to entry for anybody aspiring to replace them are pretty damned high, particularly in plurality systems such as the UK’s. Historically, anyway, it’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible for any party that can’t manage to score around 30% of the nationwide vote here to break through — unless, like the Scottish and Welsh nationalists or the Northern Ireland parties, they can claim to speak for a particular part of the country with a particularly strong identity. Nigel Farage, in offering the Tories some kind of electoral pact with the Brexit Party, isn’t so much doing them a favour as trying to prevent a re-run of 2015 when Ukip won nearly four million votes and only one solitary seat. [...]
What established parties do find difficult to escape, however, is being rendered increasingly irrelevant by social, economic and cultural change. Most of them will have come into being by mobilising identities that once upon a time were not only widespread, and made a lot of sense, but were also institutionally reinforced by relationships with big external players that both anchored them ideologically and supplied them with valuable resources. [...]
It is no accident, then, that it is parties in those traditions which (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to be suffering a slow (and, who knows, possibly in the end terminal) decline: what’s happened to both the Labour Party and Christian democrats in the Netherlands provides possibly the direst warning. This decline has been exacerbated in recent years by a failure to come up with convincing answers to widely-felt cultural anxieties brought about by mass immigration and its exploitation by arguably less responsible, but supposedly more responsive (and often more entrepreneurial) politicians – in their case, Geert Wilders and now Thierry Baudet.
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