To understand that this possible Ulsterisation of British politics is a genuinely serious prospect, step back a bit and consider the way that electoral behaviour has been evolving in Britain. Ever since 1964, political scientists, mainly based at Nuffield College, Oxford, have worked on the British Election Study (BES). For more than half a century they have tracked the decline of the old industrial-based two-party system in which general elections were fought between the Conservatives and Labour, who battled for the floating voters in the middle ground across the land.
Today’s electoral politics are fundamentally different. A long-term trend of dealignment from the two big parties means that voters are no longer loyal battalions of partisans. Millions of individual voters are now happy to switch between an increasing array of parties. In 2015, 43% of them voted for a different party from the one they had supported in 2010. In 2017, 33% switched from their 2015 vote. In 2019, a similar kaleidoscopic change seems certain. Tellingly, a BES study of these two recent elections, due for publication in December, will be titled Electoral Shocks: the Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. [...]
Northern Ireland’s divides are rooted in centuries of religious divide. The Brexit divide in Britain is far more recent. But it is rooted in identities and anger, too. If Brexit does become the defining issue in mid-21st-century British politics, the hope of a country coming back together could be as fragile as the dream of Irish peace now is, and just as fraught.
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