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Prof Sir John Curtice thoughts on the Peterborough byelection.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-politics-live

The Peterborough byelection result confirms that the issue of Brexit has turned the UK’s two-party system into a four-party system, Prof Sir John Curtice, Britain’s most respected psephologist, told the Today programme this morning.

Labour’s Lisa Forbes won the byelection with 30.9% of the vote over the Brexit party, which got 28.9%. The Conservative, who held the seat for 12 years until 2015, came third with 21.4%, and the Liberal Democrats fourth on 12.3%.

Curtice said that in the last general election in 2017 the two traditional main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, shared 95% of the vote in Peterborough, but got only 52.3% in the byelection. He told Today:

Brexit has become such an important issue that rather than our traditional system of two-party politics, at the moment at least, we’ve got a system of four party politics.

The two traditional parties, that are much happier talking about issues other than Brexit, have been joined by two parties: the Brexit party at one end of the spectrum; and the Liberal Democrats on the other, who are quite happy to carry on talking about Brexit. That’s the issue on which they are united and on which they seem to be winning votes.

Labour’s share of the vote in Peterborough was up nine percentage points compared to it disastrous showing in the European election. But Curtice said senior Labour figures could not pretend that the party was not losing support over Brexit.

The idea, that the Labour party has been coming at this morning, that this all goes to show that the whole argument about Brexit and the legacy of the European election can be ignored, is wrong.

The Peterborough result was consistent with recent opinion polls, he said and added: “Not as dramatic as the European elections but still more than enough to disrupt our usual politics.”

He pointed out that Labour’s vote in Peterborough represented the “smallest share of the vote that has ever been sufficient to win a general election in postwar British politics.”

Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost more than half the vote share they won in 2017, Curtice said:

Some of the immediate pressure on both the Conservative and Labour Party will be thought to be eased, but if anybody comes away from this and thinks, ‘Oh, actually, you know, the impact that Brexit is having on our politics is beginning to disappear and dissipate’. Well, maybe it will eventually. But it certainly isn’t doing so yet on the evidence this byelection.

Unless and until the Conservative party can deliver Brexit, it is going to be in trouble. And it remains the case that it looks as though the Labour party’s position on Brexit is not anything like adequate for the Labour party to be able to retain the kinds of support they had in the 2017 election.