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“... It looks like​ Britain’s long-standing electoral duopoly is coming to an end. Even though Labour won a huge majority in the 2024 general election, the combined vote share of the two main parties dropped below 60 per cent, the lowest on record. The two-party system we have been used to emerged in the first quarter of the 20th century, a consequence primarily of the growing electoral power of the Labour Party ...”

“... The​ first Labour government assumed office in January 1924 after a general election a month earlier resulted in a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives the largest party. In the previous decade British politics had changed in ways that might have been expected to assist the Labour Party, most obviously with the decline of the Liberal Party, the dominant progressive political force until the First World War, which had slipped behind Labour in the 1922 election ...”

“... Despite​ Theresa May’s calls during the election campaign for national unity, Britons don’t really live in a nation-state but in a multinational composite state, whose lineaments were set in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and the Hanoverian accession in 1714. With the defeat of Catholic supporters of the deposed James II in Ireland – then a subordinate kingdom belonging to England – in 1690, sectarian divisions, which foreshadow the differences between today’s Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists, became more deeply entrenched ...”

“... in the wings for it to come to its senses.But what if things weren’t quite so inevitable? Malcolm Petrie, in Politics and the People: Scotland 1945-79, challenges much of the received wisdom about an era – after the war, before Thatcher – that is gradually fading from collective memory. He does this by focusing on political culture ...”

“... second term. In the US military, this kind of thing is called ‘stolen valour’. As Malcolm Petrie has argued, the ILP’s politics were local, radical and extra-parliamentary while the Labour Party’s were national, reformist and electoral. Labour didn’t see its supporters as communities to be mobilised, but voters to be canvassed and ...”

“... languages and manners, but Mariette did not think them capable or worthy of the training. Donald Malcolm Reid’s analysis of his exclusionary tactics seems ‘unfair’ to Wilkinson, but the stalled career of the Egyptologist Ahmed Kamal – who scraped a living as a German teacher for many years – speaks to squandered potential and frustrated ...”