Description
The governance of the UK is often categorised as a ‘two-party’ system; but at least four UK parties have not received this memo. In particular, the 2024 General Election revealed an evolving electoral landscape, in which growing polarisation saw the Green Party, and Reform UK, come in second place in 138 of the 650 constituencies. As Labour secured a 174-seat majority with just 33.7% of the vote, in the next general election, very small swings could lead to a transformed House of Commons. In response, we ask: where are the sites of starkest political polarisation in the UK, and which issues are at the forefront of these locations? To answer these questions, we have created a full dataset of all 138 such parliamentary constituencies, and their wards, and their boroughs, resulting in 1916 cases. We classify these cases according to certain key themes, such as whether they include universities, and map these against the environmental narratives in play across these constituencies, which we analyse further through interviews with local party figures. We find that Anti-Net Zero Populism, alongside an emerging ‘green populism’, represent the frontline at which political contestation is occurring in the UK, even if there are few seats in which the Greens and Reform are in competition with one another. Our results emphasise the importance of climate politics, and environmental protection more generally, as a core electoral issue in the UK, and speak to the ongoing partisanship and polarisation of environmental politics that has returned since the late 2010s
