This is the most interesting British election in 10 years – against extremely weak competition, admittedly. In 2001 and 2005, Labour was in control, the Conservatives were in disarray and the Liberal Democrats were in the shade. No longer. We need to go back not 10 but 100 years to gauge the significance of what is happening.
All the politicians say it is an election for change. There have indeed been great transformative contests throughout British electoral history. In 1906 it was the apparently rock-solid bastion of Unionism (as Conservatism was known in those days) that was swept away, after virtually 20 years of power. Instead, it was the turn of the Liberals and Labour to triumph. They worked together in a “Progressive Alliance” (to use contemporary terminology again) that lasted until the first world war.
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