The Next Election Cannot Really Be “Won” – And Why What Follows Matters Even More

We are all thinking about what happens next. Quietly or otherwise, people find predictions irresistible. We know they are usually wrong. We know the future rarely behaves itself. But predictions give us something we understandably crave: reassurance. They offer the sense that someone, somewhere, has a map, even if the map is little more than a sketch drawn in the sand.

I write about the future often, but not in the way pundits do. I do not make fixed predictions about elections, because doing so is usually a fool’s errand. The political runes only ever speak clearly in the moment you read them, and even then they whisper rather than shout. What I try to do instead is look beneath the events themselves and ask what the deeper forces shaping them make possible, likely, or unavoidable.

Right now, those deeper forces are telling us something uncomfortable: the next general election cannot really be “won”, at least not in the way people imagine. And the election that follows may matter even more, if world events don’t intervene first.

To understand why, we need to step back from the daily noise and look at the operating system beneath British politics: a system that has become fragile, hollowed out, and increasingly unable to produce meaningful change.

The System Behind the System

One of the clearest windows into this reality came in The Contemporary Politician’s Dilemma (2024), where I described a moment when newly elected or returning MPs who have found themselves with power discover how government actually works.

They arrive in Westminster full of promises, only to be told – often within days – that everything the previous government was doing, no matter what it said publicly, was the only way to keep the machinery of state running. The alternative was to risk first the economy, then government itself, and then the public services people rely on.

This is the moment the illusion cracks. Politicians realise that every social issue – housing, immigration, inflation, the cost of living, benefits, productivity – is tied to the economic model. The economic model depends on growth. Growth depends on spending. Spending depends on narrative. Narrative depends on performance. And performance depends on maintaining decline in a way that looks like progress.

The practical consequences are visible everywhere. Housing cannot be fixed without confronting land, debt, planning, wages, infrastructure and the financial model that sits beneath them. Welfare cannot be discussed honestly without asking why so many people in work still cannot live independently on what work pays. Public services cannot be restored simply by changing the minister or the slogan above the department. Each problem is treated as separate, yet each is tied to the same economic and institutional framework.

Governments still hold office, pass laws and make announcements. But their room for meaningful manoeuvre has narrowed dramatically. They increasingly manage decline rather than reverse it. That is why so many governments end up looking alike. That is why promises evaporate. That is why legitimacy drains away.

The Establishment Is Not What People Think It Is

In July 2026, I wrote The Establishment Is Not What You Think It Is, which explains the deeper mechanism behind this paralysis.

People imagine the Establishment as a group – elites, mandarins, financiers, media, “the blob”. But the real Establishment is not a class. It is a worldview. A mental operating system. A set of assumptions about what is “realistic”, “responsible”, “credible” and “possible”.

This worldview saturates everything: politics, media, finance, public services, professional norms, institutional culture. It shapes how people think without them realising it, because it feels like reality. It rewards conformity, punishes deviation, and treats alternatives as naive or dangerous. It is enforced not by conspiracy, but by incentives.

This is why even anti‑establishment actors end up reinforcing the system. Reform, Restore, and even parts of the Conservatives behave as if they are fighting the Establishment, yet their actions reveal that they operate fully within its worldview. They judge success by market confidence, treat narrative as power, and assume that centralised management, competitive funding and measurable outputs are the only acceptable forms of action.

The Establishment is not something you overthrow. It is something you wake up inside.

The Right’s Fragmentation Is a Symptom, Not a Cause

In What is the Right Really For? (June 2026), I argued that the right is not divided because its factions have different philosophies. It is divided because they are all trying to reclaim a conservatism that the modern political system no longer allows to exist.

Traditional conservatism depends on locality, community, stewardship, continuity, identity and self‑governance. But the Establishment worldview depends on centralisation, corporatism, globalisation, managerialism, technocracy and distant authority. These two worldviews cannot coexist. The right is not fighting over ideology. It is fighting over something unreachable.

This is why the Conservatives defend a system that is no longer conservative. Reform tries to break the system without knowing what to replace it with. Restore tries to revive conservatism in a landscape where conservatism cannot function. Their conflict is not ideological. It is existential.

The Behaviour of Parties Reveals the Fragility of the System

The strain was already visible up to a year ago. Labour reshuffled repeatedly to manage perception. Reform behaved like a brand rather than a governing force, staging conferences that looked more like victory rallies than policy events. The Conservatives clung to relevance through messaging rather than substance. Farage mistook momentum for capability. Quasi‑Tories migrated to Reform expecting instant change.

This is the behaviour of a system running out of room. Parties behave as if optics equal authority, narrative equals power, and performance equals legitimacy. They chase headlines because they struggle to deliver outcomes. They polish the surface because they cannot repair the structure. They fight over the steering wheel of a vehicle that no longer responds properly to steering.

The Global Dominoes

The next election could be overtaken by events long before polling day. The list is not short: the Strait of Hormuz, financial instability (including Japan), a potential AI‑driven bubble burst, geopolitical escalation, supply chain fragility, food security, energy shocks. Any one of these could expose how vulnerable the UK has become.

A world‑derived crisis could very easily reveal just how fragile the UK really is – not only economically, but institutionally and politically. It could expose weak spots like food security, supply chains, and over‑reliance on imports. And it could make the result of the next general election a moot point, because we simply do not have politicians or leaders capable of operating in an environment that requires real leadership rather than performance.

Yes, this may be pessimistic. Britain has endured crises before: economic shocks, constitutional upheavals, wars, strikes, deindustrialisation, party collapses and social fracture. Institutions can bend without breaking, and electorates can tolerate more discomfort than commentators often assume.

But the question is not whether Britain has survived crises before. It is whether the present system still contains the intellectual, economic and institutional capacity to renew itself from within.

That is far less clear.

The Legitimacy Crisis

Burnham’s legitimacy problem is therefore not merely personal. It is systemic. He may have arrived in No.10 through legitimate processes, but legitimacy is not produced by process alone. It is produced by capability, consent and a credible sense of direction. Those things are difficult to generate when the same worldview sets the limits of what any leader is permitted to imagine.

This is why Reform can look triumphant, the Conservatives nostalgic, Labour managerial, and Restore principled but powerless. Each speaks to a real dissatisfaction. Yet none has convincingly shown how it would escape the assumptions that created the dissatisfaction in the first place.

The Next Election Cannot Really Be “Won”

Polling today suggests that no party can comfortably expect a working majority. The right is fragmented. The left may form a coalition. Reform may surge. Conservatives may revive slightly. Restore may remain fringe. But these are surface‑level dynamics.

The deeper truth is that even a working majority cannot govern in any meaningful sense if the system itself is at its limit. The next government, whatever its shape, will face the same dilemma as the newly elected MP who discovers that the machinery of state permits far less change than the campaign suggested. It may manage decline, or it may disturb the settlement enough to expose how fragile that settlement has become.

The Lifetime of the Next Government

The next government will inherit a fragile economic model, a saturated worldview, degraded public services, brittle institutions, exhausted narratives, declining legitimacy and global volatility. Its tools will be limited. Its room for manoeuvre will be narrow. Its philosophical foundations will be uncertain. Its institutional capacity will be stretched. Its public trust will be weak.

This is why governments now appear to fail faster. Expectations remain high, but capacity is lower. Promises are larger, but delivery is weaker. Narratives are louder, but reality intervenes sooner.

It is possible that the next administration may have months, not years, before it too is forced to admit that it cannot find a way out of the mess using the tools it inherited.

What Happens When the System Can No Longer Continue

Sooner or later, someone near power will have to say what the system currently cannot say: we cannot continue like this anymore.

That moment need not be revolutionary in the dramatic sense. It may simply be the moment when the worldview breaks, the operating system fails, the Establishment loses coherence, and the political map begins to dissolve enough for new possibilities to emerge.

The Establishment is not something you defeat. It is something you outgrow.

What Renewal Requires

If renewal is possible, it will require a return to locality, community‑rooted economies, stewardship, identity grounded in place, governance by the governed, and institutions that serve people rather than systems. This is not nostalgia. It is the foundation of a functioning society.

Conclusion: The Election Is Not the Story – The System Is

The next election matters. But it cannot be “won” in any meaningful sense. The real story is the system itself: its worldview, its fragility, its limits, its contradictions, its saturation, and its inability to solve the problems it created.

The question is not simply who wins. The question is what happens when the system can no longer hide its own failures. And the deeper question is whether enough people can see clearly enough to imagine something better: not merely a different leader, party or slogan, but a different set of assumptions about how economies, institutions and communities should function.

That is the real choice ahead. Not whether the Establishment can be defeated, but whether it can finally be outgrown.

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma

The Establishment Is Not What You Think It Is

When Tax is the Only Tool They Have Left

The Next Election Cannot Really Be Won 23Aug26 PDF_Vers2_25Sep26

Our Communities are the only place that a workable political solution can begin

Any Political Solution to the crisis we are in must develop and grow from our communities and grassroots; NOT from any existing Party that still wants to rule everyone Top-Down

One of the key problems with UK Politics today is that it operates as almost the mirror image of wider culture, where most people fall into the trap of believing that their own perspective is the right one. But that anyone with an alternative view of any kind – even in just the smallest of ways, is or will be fundamentally wrong about everything else, too.

Yes, you could easily argue that this is how tribes and groups work.

But politics or rather the UK political system is supposed to be about delivering public policy that is created and then implemented in the best interests of ALL British People.

The one thing that we can be sure of is that when it comes to the political classes who have been running Westminster and our local Councils for decades, there is very little about any of it – apart from the Election campaigns, that has anything to do with or what is best for us.

As I have been discussing in some of my recent blogs, time has now run out for the way that government and our economic system runs. Neoliberalism and everything such as MMT, FIAT money, and the increasingly illogically impractical schemes like Net Zero and everything that pushes people and businesses into being reliant on credit are no longer sustainable.

That is why everything is now in the process of crashing around the Labour Government’s head.

Yes, the politicians in power are incompetent.

No, the mess we are in didn’t begin the day after Labour were elected to power and Starmer arrived in No.10.

And No, not Labour, nor the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Reform or any other group of politicians currently looking ahead to the next General Election are going to offer and deliver to us anything different. Certainly not in any way that the UK actually needs.

For a time, I was open to the idea that Reform could find itself pursuing a different way. One that would offer the cross-tribal consensus and answers that the UK now needs.

Instead, it has become clear that the mechanics of this 4^th evolution of the anti-EU movement certainly hasn’t moved on in any kind of people-centric direction.

Instead, Reform is just reforming itself, but in ways that have a very familiar likeness to political parties that have been in power before, who have increasingly aligned themselves and been led by the machinations of the establishment instead.

The mess over Rupert Lowe and the inescapable optics suggesting that at every level of the Reform Party, the whole thing is all about Nigel Farage, really does speak volumes for itself.

That’s before taking the time to read the outpourings of words from former party activists and ‘officers’ who have recently walked away. Just like better known voices associated with Reform such as those of Howard Cox and Ben Habib.

If any of the names instantly trigger feelings that suggest you have taken a side as you read – no matter the reason, it is exactly that kind of emotion that is our collective problem.

Disagreement over the smallest of things shuts so many of us down to the reality that we all have views about different things that we might never agree on. But when it comes down to all the things that are actually important, there is an awful lot of commonalities between all of us to be found.

Difficult to hear though it might be, it is the division that is deliberately sown between us over issues that we do have in common – by them being presented in ways that make them appear and trigger us as if they are something else – that really plays into the hands of the incompetent political classes that we regrettably have.

As things stand, and without a lot of us choosing to approach our relationship with politics very differently, the same people dividing us and guiding us to hate people we should not have any hate for, are set to keep guiding the ship that we are all beginning to sink on. And they will happily continue to do so, until the whole thing actually goes down.

Westminster is just the tip of the ruling iceberg that we can actually see.

Behind central government sits all the things like power, influence and the wealth accumulation that money controls and which is carefully kept outside of open view.

Because the truth is that the only people who benefit from us continuing to elect politicians who are under the spell of the establishment are those politicians and all those who are benefiting from the continuation of the establishment itself.

Whilst there is very good reason to believe that the wheels could fall off this broken bus at any moment in time, for those who have been aware and watching the direction of travel of the UK (and for that matter the whole of the Western world) for a considerable period of time, both the Global Financial Crisis and then the responses to the Covid Pandemic could, and arguably should, have already been the catalysts that introduced a genuinely new way of doing governance to the UK.

That these two massive events didn’t doesn’t indicate that change cannot or will not come.

The fact that we have been led to believe that what the politicians have done in response is in any way normal just tells us even more about how deeply embedded those who genuinely believe or work with this Top-Down, them vs us culture really are, right across the establishment.

We can see just how far they are prepared to take things in their attempts to stop the whole thing from crashing down, even now. Indeed, they are growing so desperate to maintain The System, they are even attacking the people who their ‘tribe’ have always typically helped.

Whilst the talk of absolutes will certainly sound like a contradiction to the words used as I began writing this Blog above, the one dividing line that we really do have no choice but to observe and then decide upon, is which side we sit between the establishment and all it stands for, and on the other side, the people and what putting people, our communities and the environment surrounding the places where we live and work, first.

Whilst even the Tories are successfully making themselves sound very plausible, just 8 months on from losing power, in the context of everything that the Labour Government is doing wrong, none of these political parties – and that almost certainly now includes Reform, show any sign of genuinely offering an alternative to establishment-directed public policy today.

However, it isn’t today and what is now past that we need to worry about. The most important thing is the future, and specifically what happens when we reach the next General Election and what must be ‘our time’.

The UK and we as its people cannot afford another General Election result that delivers power to any group – whether elected directly, or assembled as a result of some kind of post-election ‘deal’, that then goes on to do whatever the hell it likes.

No political party out there today, currently canvassing for votes in this years Local Elections is offering to do anything in any different kind of way.

We know this, because the way that they are running their election campaigns right now; how they are communicating and most importantly, how they are engaging with real people outside the bubbles of their own members and activists, is exactly the same as it has always been before.

To put it bluntly, we can no longer afford to take the risk that comes with accepting a choice of political candidates in any election, that not us, but the political parties themselves actually choose.

Change will not come in the way that we now so desperately need it, if we keep on doing politics at every level in the UK in exactly the same way!

It is our communities and the people who are around us every day who should be selecting the people who will represent us at all levels of government.

Not people we don’t know beyond the pictures, websites, social media and TV screens.

We need public representatives to represent us who have genuine skin in our game. People who are answerable only to us and who are committed to delivering locality-centric democracy, that is the only way that democracy can genuinely thrive, survive and most importantly, work.

Whilst government and the public sector really do now need to undergo massive change, the reality is that our communities could be working together to select and elect non-party candidates in all elections, right now.

We certainly don’t need any kind of change to the electoral system that just favours the election of more incompetent candidates. Ambitious and self-serving politicians whose actions will be made even worse by the guaranteed requirement for compromise on public policy that schemes like Proportional Representation as a replacement for First Past the Post would bring.

Power MUST come back to the people. Not through carefully crafted labels like ‘devolution’ and ‘devolved power’ that is nothing more than Regional Centralisation sold to us with a very misleading name.

The power – OUR POWER is already ours and that power can be made to work for us right now. IF we choose to use it. Look beyond the manufactured differences. And focus on working together, on the important things that we all have in common, and to deliver a new world and way of being that is happy, healthy, safe, secure and governs life with fairness, balance and justice for us all.

Anyone can begin this process of change and the appointment of new candidates to become the public representatives and politicians who will create and deliver our new future, right now. And we need them to, IF we are going to experience beneficial change.

That change will only be certain if we all change the way that we think. What we can be sure of, however, is that a good future for us all doesn’t and will not start where anything ‘new’ for the politicians and voices that we already recognise as public figures begins.