The Uncuts: 2025 awards (pt III)

Breakthrough of the year: The Peripheralocracy

Let’s hear it for The Peripherals.

Has our Red/Blue political system ever looked weaker or more irrelevant? A rhetorical question, you understand, with the obvious response being an emphatic ‘No.’

Still, as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously responded when Henry Kissinger asked what he thought about the French Revolution, perhaps it’s too early to tell?

Yet blip or paradigm shift, it’s abundantly clear that all the energy in British politics has drained to the periphery over the past year. A combination of the campaigning brio and easy platitudes of Nigel Farage on the right and Zack Polanski on the left.

Managerial, Red/Blue centrist dad political doesn’t have much appeal when nothing works and everyone’s poor and cheesed off. This was vividly brought home in a YouGov poll the other day looking at where the various parties started 2025 in terms of their polling and where they finished up.

No surprises for guessing that Labour has crashed eight points to 18%. Or that the Tories are down five on 17%. The big winners were Reform – on 28% – up five from last January. While the Greens – energised by Zack Polanski – were up nine points on 17%.

But The Rise of the Peripherals is not just a story about Reform and the Greens. Look what’s happening in our rapidly disuniting United Kingdom.

Indeed, the big story of May’s elections – besides Reform and the Greens gobbling-up council seats across the country – is the reality that nationalists will be in control in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the first time.

Look at the SNP, Plaid Cmyru and Sinn Fein.

The SNP has recovered its mojo from the fiasco of the Sturgeon years and looks set, along with the Greens, to secure a clear majority for independence in the next Scottish Parliament. On the street, support for leaving the UK is now edging it – 53-47%.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is positioned as the clear leader in their complex multi-party system, denying the unionists any chance of recovering top spot after losing the First Minister’s role back in 2022.

But perhaps the most interesting story is Wales. No-one – and I say this as neutrally as I can – has ever entertained the idea of Plaid Cmyru posing a real challenge. Until now. The Welsh nationalists look set to ignite a third demand to secede from the UK as they lead the pack just five months out from a Senedd election that looks set to wipe-out Welsh Labour (who will probably end up backing Plaid in order to keep out Reform).

Pencil-in a constitutional crisis to add to the Prime Minister’s overflowing in-tray as we try to make sense of our new peripheralocracy.