The Prime Minister survived a somewhat lame attack from Blairite and backbench rebels on Monday night. This should be no surprise to seasoned watchers of the Labour Party whose high level power struggles can easily descend into civil war.

MPs are currently in a lose/lose situation – but a civil war is still worse than a duff Prime Minister for their electoral prospects. Brown is now claiming that he will be decisive (aka stop dithering) and that he will rebuild the economy.

Brown has also made a lot of promises about inclusion, transparency and consultation but this was a meeting of the PLP not of the membership. A natural expectation must be that the political class will retreat into its laager and that it will continue to fail to connect with discontent out there.

The coup is over but public and party discontent simmers. It is unlikely that speculation about challengers will end. The next flashpoint is the Party Conference in September. After that, the Queen’s speech in October will be the last before a General Election.

Changes in British Political Culture

It is worth repeating just how bad it was for Labour:

• it lost its popular hold over Wales, Labour’s since 1918
• there is no Labour Euro-representation in the South West
• its share of the vote collapsed to 8% in the ‘prosperous’ South East
• it is now the third party after the Liberal Democrats in English local government
• it secured the lowest vote ever recorded by a serving Labour Government
• the vote fell under 10% for the first time since 1910
• it controls not a single County Council.

What is not often commented on is the degree to which a nation that was once dominated by two tribal mass membership oligopolistic parties with a small liberal Democrat rival and with virtually no nationalist presence (outside the peculiarity of Northern Ireland) has been transformed in the space of thirty years.

The UK is now a country of multiple parties and shifting allegiances. If the Conservatives appear to be the largest party, they are not so dominant as to become complacent.

At the next level down from the Tories’ uneasy dominance, we appear to have three competing parties jostling for second place, possibly as the permanent rival to Conservatism in a revived two party system.

Labour has fallen and UKIP has risen to give the Liberal Democrats an opportunity in theory but one which they show no sign of taking.

The LibDems should be the premier centre-left pro-European party, whittling away votes from progressive New Labour and the liberal wing of the Tories. History shows that they are rarely up to the task.

In reality, the question is whether Labour will recover (which may look less likely in view of the decision of the PLP to back the Prime Minister but is still the best medium term bet) or whether UKIP will create what is, in effect, a broader neo-nationalist challenge to the Conservatives.

If UKIP wins the race, would it drive the Tories to the centre (and to coalition) or force the Conservatives to concede the policy that holds UKIP together? The Tories could crush UKIP with just one policy commitment – withdrawal – but this would cost it business and liberal votes.

This is a bit of a mess. Apart from bread and butter issues, all four parties are dancing around Europe. Two hold the line for hard-line positions (the LibDems and UKIP) that then act as a check on the manouevrability of the two historic mainstream parties.

Meanwhile, the Tories and New Labour try to have their cake and eat it in keeping together their uneasy coalitions of pro- and anti-Europeans. A referendum could lance the boil but it would also expose the contradictions within the ‘moderate’ mainstream parties.

Rising Dissent From Below

Much of the debate centres on the four leading parties because the First Past The Post electoral system means that a leading party might command a majority in the House (and so control of the State) with a minority of the actual vote, let alone a minority of those able to vote.

This raises disturbing questions of legitimacy and even of right of popular resistance in due course, as well as the level of bitterness amongst the losers. FPTP is going to be under great strain if a political culture with multiple parties, each with real backing in the country, is really emerging.

This becomes more critical as a third level of party claims serious support for certain types of community yet cannot get full representation because it is too thinly spread.

This was the historic problem with the Liberal Democrats who were constrained in any radical resistance to the system by their absolute commitment to Parliamentarianism.

The two main contenders for this status now, the Greens and BNP, have a different view of the primacy of Parliament and they have ‘fundi’ wings quite prepared for direct action.

We have not mentioned the nationalists only because they are localized - but they are important. They offer a challenge that is centrifugal, constantly threatening to break up the Union.

Yet the new parties (there is a category of ‘others’ which is a breeding ground for yet further challenges) could undermine the historic liberal democratic consensus in Parliament through action outside it if they become more and more frustrated at lack of progress in their areas of policy concern.

This challenge is also highly regionalised. If the petty nationalist parties have their base in localities so do the mainstream challengers, but the most interesting assessment is where the second level parties are dominant and where the BNP, Greens and ‘Others’ have a voice.

The Tories now lead in every part of the country except the North East (where Labour still leads and the Tories follow), Scotland and Northern Ireland (which is sui generis). The SNP’s leading role in Scotland bodes ill for the Union.

But at the second level, Labour still leads the second place position in London, the East Midlands (only just), the North West, Yorkshire and Humber, Wales and Scotland. UKIP leads in the South East, the South West, the East of England and the West Midlands.

In other words, excepting the country’s global city, Southern Britain has moved sharply towards neo-nationalism while Northern Britain and the Celtic fringe remain Labour’s to win back. The Liberal Democrats seem not to be relevant to the struggle for second place in this analysis.

Where Third Level Dissent Lives

Clearly, there is some tension between the Tories' desire to be a national party and its need to manage Southern English euroscepticism while Labour re-builds its still strong Northern and Celtic base to return in force later. The trouble for Labour is that most of the people live south of the River Trent.

A decisive resolution of the West Lothian Question under a Tory Government could see English domestic legislation fall entirely into the hands of the centre-right for a generation, forcing Labour into moderate euroscepticism to survive South of the border.

This leaves the third level dissidents. The Greens are dominant at this level in London, the South East, South West, the East of England, Wales (but only just) and Scotland. The BNP is dominant in the East & West Midlands, North West, Yorkshire & Humber, North East.

In other words, we see here exactly the same basic divide between the political culture that was once fully dominated by the Labour Party and the one that was once fully dominated by the Tory Party.

In the traditional Labour world of England and Wales, the Conservatives are now back in force (at least outside the North East) but only (in part) because the BNP and others have undermined New Labour.

On the other hand, in the traditionally conservative South, the Tories are increasingly challenged not by Labour but by UKIP. Successful organised dissent to the rise of the Right is coming mostly from the environmentalist Left as a Green challenge that is chipping away at the mainstream centre-left.

This suggests that New Labour is losing in multiple directions, against centrifugal tendencies in Scotland, against a resurgence of one nation Toryism, because of anger about the condition of the white working class and because of anger over foreign policy and the increasing integration of the country into the EU.

But, as we shall see, the obsession with economic growth at all costs in the past has also created more focused popular anxieties over migration and the degradation of the environment.

This is a perfect storm for New Labour because we have not mentioned the low turnout. The vast mass of the population were not engaged to vote at all. They were indifferent or apathetic and even declined not to protest at what they appear to have seen as an unresponsive political system out for itself.

Economic anxiety does not appear to have triggered a positive vote but rather a negative attitude to a political class that is increasingly seen as not competent to deal with crisis conditions, indeed almost as an irrelevance.

Policy Implications

The fundamentals of popular disenchantment run deep. They extend far beyond single issue concerns.

We can boil down the apathy and the dissident votes, the failure to endorse Conservatism in a ringing fashion and the confusion over whether current government, liberal or neo-nationalist solutions are best for the country into two broad themes:

• the unresponsiveness of the current political system to the people
• anxiety and anger over the felt effects of neo-liberal economics.

New Labour is unlikely to be able to recover ground until it deals decisively with these two issues. It only has a year of power to do so.

Its current approach to the reform of the political system appears to be little more than tinkering with Parliament and an espousal of the sort of liberal constitutionalism much loved by armchair intellectuals who read the Guardian. This misses the real point of public anger.

Apart from the West Lothian Question which is an irritant, the public generally do not want a European super-state and they want to be involved in local decisions. They do not want a transmission belt State telling them how to live their lives. A written constitution is utterly irrelevant to this.

New Labour has still not understood the point. It is probable that Gordon Brown is psychologically incapable of doing so. The Tories have picked up on these messages and are likely to respond positively in the coming year, severely weakened though they are by their own image of financial rapaciousness.

It is the second issue, the effects of neo-liberalism, that is more problematic. The dissent against the system is still relatively small but it is clearly growing. Behind the BNP and Greens is a political free market under the rubric of ‘Others’.

‘Others’ received more votes in London, East of England, North West and South West than either the Greens or the BNP and they were competitive as a group virtually everywhere else. A combined dissent vote would have made a fifth party at second rank in its own right.

This dissent comes down to anxiety at two primary results of radical New Labour approaches to economic growth that have shunted aside ‘sustainability’ – migration and environmental degradation.

This is not the time to go into these two issues in detail but suffice it to say that many people who are concerned about migration and environmental degradation did not make the leap to vote for the BNP or the Greens but they are still engaged in these issues and they want action.

Sweep away the personality politics that obsesses the Westminster Village and you have a very serious policy crisis for the Government.

The voters are saying that top-down rule by ‘experts’ without an observable connection with locality and a failure to manage the costs of growth are just not acceptable.

They are saying that this Government must be replaced by one that can deal with these issues if it cannot prove its ability to handle the consequences of its own policies. Now that’s a tough call for New Labour.

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