We may be seeing a political realignment before our eyes

We live in strange times politically. It is odd in so many ways that you can stop seeing the woods for the trees.

We have the first peacetime coalition for more the 80 years. The centre-left vote is united for the first time in 30 years with the collapse of the urban Liberal Democrats. The centre-right is as badly split at any time since the passing of the Corn Laws with the rise of UKIP.

Labour’s lead appears in the opinion polls to be steady, and yet there are worrying trends for the party in council by elections, where it is experiencing an erosion of support to UKIP.

The political oddness parallels the economic torpor. Overall, we have experienced a terrible rate of economic growth over the last six years. This has led to rock bottom interest rates during that time that would have seemed incredible until 2008. We are in uncharted waters.

And yet, look closely, and the tectonic plates may have been turning for some time. We tend to think of elections being governed by the swing of the pendulum over marginals that move between Conservatives and Labour. The safe seats, outside the reach of pendulum, remain safely Tory or Labour.

This is obviously too simple. The seats of mainland Britain are represented by seven parties in the House of Commons, and the decline of the two-party vote over the last sixty years could be said to be the defining electoral trend of that time.

However, even the basic pendulum idea does not quite work. For a start, under such an electoral pattern, you would expect parties to hold similar seats at similar elections – for example, 1992 and 2010, when the Conservatives led Labour by 8% and 7% respectively.

And yet, there are examples of Major-Brown seats that you would not expect – seats won by John Major in 1992 but by Brown in 2010. These tend to be in the big city suburbs. Think of Brent North, Bury South (essentially a string of suburbs of Manchester) and Gedling outside of Nottingham.

Meanwhile, there are also Kinnock-Cameron seats,  that were won by Labour in 1992 but that the party could not hold on to in 2010. These include smaller towns like Dewsbury, Crewe & Nantwich and Carlisle.

No doubt some of this reflects boundary changes. Yet even those can reflect ‘real’ changes such as the shrinking of small working class towns, and the increasing proportion of those seats taken up by more rural areas.

And it may be that these seats are merely electoral curios. But if we are seeing the Liberal Democrat vote collapse to Labour in the big cities, but UKIP halting Ed Miliband’s party advance in smaller, traditional working class towns, or even driving it back, we may be seeing something very different – an realignment of party politics.

Such an alignment would mean the bedrock of the Labour vote would not so much be based on class but urban areas. It points to a coalition of unions, public sector workers, ethnic minorities and the working age population that depends on jointly held infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and transport.

That makes the next election very hard to predict. Such a realignment would make some of Labour’s targets – such as Crewe and Nantwich – very hard to get. But others not even on Labour’s target list, such as Enfield Southgate, may be within reach.

This is not necessarily a council of optimism or despair for Labour. I don’t know whether such a Labour Party has a route to secure power or not or whether it has the long term advantage or not. Many of the data points that suggest such a scenario may just be oddities that will appear to be outliers after the next election.

But if the Labour Party voter base is realigning, it is going to make the next election even more difficult to predict, whatever the polls say.