Jane Green and Marta Miori

The rejection of Labour and the Conservatives is set to be the main story of the devolved and local elections happening this May.

Watch our What You Need To Know explainer produced with ITV News, with exclusive data from YouGov.

In Wales, Plaid Cymru and Reform are now battling it out in opinion polls for first place. In Scotland, the SNP remain in the lead despite losing support, while Reform and Labour battle it out for second place. In England, Reform top the polls but the Greens, Liberal Democrats, Labour and Conservatives are effectively now neck and neck. 

This can’t be down to the choices of these challenger parties. Labour are losing voters because of their governing record and our financial worries. The Conservatives continue to be punished for their time in office too.

But is this a peak moment of protest, or are we seeing the beginning of the end for the two traditional parties of government?

While fragmentation follows a longer-term trend, we’ve never seen this much fragmentation in vote intention. 

ITV News has been given exclusive data from YouGov, showing people’s switching between parties (from their July 2024 vote and their current vote intention). Just look at the following flows. We’re seeing switching like never before, and its almost entirely away from Labour and the Conservatives. 

Sankey diagram showing shift in voting intentions from 2024 general election to April 2026

For the first time, five or more parties are gaining a meaningful amount of support in the polls. What is more, the election results themselves could make this splintering more likely. 

And yet, beneath this fragmentation, the splintering of political support is anything but random; it is happening within two clear political sides. 

The two graphs below take the same YouGov data, but add the percentages of people who supported a party in the ‘left bloc’ (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP) or the ‘right bloc’ (Conservatives and Reform UK) in 2024 and this April. 

Despite increased switching, people tend to stay within ideological groups of parties:

If party choice at the local level becomes about backing the best-placed party in one’s own side to beat the other, different areas of the country may, essentially, be swapping the local dominant party on the left and the local dominant party on the right.

This may leave Labour and the Conservatives in real trouble in areas where voters think other parties are best placed to win. That’s self-evident in Wales where Reform seem to be replacing the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru seem to be replacing Labour. Repeated across the country, we’d see a high level of fragmentation nationally and in English Councils, but local choices boiling down to different parties in each bloc. 

When we wake up on May 8th and 9th, the results may look like a patchwork quilt of different parties. But they will still reflect the two-sided nature of British politics — a left bloc and a right bloc – but with Labour and the Conservatives likely no longer the dominant party on either side. At least for now.

Critically, the results will help inform future assessments of which party in a voter’s bloc is now the most viable locally, and voters may find it even harder to return to Labour and the Conservatives in a general election. 

Could the two traditional parties ever regain their dominance? This will come down to whether voters are turning their backs on the two traditional parties for good, or whether they return to the familiar come the next general election.