Not really, we’ve pretty much always (apparently between the late 1750s and 1780s we had no organised political parties) had two major parties who were in with a chance at getting into power and a whole bunch of ‘others’ making up the numbers with no real chance of getting into government.
Which two parties those have been has changed. Whither the previously mighty Liberal Party? Or the Whigs?
Our system is pretty much geared up to support that. For example the SDP-Liberal Alliance won 25.4% of the vote in the 1983 General Election and got a whopping 23 seats as a result.
To put that into context, the Labour party got 27.6% of the vote and 209 seats.
I’d say the difference in our experiences is that the UK electorate is a bit more fickle than the US.
As an outsider at least it doesn’t seem that US political thinking changes much, certainly not radically. Perhaps your parties are also better at co-opting new movements.
It might of course have something to do with being isolated/insulated from outside political influences.
And being a bigger country, it’s always going to be difficult to find anything that a sufficient proportion of the electorate cares enough about to disrupt the existing power blocks.
An issue like Brexit is going to significantly affect every inhabitant of the UK whatever their view on it might be.
What issues could unite someone in Alaska and someone in New Mexico - that don’t already do so?
I’d say the UKIP/Brexit Party/Faragist phenomenon is essentially the British version of the Tea Party. It’s a radical faction of one of the major parties. That goes one of three ways, either the radicals eat the host and inhabit its shell or they split off and then eat the host or they split off and wither and die.
I’d say the Tea Party is currently dancing around wearing the GOP. The Faragites are still in the process.
