Two-party politics is going to end at tomorrow’s polls

Seventy years ago this week, the Second World War ended in Europe with the defeat of Germany and there was much celebration.

Brighton Mayor Victor Nichols played the piano at dozens of street parties.

But he presided over a battered town in which 200 people had died and many more had been injured.

The election came later and it was a momentous contest, the first for a decade following the wartime coalition.

Having been the Prime Minister who led his country to victory, Winston Churchill, pictured, was widely expected to win the election too. But it was not to be.

His faithful deputy Clement Attlee led Labour to a landslide victory.

Chosen as a stopgap party leader, he lasted longer as party leader than anyone else has done before or since.

The election saw the start of two-party politics between Labour and the Conservatives.

The Liberals, powerful during the Edwardian era and First World War, were relegated to a fringe group.

The Scottish nationalists were not well regarded in their home country while the Welsh nationalists fared even worse.

There were two Communist MPs who did not last long and the far right parties, tainted by Nazi associations, almost ceased to exist.

Even though Labour won a huge majority of almost 200, they secured less than half the popular vote and the Tories remained strong in many parts of the country including Sussex.

Some constituencies saw enormous Tory majorities while Brighton and Hove, then a two-member seat, continued to vote Tory as it had done for years.

One of the MPs, William Teeling, became the first member of Pavilion when it was created in 1950 and remained there until 1969.

On many occasions after 1945 all the Sussex seats returned Tories, a far cry from now when almost half the constituencies are marginal.

The leaders, former public schoolboys, were patrician politicians. They scorned modern methods of communications such as TV.

There was no snazzy battle bus of the kind Ed Miliband uses as Labour leader. Clement Attlee toured the country in an ancient Morris Minor, driven erratically by his eccentric wife who was a staunch Tory.

Hundreds attended public meetings and turnout was high.

There was a strong feeling that having won the war, people should exercise their democratic right in voting.

Two-party politics was even more marked in the general elections of 1950, 1951 and 1955.

At my primary school on election day we used to form gangs of Labour and Conservative boys ready for furious fighting.

When one foolish boy declared he was a Liberal he was set upon by both sides and reduced to a bleeding pulp.

The Liberals were almost annihilated electorally too and it was said that their MPs, once down to five, could fit into a phone box.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that there was a flurry of interest followed by a remarkable win in the Orpington by-election of 1962 that the Liberals began to revive. But it took another two decades to be confirmed and even during the Lib/Lab pact of the 1970s, the Liberal numbers were small.

Liberals enjoyed occasional spectacular successes such as in the Eastbourne by-election of 1990 and built up a base in local government. But not until 2010 did they get into government through the coalition.

Power destroyed their popularity but their decline was accompanied by the rise of other parties such as Greens, UKIP and the Scottish nationalists.

With the two main parties almost equal in the opinion polls but with ratings only in the low 30 per cents, it seems another change is on the way.

Two party politics of the type we have known for 70 years will probably be laid to rest when the election results are known on Friday. Minor parties may soon be enjoying a taste of power.

The stable system of government which Attlee and Churchill presided over from 1945 onwards is at an end.

It may need statesmen and women of their calibre to sort out the mess and it will be a test of their talent to see if they are up to the job.