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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm..

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And this week we are a hundred not out. This is the hundredth edition of this podcast.

Ruth Fox: So we thought we'd celebrate by looking back at the first year of this Parliament and of Keir Starmer's government.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, the thing that really strikes me about the way this Parliament has had to work is the level of political fragmentation. This is not the traditional kind of bipolar Parliament where there's a government and then there's an opposition, and there are a few bit players scrambling around on the sidelines.

We have an absolutely [00:01:00] enormous government party in Labour, albeit elected on just a third of the vote and the quirk of the electoral system. There is something that's worth looking at. And then we have a unusually small Conservative opposition party, an unusually large third party in the Lib Dems, and then a collection of smaller parties whose numbers are going up and down like a yo-yo half the time with various sort of defections and movements between them.

You've got the Greens, you've got Reform, you've got the grouping around Jeremy Corbyn that may be about to coalesce into a sort of direct left wing challenger to the Labour Party. Then of course you've got the nationalist parties. There's the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and then you've got Northern Ireland parties as well.

So there's a galaxy of political alignments on the opposition benches, which is making the politics of this Parliament unusually complicated. Not least, of course, because this is all against the background of opinion polls, which show that Reform is now the lead party, even though it only has five [00:02:00] MPs in the chamber.

And that's just gone down to four.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I mean, that Reform is one of those parties that goes up and down as you say.

Mark D'Arcy: Reflecting their immigration policy. They didn't have a one in one out approach.

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