Divisions in the two major parties

The "divisions in the major parties" question is one of the most regularly tested Q3 stems on Paper 1 Political Parties. The 2024 examiner report flagged that candidates often lump the two parties together as if their divisions are the same kind of thing. They are not.

• Conservative divisions in the 2016 to 2024 period were the deepest in modern times - the parliamentary party split four ways under May, lost 21 MPs to whip removal in September 2019 and produced five Prime Ministers in eight years
• Labour divisions across the same period were sharper at leadership level than at parliamentary level - Corbyn won and lost two leadership contests, the Independent Group split off in 2019, and Starmer spent four years purging the hard left

Recent question stems on this territory:

• "Evaluate the view that the Conservative and Labour parties are more divided than united." (mock 2023)
• "Evaluate the view that factionalism dominates modern British political parties." (2022 sample)
• "Evaluate the view that the policies of the Labour and Conservative parties are more similar than they are dissimilar." (2024 paper)

The Conservative Party has always been a coalition rather than an ideologically uniform bloc. Five identifiable groupings since 1945:

One Nation tradition

• The paternalist strand: state intervention to bind rich and poor into one nation (Disraeli's phrase)
• Post-war consensus generation: Macmillan, Heath, Major's wing
• Today: the One Nation Conservative Caucus (formed 2019), Tory Reform Group, MPs like Damian Green and Tobias Ellwood
• Position: pragmatic, pro-EU on the whole, suspicious of culture-war politics, supports a strong public realm

Thatcherite / New Right

• Economic liberalism plus social conservatism: free markets, strong state on morals
• Dominant tendency since 1979 - Thatcher, Tebbit, Lawson
• Today: Kemi Badenoch as leader still claims this lineage, though the right of the parliamentary party has hollowed out through defections to Reform UK

European Research Group (ERG)

• Formed 1993 by Michael Spicer; the institutional home of Tory Eurosceptics
• Hardline Brexit faction 2016 to 2020: Steve Baker, Mark Francois, Jacob Rees-Mogg
• Forced the resignations of David Davis and Boris Johnson from May's Cabinet in July 2018 over the Chequers plan
• Defeated May's withdrawal agreement three times in early 2019 (January 2019: by 230 votes - the largest government defeat in modern history)

Common Sense Group and the New Conservatives

• Common Sense Group (2020) - populist right, immigration restrictionist, anti-"woke", around Sir John Hayes; Danny Kruger was central before defecting to Reform in September 2025
• New Conservatives (2023) - formed by 2019 intake MPs (Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger again), more populist economic instincts than the Thatcherite mainstream; Kruger has since defected
• The Reform UK threat draws votes and ideas from this corner - and, increasingly, MPs (see the Badenoch section)

Northern Research Group and "Red Wall" Tories

• Formed 2020 to represent the 2019 Red Wall intake who took former Labour seats
• Levelling-up advocates, more interventionist on the economy than the Thatcherite mainstream
• Most of these MPs lost their seats at the 2024 election (Bishop Auckland, Workington, Sedgefield, Bolsover and the rest)

The Conservative period in government produced five Prime Ministers (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak), three of them removed by their own party. The 14 years map onto five distinct division stories.

Cameron 2010-2016: modernisation versus the right

• Cameron's modernisation programme (gay marriage, climate, the "hug a husky" image) sat awkwardly with the Tory right
• The 2010 to 2015 Coalition with the Lib Dems forced compromises that the right resented (the AV referendum, Lords reform plans, education reform)
• Eurosceptic pressure produced the 2013 Bloomberg speech promising an EU referendum and the 2016 referendum itself
• Cameron campaigned to remain. Inside the Cabinet, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel, Theresa Villiers and John Whittingdale all campaigned to leave - six Cabinet ministers in active opposition to the PM. Outside Cabinet, the outgoing Mayor of London Boris Johnson became the public face of the Leave campaign. The party split publicly

May 2016-2019: Brexit civil war

• May tried to govern with a slim majority then no majority (after the disastrous 2017 snap election)
• Three Brexit Secretaries resigned over policy: David Davis (July 2018), Dominic Raab (November 2018), Stephen Barclay stayed but on different terms
• The withdrawal agreement was defeated three times in early 2019 (230, 149, 58 vote margins) - the ERG voted against three times
• May resigned in May 2019 having lost the confidence of every Tory faction except the One Nation rump

Johnson 2019-2022: dominance to disintegration

• Johnson came in promising "Get Brexit Done" and won the 2019 election by 80 seats - the biggest Tory majority since 1987
• To do it, he expelled 21 MPs from the parliamentary party in September 2019 for opposing his Brexit strategy. Names included Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames, Philip Hammond and David Gauke - chosen because they were chairs and former Cabinet ministers, not backbenchers
• The Northern Research Group emerged from the 2019 Red Wall intake, pushing levelling up against Treasury orthodoxy under Rishi Sunak as Chancellor
• Partygate from late 2021 destroyed Johnson's authority. 59 MPs voted no confidence in him in June 2022 - the largest no-confidence vote against a sitting PM in modern times
• July 2022: Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak resigned within minutes of each other; over 50 ministers resigned within 48 hours; Johnson resigned

Truss September-October 2022: the 49-day premiership

• Truss won the leadership against Sunak with 81,326 to 60,399 votes (the membership choosing the loser of the parliamentary rounds - a structural division between MPs and members)
• The mini-budget on 23 September 2022 produced an immediate financial crisis. The pound fell, gilts collapsed, the Bank of England intervened
• Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng sacked 14 October; Truss resigned 20 October; replaced by Sunak 25 October. Total premiership: 49 days - the shortest in British history
• Underlying split: economic-liberal Truss-Kwarteng wing versus everyone else. Most of the parliamentary party considered the mini-budget reckless

Sunak 2022-2024: losing to Reform

• Sunak's Cabinet had ideological balance (One Nation and right) but no political purchase - he had not won a general election
• Reform UK grew through 2023 and 2024 from 3% to 14% in polling. Lee Anderson defected from Conservative to Reform March 2024; Andrea Jenkyns followed
• The Rwanda asylum policy caused multiple Cabinet resignations and Tory rebellions through 2023 and 2024
• 4 July 2024 election: Conservatives lost 251 seats, dropping to 121. Twelve Cabinet ministers lost their seats - the worst result in the party's history

Badenoch 2024-: the Reform-shaped problem

• Kemi Badenoch beat Robert Jenrick in the leadership election concluded 2 November 2024 - Jenrick subsequently defected to Reform in January 2026 (see below)
• The internal question: how far right does the party need to go to win Reform UK voters back without losing One Nation voters to the Lib Dems? This is the structural division Badenoch inherited
• The defection wave to Reform UK. Five sitting Conservative MPs have defected since 2024 - the worst Conservative-to-rival haemorrhage in modern times:
  • Lee Anderson, March 2024 (before the general election; whip already suspended)
  • Danny Kruger, September 2025 - then Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions
  • Robert Jenrick, 15 January 2026 - the runner-up to Badenoch in the 2024 leadership; was Shadow Justice Secretary
  • Andrew Rosindell, 18 January 2026 - Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs
  • Suella Braverman, 26 January 2026 - former Home Secretary
• Several former Tory MPs have also joined Reform: David Jones (former Wales Secretary, July 2025), Nadhim Zahawi (former Chancellor, January 2026), Nadine Dorries (former Culture Secretary)
• Reform's parliamentary party has grown from 5 seats at the 2024 election to 8 seats by January 2026 through Conservative defections - and that figure understates the political damage to the Tory right, where Badenoch's frontbench has lost some of its most prominent populist-right voices in successive months
• The May 2026 local elections double squeeze. Going into the 7 May 2026 local elections the Conservatives were polling around 18 percent and being squeezed from both sides at once: Reform UK on the right in Leave-voting areas (Essex, Lancashire, the Black Country); the Liberal Democrats on the centre-left in affluent southern seats (notably Surrey). Reform projected to take county council control in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk - a historic realignment in rural England that puts Badenoch's authority under direct test

Labour's factionalism is older than the Conservatives' and tied to the party's distinctive structure: a parliamentary party, a trade union link, individual members and an annual conference that votes on policy.

Old Labour and the Bennite tradition

• Trade union ties, working-class identity, support for nationalisation, Atlanticist scepticism
• The 1980 to 1985 deep split: Tony Benn's deputy leadership challenge of 1981 (lost by 0.85 percentage points), the Militant Tendency entryism, the "longest suicide note in history" 1983 manifesto
• The 1981 defection of the Gang of Four (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams) to form the SDP - which is the deepest Labour split in postwar history
• Today: Socialist Campaign Group in Parliament (around 30 MPs), Momentum outside it

Soft left

• Between the Bennites and the Blairite right - reformist, pro-public-spending but not socialist in the Bennite sense
• Neil Kinnock's reforms in the 1980s and 1990s sat here, defeating Militant entryism and modernising the party rules
• Today the largest single Labour tendency in Parliament. Many of Starmer's Cabinet originate here

New Labour / Blairite right

• The 1994 to 2010 dominant tendency: market-friendly, pro-EU, pragmatic on welfare, hawkish on foreign policy
• Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, the modernisers
• Internal Brown-versus-Blair tensions ran throughout the 1997 to 2010 government
• Today fewer adherents in the parliamentary party but still dominant in the press, the think-tank world (Tony Blair Institute) and Cabinet (Wes Streeting, Pat McFadden)

Blue Labour

• Founded around Maurice Glasman from 2009: communitarian, working-class conservatism, opposed to social liberalism on identity issues, sceptical of mass immigration
• Position: economically left, socially conservative
• Influence on Starmer's pre-election positioning around "patriotism", "family", "country first, party second"

Corbynite hard left

• Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 leadership victory transformed the parliamentary balance
• Backed by Momentum outside Parliament; Socialist Campaign Group inside it
• Two leadership challenges (2015 won 59.5%, 2016 won 61.8%) confirmed leadership control of the membership but not the parliamentary party

Starmerite settlement

• Keir Starmer won the 2020 leadership in a soft-left/right coalition
• Has spent four years centralising the party: candidate selection panels, the National Executive Committee under loyalist control, the suspension of Corbyn (October 2020) and his eventual expulsion
• Has explicitly said the party will not return to its post-2015 left-wing positions

Miliband 2010-2015: managing the Brownite-Blairite hangover

• The 2010 leadership election split brother against brother (Ed beat David by 1.3% with the union vote)
• Ed Miliband's "responsible capitalism" tried to find soft-left-meets-Blairite ground; both factions found it unsatisfying
• The 2015 election defeat was followed by the surprise of Corbyn winning the membership vote

Corbyn 2015-2020: the deepest Labour split since the 1980s

• Corbyn won the 2015 leadership with 59.5% of first preferences; reconfirmed in 2016 with 61.8%
• Two thirds of the parliamentary party voted no confidence in Corbyn in June 2016 (172 to 40) but he refused to resign and won the membership vote
• Antisemitism crisis: the party was placed under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2019. The EHRC report (October 2020) found Labour had committed unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination
• Brexit positioning produced repeated splits: Corbyn was personally Eurosceptic; the parliamentary party was Remain by majority; the membership voted at the 2018 conference to push for a second referendum that Corbyn never fully embraced
• February 2019: 7 Labour MPs defected to form The Independent Group (later Change UK), citing antisemitism and Brexit positioning. Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna, Mike Gapes among them
• December 2019 election: Labour lost 59 seats; the Red Wall collapsed (Bishop Auckland, Workington, Sedgefield)

Starmer 2020-2024: the purge years

• Starmer won the 2020 leadership against Rebecca Long-Bailey with 56% first preference
• EHRC report published 29 October 2020; Corbyn's response that antisemitism in Labour had been "dramatically overstated for political reasons" caused his suspension that day
• Suspension lifted by NEC 17 November 2020; Starmer refused to restore the whip. Corbyn sat as an Independent until permanently barred from standing as Labour in March 2024
• Sam Tarry sacked from front bench July 2022 for joining a picket line; Andy McDonald resigned from front bench over Israel-Gaza
• Selection panels filtered out Corbyn-aligned candidates from key seats. Diane Abbott had her whip suspended for over a year over comments on race; restored just before the 2024 election after public pressure

2024 election aftermath

• Labour won 411 seats on a 33.8% vote share - the lowest vote share for a winning Labour government since 1922
• 5 Independent MPs elected in seats with large Muslim populations on a Gaza protest vote (Shockat Adam beat Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South; Jeremy Corbyn retained Islington North as an Independent)
• July 2024: 7 Labour MPs lost the whip for rebelling on the two-child benefit cap (John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Imran Hussain, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Zarah Sultana) - signalling that Starmer would not tolerate left-wing rebellion in office either
• Continued internal management challenges through 2024 and 2025: Cabinet leaks, briefing wars, the Sue Gray resignation as Chief of Staff in October 2024 over reports of clashes with Morgan McSweeney

Starmer 2025-2026: leadership pressure reopens the cracks

• The Burnham question. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham emerged through 2025 as the most popular senior Labour figure. One Ipsos poll had him leading Starmer as preferred Prime Minister by 26 points. Burnham is not currently an MP - the constitutional obstacle to a leadership challenge - but a sustained briefing campaign through late 2025 made him the de facto rival
• In January 2026 Burnham applied for the Labour candidacy in the Gorton and Denton by-election. The party's NEC blocked his selection by 8 votes to 1 on 25 January 2026, with Starmer himself voting against. The block was widely read as confirming how serious the leadership threat had become
• Cabinet briefings against Starmer accelerated through early 2026. The internal Labour split is now between Starmer-allied modernisers and a broader group of MPs and ministers who privately want Burnham brought back to Westminster
• Karl Turner, MP for Hull East and a Labour MP for sixteen years, had the whip suspended on 31 March 2026 after leading a rebellion against the government's plans to restrict jury trials. Turner publicly stated he had broken the whip only once in his career, and only on jury reform. The suspension was widely reported as disproportionate and revealed a brittle approach to dissent at a moment when Starmer's leadership was already under pressure
• The May 2026 local elections as a referendum on Starmer. Late April YouGov polling had Starmer's net approval at -45; forecasts ahead of the 7 May 2026 local elections suggested Labour could lose around two-thirds of its councillors. On 29 April 2026 Burnham called the elections "challenging" and openly urged a change of direction. Briefings around possible successors - Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Burnham - became routine in the political press, including suggestions of a timetabled handover with a new leader in place for the September party conference
• The Peter Mandelson appointment as ambassador to the United States was widely briefed against from inside Cabinet through early 2026 and became a recurring symbol of Starmer's loss of internal authority

The exam wants comparison, not parallel narrative. Three axes to compare on:

Depth of division

What kind of division?

• Conservative divisions are ideological and strategic: Brexit, immigration, the size of the state, Reform UK threat. They produce policy gridlock and leadership turnover
• Labour divisions are factional and personality-based: hard left versus soft left versus right. They produce visible argument but rarely policy gridlock once a leader is in place

Discipline of FPTP

• FPTP punishes splits: parties that visibly divide tend to lose elections
• Labour's 2019 defeat and the Conservatives' 2024 defeat both followed sustained internal warfare
• Both parties have therefore had strong electoral incentives to close ranks. Both have managed to maintain a single national parliamentary leadership in defiance of clear factional disagreement
• The structural fact: there are still two major parties. In other systems Labour might have split into three (Blue Labour, soft left, hard left); the Conservatives might have split into two or three (One Nation, Thatcherite mainstream, Reform-aligned right). FPTP holds them together against the centripetal force of factionalism

Line of argument options

Three defensible LoAs depending on the question stem:

• "More divided than united" - the strongest evidence is the period 2016 to 2024: five PMs, the ERG insurgency, the Corbyn era, the Truss disaster, the Reform UK threat. Strongest single line: the Conservatives produced five Prime Ministers in eight years
• "Divided but united by FPTP" - the parties argue internally but the electoral system holds them together. They look fragmented in office and disciplined in elections. The 2024 election outcome rewarded the more disciplined party
• "Divided in different ways" - Conservative divisions are deeper and more constitutionally consequential (Brexit reshaped the country); Labour divisions are factional and managed by leadership control. The two parties' divisions are not the same kind of thing

Avoid these mistakes

• Lumping the parties together - the 2024 ER specifically warns against this. Examine each party's divisions separately, then compare
• Pure narrative - listing leadership changes in chronological order without comparing them. Use themes (depth, kind, electoral impact) to structure
• "Divisions are bad" framing - the question is about extent, not desirability. Don't moralise. Some examiners reward acknowledgment that internal disagreement is itself a feature of a healthy democratic party
• Ignoring the electoral consequence - both parties' deepest divisions correlate with their worst electoral defeats (Labour 2019, Conservatives 2024). Connect the dots

Quick reference: the ten facts you should be able to deploy

• Conservative 5 PMs 2016 to 2024 (Cameron - May - Johnson - Truss - Sunak)
• The 21 expulsions of Tory rebels September 2019 (Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames among them)
• May's withdrawal agreement defeated by 230 votes in January 2019 - largest government defeat in modern times
• Truss's 49-day premiership (September to October 2022) - shortest in British history
• Reform UK's 14.3% vote share in 2024 - the highest vote share for a non-Lab-Con-LD party since UKIP's 12.6% in 2015 (the SDP-Liberal Alliance hit 25.4% in 1983 and 22.6% in 1987; the Lib Dems peaked at 23.0% in 2010)
• Labour Independent Group defection of 7 MPs February 2019
• Corbyn whip suspension 29 October 2020 following EHRC report
• Labour 7-MP whip removal July 2024 over the two-child benefit cap rebellion
• 5 Independent MPs elected on Gaza protest vote July 2024
• Sue Gray resignation as Chief of Staff October 2024 - factional management within the post-election Cabinet