30 July 2025, 08:56

By Nick Garland

A basic, daunting fact of politics today is the shrinking of our common ground.

Political trust is at a crisis point. In straitened economic times, politics feels increasingly zero-sum: for one group to gain, another must lose out. As the traditional bonds between mainstream parties and parts of the electorate weaken, and politics is convulsed by reactive, unpredictable outpourings from social media, it is the populist radical right which has most benefited.

There is, then, a sense of national political malaise, even crisis. However, this is not experienced equally or identically everywhere.

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