On Monday, 3rd June, the Sylvans debated the motion:
This House believes the UK’s party political landscape will never be the same.
The proposer was Magnus Nielsen and the opposer was Tony Koutsoumbos.
The proposer opened with a wide-ranging history of how the UK became involved in the European project (that ultimately became the EU), bringing the audience to today’s developments on Brexit. He concluded that in that referendum, London opinion did not lead the rest of the country – a marked shift from most other considerations for centuries. He then briefly critiqued today’s political parties. The opposer responded with a structured argument on whether ‘Brexit Britain’ will have a lasting impact on the party political landscape, bringing the debate back to the motion at hand. He argued that the two-party system had survived far bigger crises than Brexit, and that there is no evidence that the existing system would not endure.
The broad motion engendered a series of passionate floor speeches, which ranged from indignation about ‘filthy politics’ in general, to Brexit as a constitutional crisis, to the tendency of democracies to morph into oligopolies over time, to calm perspective on the flow of history and the premature nature of identifying such a shift in politics, to cynicism on ‘the more things change’ to a belief that the old parties no longer represent their supposed constituent bases.
Ultimately the club sided with a long-term view of electoral history, and in the final vote the motion was rejected.