You're disrupting the mayoral campaign.

You should be the next prime minister.

You're very sweet.

They've left the centre.

The parties have been captured.

They're not coming back.

How can two parties possibly do justice

to what modern Britain is?

That sort of sense of people wanting a disruption

is palpable, I think.

I've seen outsiders go up in flames

because they haven't had a clue how

the political system and politics actually work.

As an entrepreneur, when I started out

I got nothing but nice things happen to me.

Politics is completely different.

I can't say anything nice about it.

It is literally a viper's nest.

Political disruptors are tempting voters

away from the UK's two big main parties.

Competition is fierce with would-be radical options

on the nationalist right and even on the centre ground.

Britain's politics is being shaken up.

And the result of December's general election

has never been so uncertain.

The 2016 Brexit vote exploded the usual left-right alignment.

There are now at least four parties battling it out.

One of the insurgents, the Brexit party,

is led by Nigel Farage, whose lifelong dream for the UK

to quit the EU may be about to come true.

There will be no Brexit without the Brexit party.

Of that, I'm certain.

Brexit's thrown it all up in the air because that

went beyond left and right.

And the political parties haven't

known how to react to a major political decision that

didn't fall under party lines.

The other challengers want to stop Brexit.

But they also hope to capitalise on the upheaval.

Some form of tumult was probably inevitable in British politics

because whenever you go through big societal change,

you see tumult.

Professor Jane Green, of the British Election Study,

maps and measures the UK's changing voting patterns.

We went to Oxford asked how Britain went from this to this?

From the 1960s through to today we see more people

switching their vote between general elections over time.

So a much more fluid volatile picture.

So does this volatility mean that it's

kind of fertile territory?

That there are opportunities there

for the political disruptors?

You've got a very available electorate.

You've got opportunities for the political parties.

What you've also got is loads of uncertainty.

You can see there's a disruption going on,

and we don't know where it's going to land.

Claire Fox, a Libertarian from the left was elected as an MEP

for the Brexit party earlier this year as voters deserted

both Labour and the Tories.

Of course, change is always unpredictable, isn't it?

Makes it scary.

So is democracy.

But to argue against disruption on the basis

of 'things worked' completely misunderstands that for many

people, they didn't.

So we've talked a bit about things being more up for grabs.

Yeah.

I'm going to try and ask you to explain

where the voters might be.

So you think about one dimension of politics from left to right.

And within that kind of left-right,

bread and butter economic kind of way of seeing the world,

lots of people have left of centre views.

Lots people have right of centre views,

but the majority of people would be in the middle.

And therefore, it makes politics very much about that kind

of centre ground, about competing for the majority

of voters.

Britain has always been about understatement, compromise,

pragmatism.

And I think that's where the energy is.

I think it resonates deeply.

Rory Stewart is leaving parliament.

He's left the Conservative party.

He wants to reinvent moderate politics

by standing as an independent candidate for London mayor.

I think actually the UK's traditions

are much more consensual, much more designed

for centre-ground politics than almost anywhere in the world.

That dimension is still very important to voter choice now.

But of course, we've all started seeing the world predominately

through the lens of Brexit.

And Brexit isn't about bread and butter left-right issues

on the whole, it's about this different dimension

that cross cuts the left-right dimension.

It's divided the party, and it's divided the voters.

A lot of people who thought of themselves at centre ground

in the old politics, in the new politics are far from centre

ground.

Chuka Umunna walked out of Labour earlier this year,

attempted to start a new anti-Brexit centre party,

Change UK, but is now trying to redefine opposition politics

from within the pro-European Liberal Democrats.

Those guys are no longer centre ground.

They are firmly on the liberal, internationalist, open,

anti-authoritarian side of the new dichotomy.

So when people say to me I want a return to good centre ground

policies, I'm kind of like, but you're no longer centre ground.

You are actually firmly in one camp.

Political scientists like you are

used to thinking about voters in this rather more

complicated way.

In the past, we think about it in terms

of people that had more socially conservative views and more

socially liberal views.

But also we're now thinking much more

about people that have anti-immigration views and also

pro-immigration views and also anti-European or

Brexit-supporting, Leave-voting views or more pro-European,

Remain-supporting views.

And so we have the impression that politics

has become much more polarised.

Both the Brexit party and the radical Remainers

are betting that politics is now about values.

There's different fault lines, aren't there?

So what's happened is rather than saying the big decision

in British politics today is whether we nationalise

the railways it's actually our attitude

to popular sovereignty.

So you asked me the question, where is the space?

Yeah, where's the opportunity?

So on the one hand, we talked about kind of important.

So if this issue becomes less important,

then we might worry about left-right again.

But what if this issue, dimension,

doesn't become less important?

But at the current time, it feels

and looks in terms of the evidence

that people are pretty divided.

If you look at some of the people who've

been running our country, some of the decisions we've

made in the last decade or so, you

go, how is such a brilliant country in this mess?

Simon Franks, once a committed Labour party backer,

is dismayed by this polarisation.

He's been spending time and money trying to use his

start-up skills to shake up centre ground politics.

The mission was to scope out initially,

is it possible to create a new political party that could

win in one electoral cycle?

Can you, in politics, do something that kind of maps

entrepreneurialism onto party politics?

Yes, you can but, not in the centre.

If you're on the wings of British politics,

or in fact, any politics, and you have a cause,

you can mobilise people incredibly quickly

to bring about a change because people

are so desperate for that change or believe

so strongly in that cause.

In the centre it's much harder to do because, by definition,

you should be more balanced, more reasonable.

You understand that no one issue is

going to make our country completely better or completely

worse.

Josef Lentsch believes in the power of the middle.

This Austrian academic helped start a successful new party

and has written a book on how to make it work.

It's bloody hard.

It's bloody hard for politicians.

These days, the political itch to be scratched

is that many people feel not represented anymore.

And too many of them then decide to vote

for populists and nationalists.

But I think many of them would actually

like to have a choice to vote for something

different and constructive.

The primary reason why Change UK didn't succeed in the way

that we would have liked it to is, as you said,

I'm not sure people were looking for disruption in as much

as they were looking for their politics

to be properly represented.

But they weren't necessarily precious about the vehicle

through which you do that.

And to try and create something new

in a non-presidential system is nigh on impossible.

In a sense you, can't just compete on one dimension.

People want to know where you stand.

So if you're competing on this dimension,

but you're divided on this dimension

because you've got parties from the left,

parties from the right, then essentially, OK fine.

So you've got this bit sorted out.

But are you over here on the left?

Or are you here on the right in terms of

where your voters are likely to be?

I think the most important thing is if you want to build

a centrist alternative, that you're actually early on are

starting to talk to the voters and start to interlink what I

call, 'islands of discontent.'

Most political start-ups will fail.

I think that's not a problem.

I think actually many, many need to try for some of them

to succeed.

Once you've broken the habits of a lifetime -

at the European election, obviously everything got thrown

in the air - then you're not quite that,

we always vote Labour in our family.

We always vote Tory in our family.

Anything can happen.

It's like when MPs rebel against a whip, right?

Once they get the taste for it, it becomes possible again.

Even those people who are saying: let's get Brexit done,

their argument is, let's get Brexit done

so we can go back to normal.

And I think they underestimate the appetite for a much more

fundamental shift.

Nothing's ever going to go back, ever.

The problem is that the government of the centre has

always seemed terribly sort of bureaucratic and inert.

It doesn't really seem to listen.

It doesn't seem to engage, which gives people

the idea that maybe there's a silver bullet,

maybe there's some fantastic thing.

And it's some character.

An ideology.

Yeah, an ideology.

Or a person.

Or a person.

Like a hand grenade you can chuck at the system,

and the whole thing's going to blow up.

And suddenly, it's all going to be much better.

So there's no messiah coming.

No, there can't be a messiah.

I mean, I think I'm also...

Not you.

No, definitely not me.

We've had conspicuous examples of success

on both the left and the right.

I'm thinking of Nigel Farage on one side,

probably Labour's Momentum on the other.

But there's this whole space in the centre with lots

of plotting, lots of activity.

But it's really hard to make something happen.

It's a much easier message.

So Nigel Farage, who I think is a brilliant communicator

and I don't have this disregard for him

as so many people seem to have.