In this chapter we describe the second important electoral development of the Coalition period: the ‘reshuffle on the left’. Coalition with the Conservatives unravelled the Liberal Democrats’ electoral alliance of identity liberals, protest voters and tactical anti-Tory voters. More than one voter in eight in England and Wales switched from the Liberal Democrats to other parties during the Coalition. Protest-motivated Liberal Democrat supporters switched largely to UKIP, but the biggest shift was the migration of identity liberals to Labour, tipping the balance of the Labour electoral coalition. The traditional alliance of ethnic minority voters with Labour was also reinforced in this period as Muslim voters alienated by the Iraq War returned to the Labour fold. As white school leavers alienated by New Labour and angry about immigration shifted in large numbers from Labour to UKIP, the growing strength of identity liberals within the Labour coalition was accelerated. As a result, the 2015 Labour electorate, though similar in size to that of 2010, was dramatically different in composition. The traditional party of the workers was, for the first time, drawing more support from graduates and ethnic minorities than from white school leavers. This was a new Labour Party.

Chapter 10 concludes our story by looking at the evolving electoral aftermath of Brexit in England and Wales, as seen in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, and the possible paths forward. The steady growth of the identity liberal electorate of graduates and ethnic minorities has provided Labour with a powerful source of new votes. But this influx of new identity liberal supporters has also created new electoral risks, risks underlined by the party’s weak performance in the 2019 election. The growing electoral heft of identity liberals within the Labour coalition has increased the political power of identity politics to unsettle the attachments of economically left-wing but socially conservative ‘old left’ voters, who are increasingly at odds with the identity liberal groups now rising to dominance in Labour’s electoral coalition. The re-alignment of these voters, driven by Brexit, fuelled the Conservatives’ 2019 triumph, but that success in turn brings new challenges. The Conservatives have made major short-term gains with white school leavers, but must now meet the expectations of these disaffected and distrustful voters, and also face growing risks of counter-mobilisation from graduates and ethnic minorities opposed to the identity conservative politics they are now seen as representing.

There have been other mass-organic parties in Latin America. This chapter discusses the FA case in comparative perspective. The literature has emphasized the role of exogenous factors or the ability of party leaders to strategically “adapt” to explain the transformation of formerly mass-organic parties. The case of the FA, which confronted similar exogenous challenges, calls attention to the relevance of organizational structure in determining party activists’ level of engagement. Organizational design is crucial for fostering and reproducing activism. The chapter reviews the case of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Brazil, a former mass-organic leftist party that turned into a professional–electoral party. The PT is the case that most closely resembles the FA in its emphasis on grassroots activism. The comparison with the PT, as a negative case, increases the theory’s analytical leverage. Second, the chapter discusses the case of the FA as a strange electoral alliance or coalition. It compares the case of the FA with other leftist coalitions in Latin America, with a special focus on the experiences of leftist coalitions in Chile, showing that the FA developed a distinctive, shared organizational structure that is not observable in other, similar electoral alliances.