POLITICS in Swindon now looks very much like a two-party sport after the smaller parties saw their share of the vote collapse at the General Election.

In 2015, UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens took 20,932 votes across the town’s two constituencies.

But just two years later, despite significant increases in turnout, that total has been slashed to just 8,501 which represents a miniscule share of only eight per cent of the vote.

Nationally the election was framed as a contest between the leadership abilities of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn and it appears that voters have moved towards the main two parties as that dynamic played out locally.

The results from Swindon on Thursday night show two voter movement trends that mark a shift from 2015.

The UKIP vote in both Swindon constituencies collapsed this time around with reductions of 12.5 per cent in the North and 9.5 per cent in the South.

It is difficult to say with any degree of certainty where those disgruntled kippers shifted to but anecdotal evidence from the count suggested that the majority were turning to the Conservatives while a smaller number – those in former Labour strongholds – were reverting to type and going back to Labour.

The other phenomenon that was evident was the adoption of tactical voting position by people who might previously have supported the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.

While no formal ‘progressive alliance’ was in place in Swindon, voters deciding to rally behind Labour as an anti-Conservative option meant that an informal alliance was the outcome by default.

It wasn’t a development that caught the smaller parties by surprise. Lib Dem and Green candidates acknowledged, even ahead of the result, that some of their own members had decided to put aside party allegiance in favour of the bigger picture.

The possibility of another election looms on the horizon and no reform of the voting system is likely in the foreseeable future.

There is no reason to believe that those voters who moved towards the two main parties on Thursday will be persuaded to do otherwise. For now at least, Swindon is a two party town.