It’s always ultimately been that way for the parties, but what they’ve done now is get the public onside with that mindset in a massive way, and got people to focus on their opinion not losing the argument rather than asking themselves why they even hold that opinion in the first place. Or quite often, IF that is really their opinion at all. It’s creating a society full of sociopaths where people laugh at and attack people on the other side of the fence, rather than view them as a human being who simply feels differently to them. We are now willing to overlook massively immoral stances and in some cases positively illegal activities, for which some politicians should be in jail, purely to jeer and snarl and scream in the faces of people who don’t think exactly the same as we do.
The general public can control this and shift the climate but almost nobody wants to, because they’ve got a taste for blood and would rather have a punch up with their fellow nobodies while the people driving it all from Westminster laugh at how pathetically idiotic we are, and go about doing whatever the hell they like without fear of being collared for it.