British Unionist Party (Caroline Era)

After the 1993 General Election, the Federalist Alliance won what amounted to a majority over Labour and the Conservatives despite the fact that a First Past The Post system was still in use at the time. This meant that Wales, Scotland and Cornwall became independent nations and Ireland became a unified republic. These events confronted the Labour Party with a serious problem because many traditional Labour voters were Scottish or Welsh, and it also defeated the core Conservative principle of maintaining the United Kingdom as it had stood since 1921. This gave the two parties common interests in reuniting the UK as a single nation. Moreover, by 1993, the Post-War consensus had lasted for nearly four decades. Apart from the brief failed Thatcher government's experiment in monetarism, there was general agreement on policies. The "wets" had won the battle in the Tory party during their two terms of opposition and the centralist tendency of the Labour Party had also come to dominate, partly due to the recognition of the unpopularity of the more radical policies of the Healey government. Even taken together, the number of seats held by the Labour and Conservative parties in the English Parliament were insufficient to form a majority. Therefore, in the eleventh year of the Caroline Era, the parties agreed that they had more in common with each other than with the Federalists and united to form a single, British Unionist Party, whose main policies included the pursuit of Butskellism and working towards the reunification of the United Kingdom along with the abolition of the English Regions.

This decision led to the break away of two factions on the right and left of the new party, the Dries and the Bennites respectively. These were, however, minor parties with very little influence on Parliament and in the 1997 General Election, both lost all their seats since they had changed allegiance during the previous term.