British politics has been turned upside down by recent events. The traditional two-party battle between Labour and Conservatives has been thrown into confusion by a big surge in support for a third party, the Liberal Democrats. The likely result could be a "hung parliament," with the Conservatives being denied the overall majority of seats in the House of Commons they need to form a firm one-party government — although of course nothing is ever certain on the political stage.

Hitherto, or at least in recent decades, this third party has been regarded as a marginal player in British national politics, with only a small percentage of seats in Parliament and with an appeal confined mostly to the fringe areas of Britain.

But an agreement to stage a series of tripartite television debates among the three parties, in American presidential style, has given the fresh young Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, his chance. He has seized it by depicting the two bigger parties as giants from the past and his own small band as the new wave of warriors for radical change in British society and for the overthrow of the British political establishment.

So to every expert's surprise the familiar two-horse race has become a three-horse race. How has this come about and where will it lead?

First, the TV events have enabled Clegg to appear as an equal alongside the two bigger party figures, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron, and to exploit the undeniable feeling of distrust and disillusion among the general public toward politicians and party political machines.

As has been often observed in this column over the past years, the age of Internet empowerment, bringing unparalleled transparency to the political process and access for tens of millions to policy procedures was always bound to make governance and complex decision-making much harder, and to elevate sound bites and slogans in place of serious analysis and wise handling of difficult issues.

Small wonder that a kind of mob electronic politics has developed, in which the instant pleasing of voters becomes paramount, and indeed can now be traced minute by minute.

But there is a second and still deeper reason why Clegg has been able to present himself so successfully as the honest small guy challenging the giants, the David against the Goliaths.

This is that the big parties have been curiously slow to understand, and show they understand, how the role of politicians and governments has become more constrained in the modern age of global networks.

The political parties are all campaigning for change, but it seems that none of them has recalled the old adage, best expressed by the great British historian G.M. Trevelyan, that "politics are the outcome, not the cause, of social change."

In other words it is not more politically inspired change that people want, or even expect, from their political leaders and governments, but the wisdom and capacity to control and administer the huge forces of change already at work — in today's global conditions more so than ever.

At every level of life the individual today is experiencing the impact of waves of change, some very uncomfortable and frightening. They want their leaders to manage and tame them, not to add to them.

Electoral experts and pollsters are fond of telling us that international and world factors are of no interest to voters and irrelevant at election times. But the electors know better, especially nowadays.

They know that distant and hard-to-understand factors and influences, like the behavior of Wall Street banks, or the export policies of Chinese industrialists, or the feuds and faiths of Islam and Mideast potentates and oil sheiks, are impacting on their daily lives and family concerns.

They know that remote events on the other side of the world are determining the price of their house loans, the prices of goods in the shops, the availability of products, the flow of information into their homes, their job opportunities, what their children are taught in school, and even their leisure pursuits, such as the composition and ownership of their local football teams. They have learned through bitter experience that international capital can (and often does) sweep in overnight and change the ownership of local businesses and shatter whole communities.

And they know perfectly well what the politicians are not prepared to admit: that global power and money are shifting to Asia, that Europe and the West are weakening and that immense energies and agility will be needed in the older countries like Britain to escape sinking into ineffectiveness, deeper debt and stagnation.

If the major parties are not prepared to be frank about the global challenges facing the nation, if they harp instead on smaller domestic issues or internal European squabbles, if they claim powers to change the course of events that they do not possess at national level, then they must not be surprised when they come under assault.

The need for all a nation's citizens to be given a sense of purpose and mission, to be rallied as a united team to face these bewildering and dangerous conditions in the shifting global network, has never been greater. For the British, with their long history and their unique experience and talents, this is especially so.

This is not to say that an upstart third party has necessarily got better answers to these issues, but it does mean that the appeal of the major parties needs to reach much deeper into the minds, fears and longings of the electorate. Their analyses and arguments are just too introverted and shallow. And when a storm comes, it is the tall trees with shallow roots that are in greatest danger of being blown over.

David Howell, a former British Cabinet minister, is a member of the House of Lords.