UK General Election 2024

Index :	The electoral process	Choices in 2024
	The parties and issues	The result and after

The British General Election took place on July 4th 2024.

The Conservatives, in power since 2010,  suffered their worst defeat ever, as Keir Starmer's Labour Party achieved a massive win.

• Labour won 412 of the  650 seats in the House of Commons.
• The Conservatives only kept 121 of their seats.
• The Liberal-Democratic Party, in the centre ground of politics, achieved their best score in over 100 years, winning 72 seats.
• Reform UK, a far-right party created out of the remains of the Brexit Party, and UKIP, took 14% of the vote, and won five seats.
• The Greens quadrupled their number of seats in the House of Commons, from 1 to 4.
• The Scottish National Party lost three quarters of their seats, mostly in favour of Labout.

As expected,  the Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won a landslide victory, sending the Conservatives back to the Opposition benches for at least five years.
     For the Conservatives, re-elected in 2019 under Boris Johnson with an overwhelming majority, defeat five years later was a very bitter pill to swallow. But it was the inevitable consequence of the wear and tear of power and the splintering of the party, whose internal divisions have been amplified since Prime Minister David Cameron's unfortunate decision to hold a referendum on Brexit back in 2016.
     In theory Brexitwas not an election issue in 2024; it has already deeply damaged both the Conservative and Labour parties, which both remain  divided on the subject and wish to avoid reopening the wounds of recent years. As Boris Johnson said, "Brexit is done." End of story.... But Brexit isn't completely "done", and what's done can be undone; so it's inevitable that Brexit will remain, over the coming years, "the elephant in the room" (or in former Labour leader Neil Kinnock's words "the mammoth in the broom closet"), a subject that will invisibly underpin much of the political debate.

The voting system

    In the United Kingdom, the voting system has not evolved. The historic "first past the post" system  is still used, as in a horse race where the winner is simply the first to cross the line, even if it is only by the tiniest of margins and with only a relative majority (also called a plurality). There is only one round, and there is no proportional representation. 

The system was very appropriate at a time when there were only two or three major parties on the political scene, because it favours big parties to the detriment of the smaller ones. Consequently it is an electoral system that is less well suited to a political landscape with many small parties.

     The advantages of this voting system are said to be that it favours the formation of stable governments, prevents the splintering of large parties into smaller ones, and discourages the creation of cult parties based on personal ambitions.

     The main disadvantages are that the system allows power to alternate between two major parties, making it very difficult for any other party to break through. Furthermore, without any element of proportional representation, it regularly allows governments to be formed with the support of less than 40% of voters, leaving another third of the electorate with virtually no representation in parliament.

     Over the last few years, and in particular at by-elections, there has been a growing trend towards 'tactical voting'. Thanks to local social networks and the Internet, more and more voters are voting for the candidate who is best placed to beat the candidate of the party they don't want. As a result, since 2019 the Conservatives have won just one seat in by-elections, but have lost 11, including in strongholds that previously looked unassailable.

    At the 2024 general election, the success or failure of tactical voting campaigns in key constituencies (voting areas) will determine the extent of the Conservatives' predicted defeat.

The choices in 2024

    As has been the case for the past century, most British voters chose between the country's two major historic parties, the Conservatives on the right and Labour on the left. In Scotland and Wales, the pollswere largely triangular or even four-sided with the presence of nationalist candidates and the centrist Liberal Democrats (LD); the polls were also triangular or four-sided in England, in constituencies where the LD and/or the Greens have a strong presence.

 In Northern Ireland, the election mainly pitted the Unionist parties in favour of keeping Ulster within the United Kingdom against the Nationalists in favour of Irish reunification.

 To complicate life for the Conservatives, a new far-right party, Reform UK, took 14% of the vote, but only managed to win four seats, essentially in deprived areas. However Reform's success considerably amplified the Conservatives' defeat, by splitting the right-wing vote.

The issues

The main issue dominating the debate in the runup to the election was the record of the Conservative Party in government over the past 14 years. Opposition parties contantly stressed their failures - on the economy, on the cost of living, on inflation, on the National Health Service (NHS), on underinvestment in public services in general, on rising inequality, and on the pollution in Britain's rivers.  The Conservatives preferred to talk about immigration, about Britain's place in the world, and most particularly about their plans to reduce taxes (and Labour's supposed plans to increase them).
    However overall Britain's taxes are not high by European standards, and people in Britain are less concerned by the level of taxation, than by the quality of public services. Some in the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats even said that taxes in the UK needed to rise, if public services are to be improved.... and both parties did very well in the election.

The parties

The Conservatives (Tories)  in 2024

The British Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, is historically a broad-based party, covering the whole of the right of the political spectrum in England. It has been - and to some extent still is - home to all right-wing tendencies, from neo-conservatives to nostalgic nationalists and centre-right social conservatives.

For half a century until 2016, the party's internal conflicts were focused around the issue of Britain's place in Europe; and while the party remained in the hands of the centre-right, for whom Britain's future lay within the EU, dissent always threatened  party unity. It was in order to put an end to this internal dissent that the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, called a national referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the European Union. With both his government and the Labour opposition in favour of remaining, Cameron never imagined for a moment that the "leavers" would win – which is what happened.

Thus instead of putting an end to the internal divisions within the Conservative Party, the Referendum amplified them. After Cameron's resignation, and until 2019, the party struggled to govern and, above all, was bitterly divided about how to implement the Brexit demanded by "the people" (37% of registered voters).  The radical measures called for by the party's right wing were always watered down or thwarted by ad-hoc alliances between centrist Conservative MPs, unhappy with the referendum result, and opposition MPs. It was not until 2019, with the appointment of Boris Johnson as party leader and thus as Prime Minister, that any breakthrough could be made. 

Riding on a wave of populism and promises, Johnson led the Conservatives, albeit partially abandoned by their electorate and by former centrist MPs, to a landslide victory in the 2019 general election. 

Four and a half years later, the party of populism and promises has lost its shine. While Covid hastened Johnson's political downfall, forcing him to resign as Prime Minister and even as an MP, a succession of scandals involving Conservative MPs, as well as the catastrophic 49 days in office of his successor Liz Truss, have finally shattered the reputation for competence that the party once enjoyed. Appointed in 2022, the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has done little to boost the fortunes of the Conservative Party, which in the spring of 2024 remains languishing in the opinion polls.

Though the right-wing media, led by the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph, have maintained their ideological support for the Conservative Party through thick and thin, the British public has not. Rocked by scandals, and seemingly unable to revive the nation's fortunes, the party has lost a great deal of credibility among  middle class voters in rural and suburban areas of southern England where, since 2020, it has lost a series of by-elections in strongholds hitherto considered impregnable.

Thus, the Conservative party that will stand for election in 2024 bears little resemblance to the party that won re-election under David Cameron in 2015, and even to the party that won re-election under Boris Johnson in 2019. Despite the disastrous fallout for the British economy of Liz Truss's seven weeks of neo-conservative government in 2022, despite all the unending problems caused by Brexit, despite inflation, rising poverty, and the general decline in British living standards, the party remains dominated by its right wing, highlighting immigration, the fight against wokeism (social liberalism or liberal socialism), and lower taxes as election themes. This may appeal to  party members, as well to voters attracted by the populist arguments of the far right,  but it will not be enough to win an election.

In April 2024, Dr. Dan Poulter, MP and former health minister, resigned from the Conservatives and joined the Labour Party, telling the Observer newspaper  "It feels to me that the Tory party has gone from being a pragmatic, centrist, centre-right party which focused on and understood the importance of public service and the state to ...  become a nationalist party of the right." Poulter had been a Conservative member of parliament for 14 years.

Reform

    The Conservative Party's electoral woes in 2024 were amplified by a new right-wing populist party called Reform, which emerged in 2021. Actually Reform is the latest metamorphosis of a sovereignist party and of its ultra-populist leader Nigel Farage, who has been trying to force the Conservatives to the right since 1997. It was in 1997 that Farage took control of the small eurosceptic party called UKIP, which he transformed into a war machine to demand a referendum.

   After the victory of the 'out' vote in the Brexit referendum, Farage left UKIP (which still exists today) to form another party, which he called the Brexit Party. The party subsequently changed its name to Reform UK in 2021. It is a party that defends nationalist, libertarian and populist causes. Taking 14% of the vote at the 2024 election, Reform split the right-wing vote and  contributed to the Conservatives' defeat.

Labour

The Labour Party had been in the doldrums since its defeat at the 2010 general election, failing to garner support in spite of the woes of the ruling Conservative Party. Traditionally, the main opposition party benefits from any division or scandal within the governing party in the British Parliament, and in 2015, after five years of unpopular coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Labour should have been able to win the election hands down. They failed to do so, notably because of the loss of 40 seats in Scotland to the nationalist party, and a score well below expectations in England.

    However, it was after 2015 that the party experienced its worst years. Following its defeat in the 2015 elections, Labour Party members chose as their new leader the candidate supported by the left wing of the party, Jeremy Corbyn. While the choice of Corbyn was welcomed by militants,  the appointment of the most left-wing leader in the party's history did not allow Labour to take advantage of the Tory party's Brexit woes and in-fighting. To the despair of centre-left voters, Corbyn remained very neutral on Brexit at a time when the Conservative party was tearing itself apart over the issue, and in 2017, Labour lost the general election to the Tories for the third time in a row. Two years later, in 2019, they lost for the fourth time - this time by a wide margin - to a Conservative party boosted by Boris Johnson's promises and populism. Despite the unpopularity of Johnson (who at the time of the election had a popularity rating of just 35%), Labour lost 60 seats, ending with its lowest number of MPs since 1935..

    Since 2020, the party has refocused under the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, and  its fortunes have revived. A latecomer to politics, Starmer was formerly Director of Public Prosecutions, and a human rights lawyer. Gradually, he has succeeded in rebranding Labour as a social democratic party, thus rebuilding its credibility for many voters who had abandoned it during the Corbyn years.

    However, nothing is certain and not everything is clear, especially when it comes to the UK's position with regard to Europe. According to the latest polls, 78% of Labour voters believe that Brexit was a mistake, a view shared by many MPs; but Starmer refuses to commit to any course of action, saying only that Britain will have to repair its relationship with the EU.

    The truth is that Starmer, like the party's strategists, are afraid of offending those traditional left-wing voters who  abandoned Labour at the 2019 election, in favour of the anti-European populism of the Conservatives. In the event, Labour recaptured in 2024 most of the "Red Wall" constituencies that had voted for Brexit in 2016 and for Boris Johnson in 2019, and the die-hard supporters of Brexit in these areas moved from the Conservatives to Reform UK.

The Liberal Democrats

    The Liberal Democratic Party (LD) is raditionally the third largest party in British politics. It is the direct descendant of the Whig Party formed at the end of the seventeenth century, which became the Liberal Party in the 19th century and the Liberal Democrat Party in 1988 following its merger with the Social Democratic Party (SDP).   

    At the end of the 20th century, as the Conservatives and Labour disappointed a growing proportion of their electoral base, the LDs began to make inroads, winning 46 seats in the 1997 elections and as many as 62 in 2005. In 2010, the party won over 50 seats, enabling it to choose the next government, as neither the Conservatives nor Labour had a majority on their own.

    To the dismay of many of his more centre-left voters, then leader Nick Clegg chose to enter into coalition with the Conservatives, promising to act as a balancing force against the right wing of the Conservative party. While, objectively, the LDs were able to implement a significant part of their programme during their five years in coalition, they failed on a key promise that was very dear to many voters, namely to abolish the high university tuition fees introduced by the Conservatives. It was a disaster for the party, and in the 2015 elections the LDs were only able to salvage 8  seats in the House of Commons, compared with 57 in the previous parliament.

    As a result, the most Europhile of the major British parties was largely absent from the House of Commons at a time when the issue of Brexit was the focus of much of the political debate in Great Britain. Long before the 2016 referendum, the LDs had been proclaiming loud and clear that the UK's place was within the European Union; since then, it has been the only major party to have firmly maintained this pro-European stance, advocating that the country realign with the Single Market and rejoin the Union as soon as possible.

        In 2024, with opinion polls showing that the proportion of Britons who want the country to rejoin the EU now far exceeds (by around 15 points) those who want to continue with Brexit, the party focused its electoral efforts on rural and suburban areas in the south of England and on young voters, who are far more Europhile than older voters. The strategy paid off, and the Lib Dems took 71 seats, their highest number for over 100 years

The result, and what happens next ?

The Conservatives, at rock bottom in the polls, lost  two-thirds of their seats, leaving them with a historically low number of MPs in parliament. The party's future seems difficult to predict, as its internal divisions remain deep, between those who want to take the party further to the right and win back the support of voters who back Reform,  and those who want it to return to the more moderate centre-right position that it used to occupy. With party activists tending to be more radical than voters in general, it is possible that Rishi Sunak will be replaced by either Suella Bravermann or Kemi Badenoch, two of the more strident voices on the right of the party.

 As for the Liberal Democrats, a further rightward lurch by the Conservatives will finally allow them to position themselves as the only party to occupy the broad socio-liberal  centre of the political spectrum, capable of serving as an effective opposition to Labour (or the Conservatives) after the next election, scheduled for 2029.

 Depending on the scale of Labour's victory, and the number of seats won by the LDs, the thorny issue of the UK's relationship with the European Union will be addressed with greater or lesser urgency and determination.

 While it is virtually impossible that the UK will rejoin the EU before the end of the next parliament, a de facto reintegration - complete or partial - into many European structures, including the Single Market, cannot be ruled out... 

One of the few things about which one can be sure, is that the next British government will have a very hard job to do.  

Andrew Rossiter



Further reading.  What have 14 years of Conservative Rule done for Britain?, by Sam Knight in the New Yorker magazine, March 25 2024. (The New Yorker allows one free article, otherwise this article is behind a paywall). A long read, but an excellent overview of the past fourteen years in British politics.