| 8 mins read
The July 2024 general election which brought Sir Keir Starmer’s government to power was a strange political earthquake. The Labour Party more than doubled its seats – from 202 to 411 – and won a landslide majority, but its raw vote fell as turnout slumped, and almost two-third of those who did vote backed other parties. It was the most volatile, most fragmented, and least proportional general election in modern British history. As in previous election cycles, Political Quarterly has brought together a diverse set of political scientists, historians, and policy specialists to analyse the campaign and the result.
Perhaps the dominant feature of the 2024 election was the Conservative Party’s unpopularity after fourteen years in power, which was reflected not only in the collapse of Tory support but in high levels of anti-Conservative voting. As Will Jennings and his co-authors show in their article, the result was ‘a resounding repudiation of the incumbent government’ in which Conservative support fell most sharply in areas where it was previously highest, allowing Labour to make gains in relatively affluent parts of southern England as well as the so-called ‘Red Wall’.
Marta Miori and Jane Green use British Electoral Study (BES) data to explore patterns of change at constituency level, and show that tactical voting was widespread among Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green supporters, but much weaker between the Conservatives and Reform. Likewise, Charles Pattie and David Cutts highlight the geographical efficiency of Labour’s vote and show that the electoral system advantaged Labour over the Conservatives for the first time since 2010, whilst Peter Sloman’s article examines how the Liberal Democrats positioned themselves to exploit Tory unpopularity in target seats across southern England.
Although economic issues were central to the campaign itself, the cultural politics of the Brexit era clearly remained important. Paula Surridge shows that ‘values’ continued to shape voting behaviour in what was ostensibly a ‘valence election’, as the 2019 Conservative coalition fractured in multiple directions. Distinguishing between ‘authoritarian’, ‘moderate’, and ‘liberal’ social attitudes, Surridge shows that authoritarian voters swung sharply from the Conservatives to Reform, whilst Labour made modest gains among all groups except left-liberal voters, who moved towards the Greens. This fragmentation also shaped gendered voting patterns. Rosie Campbell and her co-authors find that BES data shows a ‘modern gender gap’ between left- and right-wing blocs, with female voters leaning leftwards. In contrast to 2017 and 2019, however, the gender gap between Labour and the Conservatives largely disappeared, as ‘younger women disproportionately shifted to the Greens and men of all ages went to Reform’.
Reform UK’s performance has attracted widespread attention, not least because – as Ross McKibbin notes in his contribution – Nigel Farage’s party is probably ‘the biggest single obstacle to the Conservatives regaining office’. In exploring the contours of Reform voting, Oliver Heath et al. show that there is ‘remarkable continuity between the places that previously backed UKIP and those which now back Reform’: at constituency level, ‘the best predictor of Reform's performance in 2024 is UKIP's performance in 2015’. Individual-level data, however, reveals much more churn, since only 37% of 2024 Reform UK voters had actually voted for UKIP in 2015.
Alongside tactical voting and the decline of Conservative support, Miori and Green highlight the importance of Scotland to Labour’s landslide. Here, Labour raised its vote share from 18.6% to 35.3% and gained 36 seats, benefiting from a ‘double anti-incumbency “bonus”’ as voters soured on the SNP government at Holyrood. Gerry Hassan unpacks this story in more detail in his article, arguing that Labour’s recovery is more fragile than it might seem. Support for Scottish independence remains relatively strong, and John Swinney’s SNP is already showing signs of life as it seeks to exploit the Starmer government’s unpopularity.
Several of the articles provide rich insights into candidates and local campaigns, which seem to have mattered more in 2024 than in other recent elections. Alan Duggan, Caitlin Milazzo and Siim Trumm draw on analysis of more than 1,600 leaflets to examine how parties engaged with different issues – noting, for instance, that more than one-third of Labour leaflets emphasised immigration, up from about one-fifth in 2015. In an analysis of the 4,515 candidates – a record number – Sofia Collignon and Wolfgang Rüdig note that the overall number of female candidates declined from 2019, though more were successful than in any previous election. They also highlight growing concerns about the impact of harassment and abuse: only 16% of female candidates and 30% of male candidates published their home addresses in the Statement of Persons Nominated.
Maria Sobolewska’s article explores ethnic minority representation, and notes that both Labour and the Liberal Democrats seem to have enjoyed considerable success in selecting more diverse candidates for their winnable seats: as a result, the proportion of ethnic minority MPs – at almost 14% – now broadly matches the composition of the electorate. Sobolewska also uses BES data to study attitudes to Rishi Sunak. Though generally unpopular, he enjoyed comparatively strong support from voters of Indian origin, and (perhaps more surprisingly) from ethnocentric white voters who believed that equality for black and Asian people had gone too far.
Keir Starmer’s government now faces the difficult task of raising living standards and improving public services by the next election in a very challenging geopolitical environment. Patrick Diamond, David Richards and Sam Warner analyse the new government’s strategy, and argue that ‘the scale of the crises that Labour has inherited’ means that it has had ‘little time or space to fashion a new model of statecraft’. Ideas about ‘mission-driven government’, devolution, and institutional reform have potentially radical implications, but it is not clear how far they will enable Starmer and his colleagues to overcome the ‘deeply entrenched pathologies’ of the British state.
As Mathew Lawrence notes in his article, Labour’s manifesto also signalled a willingness to break with post-Thatcherite economic orthodoxy by expanding public ownership in key sectors such as transport and energy. In a conscious echo of Stephen Littlechild’s 1981 agenda for denationalization, Lawrence sets out ‘ten steps to public ownership’, using the case of GB Energy to illustrate both the economic rationale and the strategic challenges involved.
And what of the Tories? Routed by Labour and frequently overshadowed by Reform, Kemi Badenoch’s path back to power is not an easy one. Kit Kowol suggests that the party should look ‘down under’ for inspiration, continuing the recent ‘Australianisation’ of Tory politics. By attacking the Albanese government’s economic record and perceived focus on cultural issues, Peter Dutton has put the Australian Liberals in a strong position to return to government after just one term in opposition. With Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the White House, global politics is already moving on quickly from the world of 2024. Even so, the consequences of the July 2024 general election are likely to continue to shape British politics for the rest of the decade, and perhaps beyond.
