The UK General Election of July 2024: Results and Implications

On 5 July 2024, the day after its general election, the UK was a country that appeared to have bucked the trend of a shift to the right among the democracies. In France, the 30 June National Assembly elections had seen a dramatic rise in support for the Rassemblement National. Earlier that month, at the European Parliament elections, there had been equally dramatic rises in support for the far right in other European countries. The election of Donald Trump in the run-up to US presidential elections in November appeared to be a growing possibility. Against this background, Labour scored a landslide victory, taking 412 of the 650 House of Commons seats to give it an overall majority of 176. This was a Labour majority that had been exceeded only by Tony’s Blair’s 179 seat majority in 1997. However, appearances can be deceptive, and in many respects, the headline result masked a worrying shift to the right in UK politics.

In the first place, it was apparent that Labour’s share of the vote had hardly changed since 2019. Moreover, thanks to the decline in turnout (down from 67.3% to the near record low of 60.0%), in absolute terms the party won fewer votes than at the previous contest when its seat share (at 31.1%) had been one of its lowest ever.

Note: 2024 result as at 12:16 pm 5 July 2024 – 648 of 650 seats declared.

Second, therefore, Labour owed its massive seat majority not a growth in its own popularity but to a decline in support for the Conservatives combined with a dramatic growth in support for the far-right populist party, Reform UK (previously the Brexit party) in the context of the single-member, simple plurality electoral system. This, as is well known, assigns the seat in each constituency to the candidate winning the most votes regardless of the percentage this represents.

Third, at the constituency level, it was apparent that Labour did better where it was placed second to the incumbent Conservative with the same being true of the Liberal Democrats whose overall vote share was likewise virtually unchanged since 2019.

Fourth, in a majority of the seats the Conservatives lost, the percentage achieved by Reform UK was larger than the margin of the former party’s defeat. While those who voted Reform UK would not necessarily have supported the Conservatives in the absence of a Reform candidate, they do for the most part appear to have voted Conservative in 2019.

So this was an election at which the Conservatives lost support in multiple directions; and it is difficult to see how in the immediate term it will be able to revive its fortunes given that it is now vulnerable both on its right and on its left. On the one hand, the four million votes won by Reform UK and the platform in Parliament acquired by the charismatic Nigel Farage and his colleagues, will act as a pull to the right while on the other hand making it difficult to pose as a moderate party potentially attractive to those located towards the centre of the left-right spectrum.

Meanwhile, Labour in government is likely to face a number of difficulties of its own. During an election campaign that failed to inspire because widely seen as the lead-up to a poll whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, the party had on the one hand raised expectations by emphasising the theme of ‘change’ after fourteen years of Conservative rule. On the other hand, it offered a manifesto that contained little sharply to distinguish it from the Conservatives. This, combined with the flat-lining of its popular support, potentially made it difficult for it to argue that it had a democratic mandate for the change it promised to deliver.

Second, the centrepiece of Labour’s manifesto was the promise to achieve higher levels of economic growth that would enable it to avoid the so-called ‘trilemma’ of a return to austerity, rising taxation or growing debt. It claimed, in other words, that under its stewardship, there would be no significant cuts in public expenditure; that there would be no rises in taxes ‘on working people’ and that it would have achieved a reduction in the level of public debt as a proportion of GDP by the end of the Parliament. The promise of no tax rises on ‘working people’ was the subject of particular ridicule in some quarters; for it seemed to imply no tax rises of any kind bearing in mind that there are no taxes paid exclusively by the unemployed and the economically inactive. Yet when the party was pressed on what it would do in the face of the challenges of an aging population and the transition to net zero in the event of growth failing to materialise, it merely responded by suggesting that the question itself was ‘defeatist’.

Third, the party has significantly failed to challenge right-wing narratives on issues such as immigration, essentially accepting the Conservatives’ and Reform UK’s framing of the matter as a problem, thereby, arguably, leaving itself vulnerable to these parties’ attacks in the event that immigration fails to decline.

Finally, Keir Starmer is a leader who lacks charisma and whose personal popularity ratings remain low partly as he is widely perceived to be lacking any very clearly defined principles. Charisma is important in the political circumstances of the early twenty-first century when voters are largely without secure ideological anchors or strong party attachments. Without it, it becomes difficult to keep voters on side when circumstances become unfavourable, the more so as the absence of clear programmatic ambitions makes it easier for opponents to set the political agenda with the risk of incumbents being forced to ‘dance to their tunes’.

Looking to the future, therefore, the worry must be that Labour has won by default and that the real novelty of the election is the populist right’s acquisition of a parliamentary bridgehead for the first time. Time will tell how far Labour is able to act as an effective bulwark against the drift to the right in UK politics, but for the moment, the omens are not very good.

Author Biography

James Newell, Adjunct Professor at the University of Urbino, is a long standing PSA member, convenor of the PSA's Italian Politics Specialist Group, and has been writing extensively on Italian events for the past two decades.