The 2024 UK Election – A Summary

2024 UK General Election – A summary

• Labour won a majority of 174.
• The Conservative Party suffered their worse election result since 1832.
• The Liberal Democrats achieved their best ever election result, winning 72 seats.
• The Reform Party and Green Party both won 4 seats whilst the SNP were reduced to just 9 seats.

Points of Note:

• The Labour Party won an astonishing 411 seats (63% of the total available) with just 33.8% of the vote.
• Reform got 4 million votes but just 4 seats whilst the Liberal Democrats got 72 seats with 3.5million. This election will almost certainly intensify the demand for a change in the voting system as a result.
• 6 Independent MPs were also elected. Many of these were pro Gaza candidates challenging previously secure Labour MPs. For example, in Leicester South, the Labour front bencher, Jonathan Ashworth lost his seat to Shockat Adams. Other Labour MPs only just held on against Pro Gaza candidates, most notably Wes Streeting who won by just 500 votes.
• The two major parties won just 57% of the vote. Given that in 2017 the two parties had taken 82% of the vote, this was quite a dramatic decline.
• It is too soon to tell if the 2024 election was the start of a new political landscape in which third parties are becoming more influential but the election was certainly notable in that 5 parties all took more than 10% of the vote.
• How influential were the opinion polls? The polls had all predicted a significant Labour win, but ultimately nearly all opinion polls over predicted the % of the vote that Labour would win. This is not necessarily to say that the opinion polls got it wrong. Given that a Labour victory was seen as a certainty it is likely that people voted tactically and leant their vote to third parties. The inevitability of Labour’s victory may have also encouraged the low turnout which may also be a reason for opinion polls over estimated Labour vote share.
• What we can be sure of is that the election was not won by Labour but lost by the Conservative Party. Labour saw just a marginal increase in their share of the vote whereas the Conservative Party saw a 20% decrease in their share of the vote. In fact, they lost half of their 2019 voters winning just 6.8 million votes compared to almost 14 million in 2019.