Fourteen years after Labour crashed to defeat, amid failing banks, soaring unemployment and grinding foreign wars, it has been returned to power under a hatchet-faced leader with an unassailable majority: 411 out of 650 mps. On the face of it, the gales of discontent that blew with such force through the British political system in the 2010s—Scottish independence, Corbynism, Brexit, parliamentary uproar, Irish crisis, revolving door at Number Ten—have subsided into centrist zephyrs, propelling the ship of state serenely forth. As many have pointed out, however, Labour’s win on July 4 was a ‘seat-slide’, not a popular-vote tsunami: 63 per cent of the Commons obtained with only 34 per cent of the ballots—a record skew.footnote1 How should the character of the vote—and the condition of the country—be understood?
Three initial points should be made about the 2024 popular vote. First, there was no swing to Labour. On the contrary, Labour’s vote fell by half a million, from Corbyn’s 10.3 million in 2019 to Starmer’s 9.7 million. If Labour’s percentage registered a tiny positive swing of 1.6 per cent, this was an effect of falling turnout: down by 7.5 points, from 67.3 per cent in 2019 to 59.8 per cent this year—the poorest showing since Blair’s re-election in 2001 on a 59.4 per cent turnout, itself a historic low. Starmer’s Labour received the votes of only 20 per cent of the overall British electorate—a worse result than Blair’s 22 per cent in 2005, in the trough of the Iraq War, and the lowest vote-share that a majority Westminster government has received since the introduction of universal suffrage. The prevailing sentiment was a dogged anti-incumbency. Asked why they intended to vote Labour, 48 per cent responded, ‘To get the Tories out’ and 13 per cent that ‘The country needs a change’. Only 5 per cent cited Labour’s policies.footnote2
Second, Labour’s victory was the product of an unprecedented Conservative collapse: the desertion of over 7 million of the 14 million voters that had backed Boris Johnson’s call to ‘Get Brexit Done’ in 2019. This was a significantly greater slump than the Tory debacle of 1997, when the long spell of Thatcher–Major rule capsized with the loss of 4.5 million votes; let alone the relatively modest decline of 1.7 million votes that put an end to thirteen years of Tory rule in 1964. Notably, the Conservatives’ meltdown this year followed several rounds of steady increase since their return to office in 2010 after New Labour’s fall. The Tory vote had climbed from 10.7 million in 2010, to 11.3 million in 2015, after five years of austerity, and 13.6 million in 2017, in the aftermath of Brexit, to its 14 million peak in 2019. This year they lost 251 seats, clinging on to just 121—another post-war record low; even after Attlee’s landslide in 1945, the Conservatives held 197 seats; after Blair’s in 1997, they held 165 (see Table 1). 
Third, it was a different story in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scottish voters did swing to Labour, which gained some 300,000 votes to win a plurality of 852,000, its best result north of the border since 2010; but this was well below the 500,000 Scottish National Party defectors and abstainers. Combined with 400,000 Scottish Tory deserters, snp stay-at-homes brought the Scottish turnout down to 59 per cent, from 68 per cent in 2019. The snp’s Westminster seats slumped from 48 to 9, while Scottish Labour’s seats rose from one to 37. Yet the swing was due rather to snp voters’ justified fury with the corruption and mendacity of the Sturgeon leadership than affection for Starmer.footnote3 Support for Scottish independence still runs at 45–48 per cent, but Sturgeon and her husband have scuppered any unified political expression of that outlook for some time to come. In Northern Ireland, which has an entirely different party system to that of mainland Britain, the molecular process of Irish reunification that gained a forward jolt from Brexit advanced another millimetre in 2024 due to deep divisions in the part demoralized, part lumpen-radicalized Unionist and Protestant ranks.footnote4
What explains the scale of the Tory collapse? The electoral drivers were three-fold. The right-nationalist Reform uk took 4.1 million votes, 14 per cent of the ballots cast, with an estimated cost to the Conservatives of eighty seats.footnote5 In over 170 of the seats the Conservatives lost, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of their defeat.footnote6 Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle featured a largely negative manifesto—anti-immigration, anti-corporation tax, anti-public spending, anti-net zero; pro-army—and down-played its supposed commitment to constitutional reform. Its principal function in the 2024 election was as a protest vote for Leave supporters to register their rage and disappointment at the outcome of Brexit in Tory hands—mapping onto the depressed regions and run-down towns in Eastern England, the Midlands and the North whose discontent took the uk out of the eu. Among working-class Leave voters, in particular, support for the Conservatives plummeted, with over half turning to Reform.footnote7
In constituency after constituency, from North West Cambridgeshire to Bolton West, Lowestoft to Dartford, the combined Tory–Reform vote towered over Labour’s. If Starmer’s aim in purging Corbyn and his supporters, adopting Conservative spending plans and extolling ‘patriotic values’ was to reinflate Labour support in Northern and Midland rustbelt communities, it fell flat. Labour’s vote-share across these ‘red wall’ seats rose by just 3 points; decisive was the 24-point drop in Conservative support.footnote8 In Bolsover, on the disused Derbyshire coalfield, Labour overturned a Tory majority of 5,000 despite adding only 600 votes to its tally for 17,000 in all, compared to 10,900 for the Tories and just over 9,000 for Reform. Similarly in Dudley in the Black Country, Labour emerged victorious with just 12,000 votes on a 51 per cent turnout; the Tories were reduced to 10,300, while Reform took 9,400. Five years earlier, with no Farage party in play, Johnson’s Conservatives had romped to victory in the predecessor Dudley North constituency with over 23,000 votes. All in all, Johnson had taken 28 of the working-class ‘red wall’ seats in 2019, and Corbyn ten; in 2024, Labour took 37 of them while one, Ashfield, went to Reform.
To the lethal effect of Reform should be added Conservative abstentions, estimated to have cost the party another 33 seats, and systematic Labour–Liberal Democrat tactical voting.footnote9 In London commuter-belt seats like Hertford and Stortford, where Labour had finished a fairly strong second to the Conservatives in 2019, one in four Liberal Democrats lent it their votes. Where the Liberal Democrats were so placed, one in three Labour supporters switched.footnote10 Although the Liberal Democrats’ popular vote actually fell from 3.7 million in 2019 to 3.5 million in 2024, anti-incumbent tactical voting increased the number of Liberal Democrat MPs sixfold, from 11 to 72, capturing seats across affluent southern England, from St Ives in the far west through the Cotswolds to Guildford, Winchester and Tunbridge Wells, also running Chancellor Jeremy Hunt close in leafy Godalming, Surrey.footnote11