At first glance, the election has delivered what first past the post claims to provide but usually does not: a clear transfer of power. This is the first election since Edward Heath’s surprise victory in 1970 in which a parliamentary majority of one party has been replaced by a majority for the other party; all the transitions since – in 1974, 1979, 1997 and 2010 – have involved hung parliaments on the way in or out of government. But while power has changed hands decisively, the votes cast reveal a divided, uncertain nation. And those numbers reveal the result to be one of the most unique in British history.
The turnover of seats was on an awesome scale. No party has ever lost as many seats as the 251 the Conservatives shed in the 2024 election. No third party has held 71 seats, as the Lib Dems now do, since the Liberals in 1923. The nearest comparisons are from the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, competition between multiple parties, in which Labour displaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories, combined with economic crisis to create an unstable series of election results.
Elections after that period and up until quite recently were contested between reasonably stable coalitions of Labour and Conservative voters, defined mostly by class. Campaigns were fought in a narrow spectrum of constituencies and based on appealing to the small number of electors who might change their minds (between the parties or between voting and abstention). The past few elections, starting in 2015, have been very different. Each of the past four elections has involved one or more parties assembling a flimsy, single-use coalition of support that has subsequently fallen apart. The Tory coalition of 2019 collapsed catastrophically in all directions, driven by impatience with chaos, economic stagnation and declining public services.
Labour’s electoral coalition could well suffer a similar fate unless the new government is a demonstrable success. The massive haul of seat gains derives from a breathtakingly effective redistribution of support rather than an increase, aided by the division of the rightwing vote between the Conservatives and Reform UK. This is the first election, with the arguable exception of 2015, in which the right has been splintered the way the centre-left so often has throughout British political history.
Labour’s share of the vote, at 34%, is extremely low. It is higher than the party managed in defeat in 2019 largely because of the prodigious results for the Scottish Labour party. Labour’s third term in 2005 and the Conservatives’ release from coalition in 2015 were comparable, but 2024 is clearly the lowest level of active popular support with which a party has started a period in power.
The low turnout is another warning: 60% is the third worst in UK electoral history, after the chaotic election of 1918 and the foregone conclusion of 2001. The main parties share the responsibility; Labour failed to excite, and the Conservatives were too bedraggled and exhausted for many of their natural supporters to endorse at this election. It was, by a long way, the Tories’ worst result ever in vote share or seats. The voters refused to line up behind either main party. Competing for the centre ground has led to revolts from the right against the Tories and from the left against Labour – and the traditional centre was attracted to the Lib Dems’ campaigning verve and emphasis on issues such as water pollution.
The electoral battleground revealed by the 2024 election is bigger and more confusing even than it was in the past. Inner-city Muslim communities, rural shires, wealthy commuter towns, seaside towns and Midlands new-build estates are all part of marginal constituencies now. But only a few of these constituencies feature competition solely between the two main parties. There is a kaleidoscopic range of contests – Labour against independents and Greens, Conservatives against Reform, Labour against Reform, Conservatives against Lib Dem, Labour against SNP, and more than a few three- or four-way pile-ups where victory is possible on a low share of the vote. The proportion of MPs having the support of more than 50% of voters slumped.
Electoral strategy in such an environment becomes fiendishly complicated. The Tories cannot “unite the right”, because part of the point of Reform UK is that it is hostile to the “establishment” that the Tories have always represented, and because the voters of Surrey and Oxfordshire have demonstrated that the Lib Dems have a strong appeal to a slice of the traditional Tory vote.
Labour has a strong parliamentary majority, with all the authority that bestows, but a painfully thin base among the electorate. It can ill afford to dispense with any component of the coalition that produced that majority, but “to govern is to choose”. It will be impossible to deal with Britain’s problems without risking the collapse of this rickety electoral edifice. Perhaps one can be optimistic, and argue that the choices made, if they are successful, will create the route to a more durable electoral majority.
But maybe parties in Britain, as in many other European countries, are losing their ability to unite disparate but compatible groups under a single banner. The two parties together attracted the support of only 35% of the electorate – 58% of a 60% turnout. Despite the brisk and efficient change of power, the results indicate a crisis in the relationship between government and governed.