Labour wins by a landslide in UK election on 33.8% of the vote, as minor parties flourish in wake of Tory rout

American Leadership Review Special Edition with revised final totals

In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Labour has won the 2024 General Election in a landslide winning 412 seats out of 650 seats in the UK Parliament.

Labour was led to victory by party opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer. ?

Labour’s overall vote share in the election was 33.8%, 1.7% above their party’s 2019 General Election results.[1]

What a difference 1.7% makes in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system! With 32.1% of the vote in 2019, Labour secured 202 seats, less than half of its 2024 total. The surge in seats for Labour is primarily due to the collapse in support for the Conservative and Scottish Nationalist parties.

Both Conservative and Scottish Nationalists’ representation in Parliament were decimated, the former taking 23.7% of the quadrinational vote, [2] and the latter having lost four-fifths of their seats in Scotland, plummeting from holding 48 to just 9 mandates. Conservatives, also known as ‘Tories’, retained 121 seats, down from 365 held following the 2019 election.

Liberal-Democrats (Lib-Dems) won 71 seats, their best result in a century (since 1923), on a total of 12.2% of the quadrinational vote.

Reform UK, Nigel Farage's recent incarnation of the former Brexit and UK Independent (UKIP) parties, won 5 seats taking 14.3% of the quadrinational vote off the backs of the Tories. By splitting the right-leaning vote, Reform helped Lib-Dems overtake Tories in dozens of constituencies.

Greens did remarkably well, winning 4 seats, up from 1 in the previous Parliament, an all-time high for the party. The green parties for England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are separate yet allied parties. Their combined quadrinational vote share came to 6.8%, an historic high.

The commanding share of parliamentary seats captured by Labour can partly be accounted for by strategic voting on the part of Labour and Liberal-Democratic voters. This maximized the efficiency of Labour and Lib-Dem votes, allowing both parties to increase their representation on relatively weak turnout of voters.?

On July 4, 2024, Labour gained a mere 9,725,117 votes. In 2019, Labour took 10,269,051 popular votes. Labour won less votes under Starmer than it did in both 2019 and 2017 (12,877,918) under former party Jeremy Corbyn.

Running as an Independent, Corbyn retained his Islington North seat in London, ?winning a 7,247 majority over a Labour Party challenger.

Labour leader Starmer has won his seat in Holborn and St Pancras in London ?with 18,884 votes. His majority is down significantly from 22,766 in 2019 to 11,572 in 2024.

Turnout in 2024 at 59.9% was significantly lower than in 2019, when 67.3% cast ballots. Turnout in this month’s election was the lowest share since 2001.

If the Conservative (23.7%) and Reform UK (14.3%) vote shares are added together, they outperform Labour’s 33.8% by 4.2% points quadrinationally.

Sinn Féin, the Irish Nationalist party, won the most seats in Northern Ireland for the first time in history, besting the Democratic Unionist Party with 7 seats to DUP’s 5.

In Wales, Tories lost every one of their 12 seats and were wiped off the map. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party established in 1925, increased its number of seats from 2 to 4 seats in the election.

The Workers Party of Britain led by George Galloway since its founding in 2019 lost its sole seat in Parliament to the Labour candidate in Rochdale.

The victory for Labour followed from the Reform UK splitting the right-leaning vote, handing what otherwise would have been Conservative seats to the centrist Liberal-Democrats. Tories would have gained as many as an additional 100 seats if Reform had stood down, as they had done for Boris Johnson in 2019. The so-called ‘One Nation’ Tories, the moderate faction within the Conservative Party, lost hugely in the election, mainly to Lib-Dems. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and?Penny Mordaunt, the House of Commons leader, were among the most high-profile cabinet ministers unseated by opposition candidates. All three are associated with the ‘One Nation’ faction.

Decimation within the ranks of relatively moderate Tories suggests the Party may lurch further to the right, to check competition for Farage’s Reform party. Farage won election to Parliament on his eighth attempt and will be joined by four other Reform UK members.

The Tories and Labour, now the main opposition and the majority governing parties in Britain, respectively, have a combined showing of merely 57.5% of the vote, the lowest combined total for the two parties since the 1910 General Election.

Labour also lost seats where left-leaning votes were split with Greens, Lib-Dems and Independents. Five Independents were returned in constituencies with high (10%+) Muslim populations. These candidates ran on pro-Gaza platforms. Greens ran on pro-environment, high tax-high public spending policies. And Lib-Dems ran on support for Social Care and the National Health Service, outflanking Labour from the left on these key issues.

Arguably, Starmer has moved the Labour Party? too far to the centre-right. There is support for more progressive policies in Britain well to the left of where he has placed the Labour Party. With a majority of 172 seats, Labour will not be open to listening to this criticism any time soon.

The 2024 UK election results follow the larger pattern of European politics, with the centre-right losing ground to the populist far right, while the left is fragmenting, as seen in Germany, France and Italy.

Whether Starmer’s Labour Party, arguably now a centrist force in British politics, can stem the rightward drift in British politics remains to be seen.

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[1] The Guardian (July 6, 2024). UK general election results in full: Labour wins in landslide, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jul/04/uk-general-election-results-2024-live-in-full

[2] The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is constitutionally comprised of four nations: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.? The Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin does not recognize the nationhood of Northern Ireland, however. For this reason, Sinn Féin members elected to the UK Parliament have historically refused to take their seats.

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