2024 United Kingdom general election

Based on Wikipedia: 2024 United Kingdom general election

On the Fourth of July 2024, while Americans were lighting fireworks, the British were lighting a political bonfire. After fourteen years in power, the Conservative Party didn't just lose an election—they suffered the worst defeat in their 190-year history. The Labour Party, led by a former human rights lawyer named Keir Starmer, won 411 seats in Parliament. The Conservatives were left with just 121.

But here's the strange part: Labour won this landslide with the lowest vote share of any winning party ever recorded in British history. Just 33.7 percent of voters actually chose them. This wasn't so much a wave of enthusiasm for Labour as it was a collapse of support for everyone else—particularly the party that had been running the country since 2010.

The Conservative Implosion

To understand how the Conservatives fell so far so fast, you need to rewind to 2019. Boris Johnson had just won them a commanding 80-seat majority, largely on the promise to "Get Brexit Done." The party seemed unassailable.

Then came COVID-19.

The pandemic would have tested any government, but what destroyed the Conservatives wasn't their handling of the public health crisis itself. It was what became known as "Partygate"—the revelation that while ordinary Britons were forbidden from visiting dying relatives in hospital, while they held funerals over Zoom and celebrated birthdays alone, staff at 10 Downing Street were throwing parties. There was drinking. There was a DJ. There was a suitcase wheeled to a nearby off-license to stock up on wine.

Johnson initially told Parliament that no rules had been broken and no parties had taken place. This was a lie, and Parliament later found unanimously that he had deliberately misled them—one of the gravest sins a British politician can commit. He resigned as Prime Minister in July 2022, though not before more than 50 ministers quit the government in a single 48-hour period over a separate scandal involving sexual misconduct allegations against a government whip.

The Shortest Premiership in History

What followed Johnson was, somehow, worse.

Liz Truss won the Conservative leadership contest and became Prime Minister in September 2022. Within weeks, she announced what she called a "mini-budget"—though there was nothing mini about it. She proposed enormous unfunded tax cuts, primarily benefiting the wealthy, to be paid for through massive government borrowing.

The financial markets panicked. The pound sterling crashed to its lowest level against the dollar in decades. Pension funds nearly collapsed. The Bank of England had to intervene with emergency bond purchases. Mortgage rates spiked. The International Monetary Fund, which usually reserves its criticism for struggling developing nations, publicly rebuked British economic policy.

Truss reversed most of the policies. She fired her Chancellor of the Exchequer, the minister responsible for economic policy. None of it helped. Forty-five days after taking office, she resigned—the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. A British tabloid had started a livestream comparing her tenure to the shelf life of a head of lettuce. The lettuce won.

Rishi Sunak's Impossible Task

Rishi Sunak, who had warned against Truss's economic plans during the leadership contest, became Prime Minister without a vote. He was the only candidate. The Conservative members of Parliament, shell-shocked by the chaos, rallied around him as the adult in the room.

Sunak was, in many ways, an unusual figure in British politics. Born to Indian immigrant parents who ran a pharmacy, educated at Winchester College and Oxford, then Stanford Business School, he had made a fortune in finance before entering politics. At 42, he became the youngest Prime Minister in over 200 years—and the first person of color to hold the office.

He stabilized things. The markets calmed. The pound recovered. The government stopped making international headlines for chaos and incompetence. But Sunak inherited a party that had been in power for twelve years and bore responsibility for everything voters were unhappy about: a National Health Service in crisis, a cost-of-living squeeze, stagnant wages, crumbling schools, and the lingering economic damage from Brexit, which most economists agreed had made Britain poorer.

By the time Sunak called the election for July 4th, 2024, the Conservatives had been trailing Labour in opinion polls for nearly three years straight. Some polls showed them more than 20 points behind.

Keir Starmer: The Anti-Corbyn

Keir Starmer's path to Downing Street was, in some ways, the opposite of his predecessor's destruction.

In 2019, Labour had suffered its own historic defeat under Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who had moved the party sharply to the left. Corbyn's Labour promised to nationalize major industries, dramatically increase public spending, and transform Britain's economy. Voters rejected this vision decisively, giving the Conservatives their largest majority since Margaret Thatcher.

Starmer, who had served as Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary, won the Labour leadership in 2020. A former Director of Public Prosecutions—essentially Britain's top prosecutor—he was knighted for his services to law and justice. Sir Keir Starmer, as he's formally known, proceeded to do something politically remarkable: he made Labour boring.

He purged the party of members associated with antisemitism, which had plagued Labour under Corbyn. He dropped radical economic policies. He wrapped himself in the Union Jack, emphasizing patriotism in a way that made left-wing activists uncomfortable. He refused to make bold promises, instead offering vague pledges about "change" and "a new chapter."

Critics called him bland, uninspiring, a manager rather than a leader. His supporters called him exactly what Britain needed after years of chaos. The comparison everyone made was to Tony Blair, who had similarly repositioned Labour toward the center in the 1990s and won three consecutive elections.

The Campaign That Wasn't

The election campaign itself was notable mainly for how little it mattered.

Sunak surprised everyone—including many in his own party—by calling the election for July. Most observers had expected autumn. The announcement came in the pouring rain outside Downing Street, with Sunak getting soaked as a protester blasted the 1997 Labour anthem "Things Can Only Get Better" from nearby speakers. It was not an auspicious start.

The Conservative campaign lurched from disaster to disaster. Sunak left D-Day commemoration events in France early to record a television interview, prompting outrage from veterans' groups. Several Conservative candidates were revealed to have placed bets on the election date before it was announced, suggesting they'd received insider information—betting on elections being legal in Britain, but betting on information not available to the public being very much not.

Starmer, meanwhile, ran a campaign of aggressive caution. He made few promises. He avoided controversy. He let the Conservatives self-destruct.

The one issue that might have mattered—Brexit—barely came up. In 2019, it had dominated everything. By 2024, both major parties seemed to have agreed not to discuss it, like relatives avoiding a contentious topic at a family dinner.

The Night of the Long Knives

When the results came in, the scale of the Conservative collapse became clear.

Cabinet ministers fell one after another. The Defense Secretary lost his seat. The Education Secretary lost hers. The Leader of the House of Commons, the Veterans' Minister, the Science Minister—all gone. Liz Truss, the former Prime Minister, lost in her Norfolk constituency, a seat the Conservatives had held for over a century.

In total, twelve sitting Cabinet ministers lost their seats. This had never happened before in British electoral history.

Rishi Sunak held his own seat in Richmond, in North Yorkshire, but arrived at Labour headquarters in London the next morning to concede defeat. "I take responsibility for this loss," he said, before apologizing to the Conservative candidates who had lost their seats.

The Third-Party Surge

Perhaps the most interesting story of the night wasn't Labour's victory or the Conservatives' defeat. It was what happened to everyone else.

The Liberal Democrats, Britain's traditional third party, won 72 seats—their best result since 1923, when Lloyd George still led the Liberals. Under Ed Davey, who had run a campaign heavy on stunts (bungee jumping, paddleboarding, falling off a paddleboard), they swept through the Conservative heartlands of southern England, winning seats in wealthy suburbs that had voted Tory for generations.

Reform UK, a right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, won five seats and 14.3 percent of the national vote—the third-highest share of any party. Farage himself finally won a seat in Parliament on his eighth attempt, representing Clacton-on-Sea, a seaside town that has become a symbol of left-behind England. Reform's rise terrified Conservatives, who watched their voters defect to a party that promised stricter immigration controls and criticized the Conservatives for failing to deliver on Brexit's promises.

The Green Party won four seats, their best result ever, including in Bristol, where they defeated a Labour candidate.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party collapsed from 48 seats to just 9. The SNP had dominated Scottish politics for a decade, but scandals, leadership turmoil, and frustration over the stalled independence movement sent voters flooding back to Labour. For the first time since 2010, Labour became the largest party in Scotland.

The Least Proportional Election Ever

Britain uses a system called first-past-the-post, where each constituency elects one member of Parliament, and whoever gets the most votes wins—even if that's far less than a majority. This system tends to exaggerate victories and punish third parties whose support is spread thinly across the country.

The 2024 election pushed this to an extreme.

Labour won 63 percent of the seats with 34 percent of the vote. Reform UK won 14 percent of the vote but less than 1 percent of the seats. The Liberal Democrats won 12 percent of the vote and 11 percent of the seats—a rare case of rough proportionality, but only because their vote was concentrated in specific constituencies they could actually win.

By one measure, this was the least proportional election in British history. A party that four in ten voters rejected now controlled nearly two-thirds of Parliament. Meanwhile, the combined vote for smaller parties—Reform, Greens, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, and others—exceeded 42 percent. In a proportional system, they would have formed the government.

What Comes Next

Keir Starmer walked into 10 Downing Street on July 5th with an enormous majority and almost no specific promises to keep. He had pledged economic stability, better public services, and change—but the details remained vague.

The challenges were concrete enough. The National Health Service, Britain's beloved but struggling universal healthcare system, faced record waiting lists. Schools were literally crumbling, with some buildings held together by emergency props. Real wages hadn't grown in fifteen years. Britain's relationship with the European Union remained unresolved, with trade barriers hampering businesses and the Northern Ireland border arrangements still contentious.

Starmer had the power to do almost anything. The question was whether he had the vision—and whether a public that had voted against the Conservatives more than for Labour would give him the benefit of the doubt.

The Broken Electoral Map

One striking feature of the 2024 election was how the electoral boundaries themselves had changed.

Britain periodically redraws its constituency boundaries to account for population shifts. The 2024 election was the first fought on boundaries established by a 2023 review. Wales lost eight seats, dropping from 40 to 32 members of Parliament. Scotland lost two, going from 59 to 57. England gained seats, particularly in the growing suburbs of southern England.

This was expected to help the Conservatives, as southern England had traditionally been their stronghold. Instead, it merely reshuffled the deck chairs on a sinking ship. The Liberal Democrats swept through these new southern seats, turning expected Conservative advantages into losses.

A New Voting Requirement

For the first time in Great Britain, voters were required to show photo identification at polling stations. This change, implemented through the Elections Act 2022, brought Britain in line with Northern Ireland, which had required voter ID since 2003.

Critics argued the requirement would disproportionately affect poorer voters, who are less likely to have passports or driving licenses. Supporters said it would prevent fraud. Studies after the election found that hundreds of thousands of people were turned away from polling stations, though many returned with acceptable ID.

Whether this affected the outcome is unclear. Given the scale of Labour's victory, it probably didn't matter. But it marked a significant change in how British democracy operates.

Northern Ireland: A Historical First

One result that attracted less attention than it deserved: for the first time in the history of Northern Ireland, an Irish nationalist party won the most seats.

Sinn Féin, the party historically associated with the Irish republican movement and once linked to the Irish Republican Army, held seven of Northern Ireland's eighteen seats. The Democratic Unionist Party, which wants Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, dropped from eight seats to five.

This didn't mean Northern Ireland was about to reunify with the Republic of Ireland. But it reflected a slow demographic and political shift that has been decades in the making. The Protestant unionist majority that once seemed permanent is fading. A border poll on reunification, once unthinkable, has become a topic of serious political discussion.

The Meaning of July Fourth

There's something fitting about a British election held on American Independence Day. In 1776, the British lost their most important colony to a revolt against distant, unresponsive government. In 2024, the British themselves revolted—not with muskets, but with ballots—against a government that had come to seem equally distant and unresponsive.

The Conservatives didn't lose because of one scandal or one leader or one policy. They lost because fourteen years of governance had accumulated into exhaustion. The public had simply had enough. They weren't necessarily excited about what came next, but they were certain they wanted something different.

This is, perhaps, the most British form of revolution: not a storming of the barricades, but a quiet, orderly, slightly grumpy march to the polling station, followed by a return home for tea. The results were revolutionary all the same.

Keir Starmer now leads a government with a massive majority but fragile support. His party is popular mainly by comparison to the alternative. The voters who swept him into power could just as easily sweep him out if he fails to deliver. Britain had chosen change. What that change would actually mean remained, as the sun set on July 4th, 2024, entirely unclear.