The 2024 United Kingdom Election – Did Tactical Voting Kick the Tories out?   

The United Kingdom (UK) election held on 4 July 2024 was clearly decisive in terms of the overall outcome of a change of government, with the ruling Conservative Party having its worst result ever at 24 percent of the vote and 121 seats. However, underneath this change were multiple shifts in vote patterns, magnified – or suppressed – in terms of seats by the electoral system. The opposition Labour Party had a huge lead in the opinion polls since late 2022.  But both Labour and the Conservatives would see their support drop during the actual campaign, and Labour only finished ten percent above the Conservatives in vote share, much less than what the polls were saying.

Crucially, though, Labour’s vote was highly efficient, as was intended, and thus it won a seat landslide of 411 seats (plus the Speaker) on only 34 percent of the vote, producing record disproportionality (distortion), as expected. Furthermore, the combined vote share of the two main parties, at 57.4 percent, was the lowest since Labour became the main opposition to the Conservatives in the 1920s. Voter turnout was also down since the last election, and so Labour only won some 21 percent of the electorate. Incumbent governments, not just nationally but also in Scotland, were heavily punished. One could conclude that the Conservatives lost more than Labour won, but Labour’s win still benefited from if not indeed required leader Keir Starmer’s moving Labour towards the political centre, its non-threatening campaign promises, and its specific promise not to go back into the European Union (EU).

In fact, the total lack of focus on Britain’s relationship with the EU made 2024 quite different from the three previous elections. In 2015, then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise of a referendum on British membership undercut the appeal of the then-United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). In 2017, after the narrow vote in favour of Brexit, ‘remainers’ voted heavily for the Labour Party in protest, denying then-Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May a majority let alone the increased majority she aimed for with a snap election. And in 2019, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson achieved a decisive victory with the slogan of “Get Brexit Done”, including winning many traditional Labour seats in the North of England (the “red wall”) that had voted for Brexit. Keeping together this more diverse voting coalition was always going to be a challenge.

Like Canada, the UK uses the single-member plurality electoral system, commonly known as ‘first-past-the-post’. In the UK there are now 650 seats in the House of Commons. However, the 18 seats in Northern Ireland are contested by an entirely different group of parties (of which Sinn Féin won the most seats, though it does not take them), so strictly speaking the focus was on the election for the 632 seats in Great Britain. There both the Conservatives under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Scottish National Party were clear losers in both seats and votes, whereas in differing ways Labour, the Liberal Democrats (with the biggest Liberal seat number since 1923), the populist Reform UK, and the Greens were all winners.

The Conservatives lost for many reasons: There was the natural desire for change after having been in office for 14 years, and “Change” was Labour’s slogan. The economy was sluggish, and the health system was underperforming. Nor did voters in the North of England see any “levelling up” as Boris Johnson promised back in 2019 (which would have involved the traditionally Tory South of England paying for much of that). Additionally, the Conservative image suffered from various scandals such as “Partygate” (parties held by Johnson during the Covid lockdown) and Conservative MPs betting on the election date and outcomes. Sunak’s enormous wealth hardly made him relatable to most voters, whereas Starmer could emphasize his working-class background.

In addition, Conservative credibility was strongly hurt by being on their fifth prime minister since the Brexit referendum, with Boris Johnson replaced by Liz Truss, whose very brief tenure involved an attempt at large unfunded tax cuts for the better off, and soon after becoming a subject of mockery. Truss was replaced by Rishi Sunak, who zigzagged in terms of policy. Sunak was heavily criticized within the party for calling the election when he did rather than in the autumn, as well as subsequent campaign mistakes. It seems Sunak went for a snap election to surprise his opponents, especially Reform UK, yet without having dealt successfully with the high number of migrants irregularly entering the UK Sunak’s right flank remained exposed.  Strikingly, although in the end Sunak easily kept his seat Truss lost hers, and the seats previously held by Cameron, May, and Johnson were all also lost by the Conservatives!

Perhaps the major game changing event during the campaign was Nigel Farage taking over the formal leadership of Reform UK. Its name of Reform was taken from the former Canadian Reform Party, with the similar goal of replacing the traditional Conservative Party with a harder, more populist version. Farage had long been active on the populist right and was a central proponent of Brexit via UKIP. Reform’s support went up during the campaign but fell back at the end given scrutiny of certain candidates. It finished with 14 percent of the vote, but only five seats given its geographic breadth of support (unlike Reform in Canada which was concentrated in the West).

In his victory speech, Keir Starmer said that Labour won “because we changed the party.”  Having become leader in 2020, he set out to purge ruthlessly the hard left. This included his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who was not allowed to run again for Labour (though Corbyn would win his seat as an independent). Labour pledged no tax rises, and supported Israel in the current Gaza conflict in contrast to what was seen as anti-Semitism under Corbyn. One consequence of this policy was Labour’s vote dropping in proportion to the Muslim share in constituencies. Five such seats with large Muslim populations were lost to independents (including Corbyn), and Starmer’s own margin of victory in his London seat was much less this time. Moreover, the Greens clearly ran to the left of Labour, winning a record four seats and tripling their vote. They were particularly successful with younger voters.

So where (and how) did Labour win? The only region where Labour’s vote was clearly up was Scotland, where the party leapt from third place (and only one seat) in 2019 to winning 37 of the 57 seats there (though many quite narrowly). The UK election was thus in part also a vote against the problems and scandals of the Scottish National Party, governing Scotland since 2007, and which itself went through three leaders in 2023-2024.  

In contrast, Labour’s vote in Wales (which it governs) was down slightly. In England, Labour’s overall vote changed little: though it took back the “red wall” this was more due to Conservative vote losses to Reform UK in those seats than to Labour gains. In Conservative-held seats in England, what clearly mattered was whether Labour was the main challenger to the Tories (in which case its vote did go up), or whether this was the Liberal Democrats. The latter party was finally past its legacy of being junior coalition partners to the Conservatives in 2010-2015, and in addition to social policies (especially health and personal care) stressed local issues such as sewage. Its new leader Ed Davey kept himself in the news by such campaign activities as paddle boarding and bungie jumping, and he came across positively to its target voters.  Conversely, the Liberal Democrats too did not talk about Europe, in contrast to 2019 when they ran on ‘cancelling Brexit’.

Overall, then, there was little difference between Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the centre-left (and Starmer and Davey were never together in a debate). This fed into a central aspect of the 2024 British election: the very high degree of tactical voting by opposition voters in Conservative-held seats (in Canada, anti-Conservative tactical voting has rarely been successful.)  For their part, the Liberal Democrats focussed overwhelmingly on seats where they came second to the Conservatives last time and won most of these. Labour helped by pulling its resources out of such seats. Indeed, Labour also ‘helped’ by not frightening moderate Conservative voters this time, who thus could abandon their party for the Liberal Democrats.  

In short, even if there was no explicit co-operation agreement between Labour and the Liberal Democrats there certainly seemed to be an implicit one, which allowed both parties to improve their seats-to-votes ratio (the Liberal Democrats seat share was almost that of its vote share, whereas the electoral system normally squeezes said party). In contrast on the right, the votes Reform UK took from the Conservatives caused most of their losses (specifically, in about 180 of the 251 seats lost by the Conservatives the combined Conservative / Reform UK vote was greater than that of the victorious candidate) but as noted produced few Reform MPs. That said, Reform UK set out to be Labour’s main opponent come the next election, and in 2024 it did place second to Labour in 89 seats.

Although the Conservatives, not Reform UK, will be the official opposition, the party by way of the upcoming Conservative leadership race will have to decide its response to Reform UK: eliminating or at least marginalizing it versus co-operating with or even merging with it. The latter option and its related focussing on social over economic issues though would abandon affluent centrist voters to the Liberal Democrats, and is demographically problematic given the ever-growing share of university graduates in the population – who increasingly are leaving big cities for more rural areas.

So, should we conclude that tactical voting cost the Conservatives the election? Not quite. In the absence of tactical voting Labour would still have won assuming a vote lead of 10 percent.  One useful indirect assessment here comes from an election model for the United Kingdom based around cyclical shifts (number of terms in office) and popularity of the prime minister, with no focus on voting intentions. As it happens, this model predicted for 2024 a Labour vote lead of nine percent – almost exactly the reality – but ‘only’ 381 seats for Labour and 186 for the Conservatives. We could thus say that tactical voting cost the Conservatives some 60 seats, yes quite a large number – but still under a quarter of their overall losses! Again, the division of the right-wing vote with no co-operation between the Conservatives and Reform UK is the bigger story in terms of the Conservative defeat.

Such a division, if it lasts, will presumably help keep Labour in power at least in the next election, assuming no change to the electoral system. Back in 2011 the United Kingdom did hold a referendum on replacing ‘first-past-the-post’ with the alternative vote (as used for example in the Australian House of Representatives) but this went down to defeat, with the Conservative Party against such a change. They may be regretting that now.  Interestingly, Reform UK continues to demand proportional representation, not the behaviour of a party that truly thinks it can win under a plurality electoral system.