Labour won. More notably, the Conservatives lost.
Keir Starmer is our new prime minister, in a landslide victory just shy of the devastating defeat of the Conservatives in 1997 when Tony Blair rose to power. Yet I had more American friends reach out with excitement than I did British ones. Even my South African personal trainer paid attention to where the Conservative votes went, in a rare moment of intellectual seriousness before he seriously crushed me.
One reason for the lack of elation right after the victory is how predictable it was. Labour led in the polls by 20 percentage points when Rishi Sunak called the election, and Keir Starmer was already being asked the questions in Prime Ministers Question time. They delivered 411 seats[i], 63% of the MPs, and the country is a now wall of geographic red (the previous election saw Conservatives (blue) holding 15 times more landmass than Labour).
Yet notice all the orange.
General Election constituency map (by seat and by geography) (Electionmaps.uk)
The Liberal Democrats, a middle-of-the-road party which seems to steal votes from centrist Labourites and Conservatives depending on who has recently fallen out of favour, had just 8 MPs prior to the election. They picked up 63 new seats of the 251 banished Conservatives and 38 Scottish Nationals, more than a fifth of the seats lost.
Less visible are the cyan and green seats, Reform and Green parties respectively. While the Liberal Democrats won seats just about proportionally with its voter share (~12% of the vote and ~11% of the seats), Reform and the Greens seem to have done more to propel Labour to power than themselves.
Share of UK Vote vs seats in parliament, BBC
Reform, led by Nigel Farage the Brexiteer-in-Chief, is a far-right populist party, while Greens is a lefty environmentalist group. Even though they each picked up 14% and 7% of the popular vote respectively, they hold <1% of the parliamentary seats apiece.
This is partly due to the UK’s first-past-the-post system, where the winner in an electorate is the party with the largest vote share, not the party with the majority. If a Reform voter was previously Conservative (68% of them were), then their vote would now split a formerly Conservative seat, ceding it to the next largest vote share, in many cases Labour. Indeed, tallying Conservative and Reform combined hold 38% of the popular vote against Labour’s 34%.
Another contributor to the muted celebrations was light apathy towards the election. Voter turn-out was lower than normal at just shy of 60%, despite a fellow campaigner optimistically declaring a Labour victory “because when I woke up today the sun was shining, and I just knew it would be a great day for turn-out.” News about a Labour super-majority before the election surely didn’t help if you thought the Labour win was a given. Joe Powell flipped the seat in my constituency, Kensington, with record votes for Labour despite 13.2% lower turn-out than the last election.
Even those who made the effort to go to the polls may not have voted constructively, eschewing the viable political candidates in protest. A friend of mine delightedly spoiled his ballot, while in my constituency, “Prince Ankit Love Emperor of India” garnered 65 votes. In 2017, these votes would have been enough to tip the scales of the successful candidate, who won by just 20.
Emperor of India Prince Ankit Love, Candidate for MP of Kensington in 2024 (Who I Can Vote For). Prince Ankit has run in 5 races since 2017, and this year was his largest ever number of votes.
I must say that I do not share the general malaise. I am excited about the prospect of a Labour government.
They have already abolished the Conservative policy of illegally deporting refugees to Rwanda, something I wrote about with outrage to the Economist over two years ago. Even though I think their plan needs work, they also have ambitious energy policy to achieve net zero carbon emissions at pace. Their leadership appointments are groundbreaking in that, for once, they have selected qualified and engaged people for their roles.
Here’s hoping they can put their huge majority to use and achieve their bold vision over the next 5 years.
[i] One seat remains to be declared as of time of writing