2024 UK GENERAL ELECTION - RESULT

The United Kingdom 2024 General election was held on the 04 July.   All 650 seats were contested under new boundaries that tried to equalise the size of the voter-base in each seat as well as balance population changes across the 4 Home Nations and to make them more 'marginal' and more representative socio-economically, creating more marginal constituencies.  It is now difficult to win a seat and easy to lose it where as previously it has for the most part always been the other way around..

It was clear from the results and the poor turn-out that although the public were clearly very very annoyed at the Tories and their lack of delivery, they were not particularly keen on Labour either.  In England & Wales especially, the presence of the 'wild card' of Reform UK heavily influenced the results, costing the Tories over 100 seats that switched from Tory to Labour, in which a Reform UK candidate also stood.  In Scotland the on-going damage done to the SNP by the Sturgeon scandal was all too clear. 

What is strikingly clear from the data is that there is no great appetite for Labour or for Starmer.   He is the most unpopular Prime Minister to win a General Election and enter No 10 on record with a -21 rating.   He has taken fewer votes than his predecessor (Corbyn) lost with in 2019 & 2017, and really owes his victory to three things - Nigel Farage of Reform UK who has gutted the Tory vote, a sharp fall in turn-out (down 7% on 2019) and the vagueries of the UK's 'First-Past-The-Post' constituency voting system which produces strong governments at the expense of representation.  Even Starmer's vote in his own seat was 17% down on 2019.

So far, socio-economic breakdown is that more working class voters (C1 and the lower part of C2 - 'Them as get their 'ands dirty') voted Tory or Reform UK than voted Labour and this has been common over the last few elections and shows how the ideologies of both Tory and Labour are out of step with a large part of what should be their own core vote.

The Tories have been hollowed-out by Reform UK. In fact if it hadn't been for Reform UK they would probably have won the election or at least forced a hung Parliament as most of the seats that went from Tory to Labour/Lib Dem, where there was also a Reform UK candidate, the Tory/Reform combined vote was bigger than the Labour or Lib Dem vote.  This is the case in well over 100 seats.  Analysis by former Labour adviser and Labour blogger Alex Hilton shows the Tories would need just a 2% swing in 2029 to return to power if they can pull off a pact with Farage over the next five years.     If Reform and the Conservatives actually teamed up and stood aside for each other, Labour would need a further 7% swing to just about scrape a majority of one.  Bearing in mind Reform UK built their election machine in the last 4 weeks of the election campaign, with no activists in most of the country, very little money in the bank and barely any staff, they illustrate how disenchanted large parts of the electorate are. 

The key to this next Parliament and the next election is the Reform UK vote (also known as the 'Blue Collar Insurgency').  These are the people that delivered the Leave vote in 2016,  put Johnson into power in 2019 sinking Labour in the process and have now sunk the Tories and put Farage into Parliament.  They are belligerent and couldn't care less what either of the two parties have to say about most things. Both Labour and the Tories will probably now devote a large part of their political strategy for the next few years in trying to win over the insurgency (which will require moving towards their position on immigration, defence etc etc) while at the same time stopping the other side winning them over.  Simultaneously they will not be spending as much time actually running the shop because of the distraction.  In Reform UK's case, they will undoubtedly 're-programme' and now become a  specialist by-election Party, picking off seats in the north of England, the English Midlands and Welsh valleys as they become vacant, that fit a certain profile - historically Labour, high percentage of Leave voters, low Tory presence.  Expect them to take a few more seats over the next few years provided they don't implode.

What is clear is the Brexit vote combined with the impact of Covid and the inflationary effects of the early part of the Ukraine war are still rippling through the electorate.   The voters are no longer prepared to give politicians a chance - or indeed even give them a break.  They are not interested anymore in what politicians try to do - regarding trying and failing as just failure and they now demand and expect 'delivery'.  If you say you will do it,  you either do exactly that no matter what happens along the way (wars, Courts, Covid etc) or they will turn on you with a vengeance.  This may well be the reason Starmer has been very very careful to promise or offer very little in his election campaign and what he has promised has been deliberately vague and light on detail.

Starmer probably now plans to delay the summer recess by at least a month in order to punch through several Acts straight away (it is customary for new governments to hit the ground running.  It gets progressively harder to do things the longer you are in Office).  His big problem is his promises (few that there are).  The money simply is not there.   And he is very quickly either going to have to raise secondary taxes considerably (car tax, fuel duty, alcohol duty, IHT, CGT, TV licence etc etc) - and very very quickly, possibly introduce a new 'super level' of VAT on luxury items such as new cars, possibly even tinker with VAT thresholds on small businesses a slightly and lower them, or massively scale-back on what little he has promised.     To meet his first year's promises he needs to increase the total tax take by tens of billions or increase GDP by 4% during the next 6 months - which is nigh on impossible - and although we are the fastest growing major  western economy it is very fragile and squeezing extra tax could kill that recovery and spark a recession. 

The new Labour government will now enter a period known as a 'loveless honeymoon' - they aren't there because the voters wanted them, they are there because the voters looked the other way or looked elsewhere (Reform UK Green etc) and they sneaked in on the rails. It will be an 'adrenaline-free' first few years and a case of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'.

Labour's big difficulty is going to be the same as the Tories was - immigration.    Labour don't seem to grasp that the majority of the electorate do not want the boat people processing faster (ie granting right to remain) - they want them throwing out and bollocks to what the ECHR says or what state their original countries are in.

And finally,  Labour have won with 33% of a 60% turn-out.   That means 80% of the registered electorate either did not vote for them, or did not vote at all.  In fact more registered voters did not vote than voted for them.  And that is something he is going to be very very aware of every day of his tenure. It was best described in the media as a 'miles wide majority, that is only inches deep'.    And as Boris Johnson can attest,  when you have a large majority, you face continued back-bench rebellions.

THE NEW 2024 HOUSE OF COMMONS

THE INDIVIDUALHOME NATIONS

Across the Home Nations, bear in mind the number of seats in each of the three mainland nations has changed to reflect population shift and therefore, for comparison purposes, the shift in seats from 2019 to now is adjusted using the 2024 constituency template.  The results were:-

ENGLAND (543 seats, up 10 from 2019)

SCOTLAND (57 seats, down 2 from 2019)

WALES (32 seats, down 8 from 2019)

N IRELAND (18 seats, no change from 2019)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

YOUR NEW GOVERNMENT
(this is the 'Top Table)

(the people that actually make things happen and control the important stuff)

Rt Hon sir Keir Starmer KC KCB MP
Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom
First Lord Of The Treasury
Minister For The Civil Service
Minister For The Union

Rt Hon Angela Rayner MP
Deputy Prime Minister
Secretary of State For Housing, Communities & Local Government

Rt Hon Rachel Reeves MP
Chancellor Of The Exchequer

Second Lord Of The Treasury

Hon Wes Streeting MP
Secretary Of State For Health & Social Care

Hon Liz Kendall MP
Secretary Of State For Work  & Pensions

Rt Hon John Healey MP
Secretary Of State For Defence

Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP

Secretary Of State For The Home Department

Rt Hon David Lammy MP FRSA

Secretary Of State For Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs

Hon Peter Kyle MP
Secretary Of State For Science, Innovation & Technology

Hon Shabana Mahmood MP
Secretary Of State For Justice
Lord Chancellor

Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP
Secretary Of State For Business & Trade
President Of The Board Of Trade

Hon Louise Haigh MP
Secretary Of State For Transport

Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP
Secretary Of State For Energy Security & Net Zero

Hon Lisa Nandy MP
Secretary Of State For Culture, Media & Sport

Hon Ian Murray MP
Secretary Of State For Scotland

Hon Jo Stevens MP
Secretary Of State For Wales

Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP
Secretary Of State For Northern Ireland

Hon Anneliese Dodds MP
MInister Of State For Development

Rt Hon Pat McFadden MP
Chancellor Of The Duchy Of Lancaster

Hon Darren Jones MP
Chief Secretary To The Treasury

Hon Lucy Powell MP
Leader Of The House Of Commons
Lord President Of The Council

Rt Hon The Baroness Angela Smith PC
Leader Of The House of Lords
Lord Keeper Of The Privy Seal

Rt Hon sir Alan Campbell MP
Chief Whip Of The House Of Commons
Parliamentary Secretary To The Treasury

Mr Richard Hermer KC
Attorney General For England & Wales
Advocate General For Northern Ireland

Rt Hon Mr Simon Case CVO
Cabinet Secretary
Head Of The Home Civil Service
(This is THE main man.  Not the politicians.)
(This is the real 'sir Humphrey')

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~