Labour’s landslide
10 features of the 2024 general election and public opinion
Elections hold a mirror up to the nation’s outlook. As the father of psephology, Sir David Butler wrote in the 1950s, “electoral trends cannot be understood without reference to social trends.”
What does last Thursday’s general election reveal about public and political opinion in Britain? Here are 10 quick thoughts.
1. Voters want change
It’s an obvious thing to say. In June, Ipsos found 75% rating the Conservatives as having done a poor job in Government and a similar 78% believing ‘it’s time for a change at the next election’. A couple of weeks into the campaign a similar proportion (63%) believed that the policies in the Labour party manifesto would represent a positive change for Britain.
Distaste for the Conservatives was evident in Michael Thrasher’s analysis that 26 of its candidates lost their deposits by polling less than 5% and defeat for 12 Cabinet Ministers.
The Guardian reported that, before 2024, Brent North’s 19% Conservative-to-Labour swing was the largest such shift in post-war voting history; last week, this was bettered by 46 constituencies.
The Conservatives were condemned to the party’s worst ever share of the vote, a measly 24% across Britain, accompanied by its worst result in terms of seats.
2. There was a decisive movement away from the Conservatives where it mattered
Back in 2019, Boris Johnson admitted that voters in ‘Red Wall’ areas had lent his party their vote ‘to get Brexit done’. The implication was this was a soft base. At some point, lenders invariably ask for what’s theirs to be returned, especially if there is no reason to continue lending it (“we did not do enough” said Liz Truss). And so they did.
Ipsos’ penultimate poll showed the Conservatives retaining only two fifths of their 2019 voters. A quarter (26%) had switched to Reform, and a similar proportion moved to Labour (12%) or were undecided (10%) even at that late stage.
Even more damaging, the Conservative vote collapsed to a greater degree in seats it was defending. This came despite a defensive, ‘80/20’ strategy. The FT built up a picture of the places where the prime minister expected the election to be decided, and suggested this anticipated potential losses running into triple figures.
3. Voters penalised incumbency across the board
This was a valence election. Competence loomed large, evident not just in the Conservatives’ poor showing across Britain, but also the hammering taken by the SNP in Scotland, and, to a lesser degree, the slip in Labour’s vote share in Wales. Holding the reigns of power created disadvantage.
Ipsos recorded record low levels of dissatisfaction with the Sunak Government across Britain. There was also a double incumbency penalty in pivotal Scotland where ratings of Sunak were even lower than they were for Boris Johnson in advance of the 2019 election. The SNP’s standings had deteriorated too (although we shouldn’t confuse this with a significant change in attitudes towards independence).
4. The fundamentals underpinning populism still exist
‘Backlog Britain’, continued strikes during 2023, media stories about crumbling concrete, sewage discharges, and the ubiquity of potholes added to the feeling of an embattled, struggling kind of place. The sentiment of Britain being ‘broken’, identified in 2022 by media as diverse as The Telegraph and the New Statesman, is firmly embedded in our psyche.
This is not a uniquely British phenomenon (witness what has happened in France) but is felt keenly here. In 2022, Ipsos found that Britain was the only country surveyed of 28 where the overall ‘broken system sentiment’ was growing.
During the election, new research was published which showed public trust and confidence in government and politicians had fallen to a record low. The report cited a long list of causes — Brexit, Partygate, and struggling public services — a potent cocktail of failures in delivery and in conduct.
Enter Reform, stage right. The party quickly garnered national support, prompting talk of a ‘crossover’ and overtaking the Conservatives. While their success shouldn’t be over-stated — as Sundar Katwala has pointed out, except for its tally of seats, its performance is not dissimilar to UKIP’s in 2015 — it is remarkable nonetheless.
UKIP’s gains prompted the EU referendum. What comes next in response to Reform looks likely to exercise Conservative party minds for a while.
5. The electorate is volatile
An anti-politics sentiment feeds a volatility which has been decades in the making as tribal loyalties have weakened. At the last election, Professor Ed Fieldhouse concluded that most of the electorate were swing voters, compared to an eighth in the 1960s, a fifth in the 1980s.
To adapt Boris Johnson’s lament on leaving office that “when the herd moves, it moves”, the herd had already decided to move and during the 2024 election campaign it found several new directions to go in. Ipsos found evidence of higher than normal levels of tactical voting.
The new Parliament will have more Lib Dems, more Greens, and more independent MPs than ever before, joined by four Reform MPs including Farage himself. All this despite an electoral system which tends to punish all but the established parties (more on that later).
There are also more marginals. Journalist Tom Calver has pointed to the co-existence of a Labour landslide and “bonkers, marginal Britain”; constituency seats are tighter than at any point since 1945.
Labour’s mandate might be wide — including seats like Dorking, Bury St. Edmonds and Mid Sussex (now out of Tory hands for the first time since 1885) — but not especially deep. My favourite tweet of election night came from Philip Cowley, “It’s a landslide made of the same stuff as the Ming vase”.
Other people called it the “loveless landslide” and turnout was a near-record low despite this being a ‘consequential, ‘change’ election.
6. The die was cast…
While 2022 was frenetic, particularly in Westminster where Liz Truss’ Deputy had to reassure the House of Commons that the country’s leader was not “hiding under a desk”, 2023 was more sedate in terms of political, economic, and social outlooks — the year ending pretty much as it started. This made for bad news for the Conservatives; things didn’t improve, they stayed bad.
The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch has shown that by the point when Boris Johnson resigned, the Conservatives were on course to win 211 seats, the fifth heaviest defeat in their history. Partygate and the mini-Budget were their ‘Black Wednesday’ moments.
A short while before John Major’s Government appeared to have lost control of events that Wednesday in 1992, voters believed there had been a change of government (metaphorically speaking) following Margaret Thatcher’s departure, not just a change of Prime Minister. They went on believing this until the general election in April, giving Major’s Conservatives a surprise win. At no point did this fresh start materialise for Rishi Sunak.
7. …but the campaign mattered
In Snap polls 2, I recounted Christopher Wlezien’s analysis of polling across the world that, “the electoral cake is substantially baked well before the voters go to the polls”.
The campaign didn’t change the dial in terms of vote share, at least not initially. There were several missteps, especially on the part of the Conservatives. Other than a kerfuffle about Dianne Abbot’s candidate and some clumsy comments about Bangladeshis, Labour didn’t drop the vase. Their twenty point lead remained intact.
But Labour’s support did dip at the conclusion of a six-week campaign, and, more importantly, the entry of Nigel Farage into the fray as leader of Reform, undoubtedly gave many disgruntled voters the means they needed to kick the Tories.
8. People were spilt on the merits of a large Labour win
The media’s attention was caught by MRPs which, essentially, convert large sample national polls into seat projections. These showed eye-popping Labour landslides, even Canadian style “wipeout” for the Conservatives.
Conventional polls showed that two-thirds of people, 66%, expected Labour to form the next government. According to Ipsos, in mid-June 31% believed that a Labour majority of 151 to 200 seats or more would be a bad outcome for the country, but a slightly larger proportion, 36% said it would be good.
The Conservatives sought to use Labour’s commanding lead to raise fears of a ‘supermajority’ but to no avail. While supermajority does not translate well from America to Britain, its gist — the size of Labour’s victory — relative to its vote share and the peculiar outcomes of the first-past-the-post-system raises big questions. These are, though, likely to be quickly and long forgotten by Labour, maybe even if the Lib Dems.
9. Labour played its part too!
Keir Starmer took office with the lowest level of satisfaction of a Leader of the Opposition recorded by Ipsos, and a national vote share comparable to Jeremy Corbyn’s party. According to Professor John Curtice, the election result owed more to the Conservatives’ reputation for dishonesty and incompetence than positivity about Labour.
While that is hard to refute, the winning party was widely credited with running an efficient and effective campaign. It successfully presented itself as the ‘safe’, stable choice, evident in the Sunday Times’ endorsement of Labour:
“Since 2016 there have been 5 prime ministers, 7 chancellors, 7 foreign secretaries, 7 Home Secretaries and no fewer than 9 education secretaries… Lee Rowley is both the 10th and 13th person to have held the role of housing minister.”
Starmer led vital efforts during 2020–22 to change the workings, culture and image of the Labour party. It had been on a downward trajectory under Corbyn but by June was twice as liked as their main rivals (admittedly not a high bar). Ipsos found businesses most likely to find Labour as having the best policies to manage the economy, and to help people in work.
10. People want policy as well as personality
Ipsos’ Political Triangle asks voters to rank the extent to which leaders, the parties, or policies most attracted them to a party (survey participants are given 10 points to share between the 3). Its measure in June 2024 recorded the lowest figure given to the importance of leaders ahead of all elections going back to 1987.
This may reflect the less flamboyant nature of Sunak and Starmer compared to Johnson and Corbyn plus the importance to the public of purpose (values) and competence (delivery) already described.
What issues mattered? Ipsos has always found the NHS to be a top two issue but the issue had a lead this time rivalling that of 2015. The Conservatives won a majority back then but the long tail of austerity, the crisis of confidence in the NHS and other public services has become much more acute, particularly since the pandemic. Fixing these will be a key priority and necessary precondition of success for Labour.
But how? During the election campaign there was strong criticism from IFS leader Paul Johnson about a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about Britain’s fiscal predicament. Several independent onlookers were equally dismissive of the use of statistics about tax and spend during the campaign.
This is significant for three reasons. First, an Ipsos survey for Full Fact found four in ten people, 38%, reported having been put off voting by the level of false or misleading claims in current politics or the previous election campaign. Second, polls showed voters would trade off the status quo on tax for investment in the NHS, third, they expect Labour to put up taxes.
Missions possible?
New Prime Minister Keir Starmer talked to many of these themes in his first speech outside №10 Downing Street.
He set out an intention to put politics and government back in the service of people and end an era of ‘noisy performance’. And he sought to manage expectations; “this will take a while”.
How long it will take will be dependent on numerous factors, including the careful understanding and management of public opinion and lived experience. Even if Labour succeeds, will people notice and give it credit?
