Historic UK election hauls reveal bigger voter trends

Keir Starmer has won a historic victory. He has led the Labour party to the biggest single set of gains it has ever achieved in one night, and is in touching distance of Tony Blair’s 1997 seat haul. It is the first time since 1970 that a government with a working majority has been directly replaced by a different one with a working majority. (By 1997, John Major had lost his Commons majority.)

And it is the Conservative party’s biggest defeat since its foundation — a worse defeat than the ones suffered in 1945, 1997 or 1906.

But it is also a historic victory in another way. With a vote share that is about the same level as that of Blair’s in 2005, Starmer has managed to win a majority closer to that of the one Blair won in 1997. No British political party has ever won such a big majority with so few votes.

It is also an election with an awful lot going on under the surface. It saw huge and unprecedented Labour strides into deep Tory territory, coupled with Labour losses in some of the party’s safest seats. Labour oversaw an astonishing revival in one former heartland — in Scotland, someone waking up from a 14-year sleep would think that nothing had changed if they looked at these headline results — while falling sharply backwards in many of its inner city strongholds in England due to anger at its position on the Israel-Hamas war.

In many constituencies, Labour’s margin of victory over the Conservatives is less than the Reform party’s vote. Some thoughts on the underlying trends here.

The loser now, will be later to win

The headline story is that what we might think of as Britain’s “left bloc” has won sweeping victories. So far the Liberal Democrats have returned 71 MPs, their record highest since their merger with the SDP in 1988, and more than the Liberals’ best performance since the party split between supporters of HH Asquith and David Lloyd George. The Green party has won four seats, taking two from the Conservatives and one from within the “bloc” from Labour, also a record for that party. At the time of writing, Labour has won a victory that is not quite at the scale of their triumph in 1997, but is one of their biggest ever.

The UK’s “right bloc” has gone down to heavy defeat. Reform has won four constituencies, the best ever haul for a Nigel Farage-led party, and Farage himself has entered the Commons on the eighth time of asking. But so far the Conservatives have just 117. Whatever happens in the remaining constituencies, this is the party’s worst ever night.

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But it’s a little bit more complex than that. Firstly, the big difference here has been the willingness of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters to switch between the two to defeat Conservative MPs — which is why both parties have posted excellent seat hauls with vote shares that are very far from either of their best ever historical performances.

Parties of the right have fractured, which is part of why Reform has won just four seats and why the Tory party has suffered such heavy losses.

The big picture story here is that British voters have become much more volatile and much more willing to shop around. That trend has two parents. The first is the financial crisis, which did so much damage to the UK’s economy. As far as our sluggish productivity and low growth is concerned, we have not yet recovered from it. A big part of why elections since 2008 have seen such big swings is that British voters are simply very cranky about the condition of the UK, not unreasonably.

The second is the Liberal Democrats’ entry into coalition, which shocked voters’ perceptions and injected much greater volatility into elections. Now that volatility has handed Labour a huge majority, one that gives it all the power it could wish for to tackle the UK’s weak growth, stalled productivity and ailing public services.

But that volatility also means that if Labour doesn’t satisfy its manifesto pledges, it could find itself just as easily on the wrong side of a defeat as large and devastating as the one it inflicted on the Tories in just four years. Keir Starmer will have no guarantee that the politician dealing the blow won’t be Farage.

Now try this

I grew up in the kind of household where Radio 4 was always on, so I always get a huge thrill whenever I appear on it. It was a real privilege to be able to see in a new government for much of its overnight programme.

As Rishi Sunak said, it is a precious thing that we got to do yesterday: a peaceful transfer of power without violence in a free and fair election. It’s something, as Jeremy Hunt said, that people are fighting and dying for right now.

However you feel about these results, the most important thing about them is that we get another go: that is a certainty that very few people have about their elections at the moment. I’m off to have a very long sleep — we’ll be back for a special edition on Sunday.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.

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