General Election 2024: Match Report

The media has been very busy since the results of the General Election started coming through, variously describing the outcome as a pivotal moment in British politics. I suspect, like me, you are a little tired of the wall-to-wall coverage, but I thought that I should sign off on this extraordinary election by highlighting some of the facts and stats you may not have seen and end by drawing a few conclusions.

This was the 24th General Election since Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald contested the 1929 version in which, interestingly, Baldwin won 260 seats with 8.7 million votes, and MacDonald won 287 seats with 8.4 million votes. The turnout was 76.3%, and the UK, at the time, had an electorate numbering just under 28.5 million. UK General Elections have been throwing up oddities ever since, in part due to our first past the post system, and the latest may appear to some to be one of the most odd.

First to the outcome. On Thursday, Sir Kier Starmer's Labour Party won 411 seats, the third highest number of seats won by any Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald and only surpassed on two occasions by Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001. The 60% turnout was the second lowest of these 25 elections since 1929, with the 2001 election recording the lowest at 59.4%.

The Labour Party secured 9.7 million votes in this election out of an electorate of 48 million voters. This is 600,000 fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn won in 2019 when Labour won 202 seats, and 3.2 million fewer than he secured in the 2017 election when Labour won 262 seats.

The other stand-out statistics I thought from the election, aside from the collapse in the Tory vote and the number of seats the party won, respectively, 6.8 million and 119 (down from 14 million and 365 seats in 2019), was the 4.0 million votes cast for Reform and the 3.5 million for the Lib Dems. Interestingly, Reform won 5 seats, and the Lib Dems had their best seat outcome of these 25 elections spanning nearly 100 years of parliamentary history, winning 71 seats despite their vote falling by 200,000 from the 2019 election in which they only won 11 seats.

Clearly, this was no "normal" General Election, and through a combination of a very low turnout and the arrival of a new political party which polled a 14% share of the vote, some extraordinary results were thrown up in terms of seats won and lost.

I am no political analyst, but I am interested in the numbers. My guess is that far from a seismic shift in the political preferences of the UK electorate, what this election signifies, going forward, is a much more volatile relationship between votes and seats won and lost. This should make for a very interesting General Election in 2029 when the UK electorate must once again decide who will govern them. In the meantime, as politics occupies a little less of our everyday thoughts, I expect we may start to enjoy yet more good news on the economy and the interesting spectacle of the Bank of England, the MPC, the OBR, and countless other economic commentators trying to explain why their pessimistic forecasts were so wrong. I, for one, will find this quite entertaining!