General Election briefing 

 

The IPG’s academic and policy correspondent Richard Fisher explores the 2024 General Election campaign and what might happen on and after 4 July

I should start with a confession. I love General Elections. Always have, always will. Going back half a century to Ted Heath’s ‘Who Governs Britain?’ election of February 1974—to which the public answer was famously ‘Not you, mate!’—I have been fascinated by campaigns, polling and constituency results, with ‘Election Night’ the unquestioned TV highlight of any quinquennium. I have been involved in numerous constituency campaigns, going right back to 1979. In every single one I have supported and worked for a losing candidate.

So when Rishi Sunak was standing in the rain of Downing Street and announced a General Election for 4 July 2024, my reaction was not that of Brenda from Bristol, but rather ‘whoopee! May the fun start here!’ An unusually enthusiastic perspective, I know, but one that will I hope feed into this, the IPG Election briefing, in which we provide members with enough historical and political context to make sense of what is going on, and what given electoral outcomes might mean.

1. The battleground

650 seats will be up for election on 4 July, following the first significant changes to constituency boundaries since the 2010 election. Wales will lose eight seats (down from 40 to 32), Scotland will lose two seats (down from 59 to 57), Northern Ireland will remain the same at 18, and England will gain ten seats (up from 533 to 543). England’s ‘new’ seats are primarily in the areas of demographic expansion in the south and east. At one time it was thought that this redistribution would be significantly to the advantage of the Conservative party, and on balance it probably still will be, but ironically one consequence of the new voter coalition assembled by Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019 is that the impacts of this redistribution may be rather less than originally mooted. 

2. The state of the parties at the dissolution

In 2019 the Tories gained 48 seats and with 365 MPs in total secured a very healthy parliamentary majority of 80. However, a sequence of by-election defeats, resignations, suspensions and defections had reduced the Tories to 344 MPs at the dissolution of parliament, with the effective majority down to 38. Labour had 205 MPs, the SNP 43, the Liberal Democrats 15, and other parties 42, plus the Speaker of the House of Commons. The target for all parties with aspirations to govern is 326 seats, although in practice rather more will be required to govern effectively.

One remarkable aspect to this current General Election is that all of the major parties have replaced their leaders at least once since the 2019 campaign—the first time in modern political history that the electorate will have, effectively, a clean slate of party leaders about which to form an opinion. Indeed the respective fates of Messrs Johnson, Corbyn and Mmes Sturgeon and Swinson provide their own cautionary tales about the transient nature of political celebrity in the 21st century.

3. The political context

IPG members will not need reminding of the political chaos of ‘the Brexit years’, stemming from the fateful decision of the Cameron government to call in 2016 an advisory referendum on membership of the European Union, a government incidentally elected with the support of less than one quarter (24.4%) of the electorate (on which more below). The General Elections of 2017 and (especially) 2019 were utterly dominated by the issue of Brexit, with voter groups seemingly rearranged around a new binary of ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’; in a manner not seen since Home Rule and its Unionist counterpoint transformed the politics of the closing decades of the 19th century.

The evidence of 2024 suggests (thus far, anyway) that this realignment may turn out to be rather short-lived. It’s certainly true that the massive and still crucial issue of Brexit has been the subject of a conspiracy of silence from both Conservative and Labour politicians alike. What is hard now to recall is how utterly dominant the Conservatives and Boris Johnson seemed to be on the morning after the Hartlepool By-Election of May 2021, although even then there were some signs in the local council elections held the same day that the ‘new’ Tory voter coalition was beginning to fray. As I write, at the midpoint of the 2024 campaign, the Tory party is fighting for its life and—astonishingly—to remain the principal opposition force at Westminster.

It also seems to be increasingly the case that the election of 2017, in which the two big established parties secured 82.3% of the votes cast, was an outlier and that the gradual fragmentation of party loyalties and voter behaviour which has been such a feature of British electoral politics since the 1970s is continuing—if anything with renewed energy. 

4. Candidates in the 2024 General Election

One very significant feature of the British electoral scene nowadays is the proliferation of constituency candidates. October will mark the 50th anniversary of the last time any British constituency witnessed what used to be called a ‘Straight Fight’ between two parties only, something which throughout the 1950s was the norm, rather than the exception. On 4 July the Conservatives will field 635 candidates, Labour 631, the Liberal Democrats 630, Reform 609 and Green 574. With 57 candidates the SNP will be fighting every seat in Scotland, and with 32 candidates Plaid Cymru will be fighting every seat in Wales. The vast majority of voters will, therefore, have at least five candidates from which to choose, with overall a record 4,515 persons putting themselves forward for election.

One rather basic reason for this proliferation is that the sum required to stand (the ‘deposit’) has remained at £500 for nearly 40 years, to be returned if a candidate secures more than 5% of the votes cast. It’s important to remember that from 1918 to 1985 the deposit sum required was £150, an amount which in 1918 would have bought you a small, terraced house: in addition a more demanding vote-share of one-eighth (12.5%) was required to secure its return. 

There were thus real financial barriers to standing in elections, which gave rise to one of my favourite pieces of election trivia: in the General Election of 1950, the Liberal Party fielded 475 candidates, by far its largest representation in decades. Unfortunately for the supporters of Clement Davies and his colleagues, 310 of these candidates lost their deposits, as the rules then stood: however, as the Liberal Party had been well aware of the fragility of its electoral position, the party had taken out insurance with Lloyds of London against precisely such an outcome, and thus emerged from the 1950 election financially, if not politically, rather healthy.

5. The campaign

The cycle of manifesto launches for all of the major campaign participants is now complete. These documents have increased in size for all parties—very probably in direct correlation with their generally declining readerships. What has been unusual about the 2024 campaign thus far is how positional it has been, with nothing yet to challenge a narrative that Labour is on course to form the next government, and much media discussion wondering what that means—not least for a Conservative party seemingly heading for a quite disastrous outcome, drawing comparisons with the 1993 Canadian General Election, when the governing Conservative party was reduced to a parliamentary representation of precisely two.

There seems now general acceptance that calling an Election for July was a mistake by Rishi Sunak, not least because this timing has signally not cancelled out the threat on the right flank of the Conservative party posed by Nigel Farage and his Reform party. Had Sunak waited a few more weeks, so the rumours go, Farage would have signed a lucrative contract with Fox News to cover the US election and would have been unable to participate in the UK campaign to anything like the same extent. Sunak’s subsequent absence from parts of the D-Day commemoration was likewise a spectacular own goal.

Inevitably, therefore, much of the commentary on the Election has centred around what might happen afterwards, with relatively little extended scrutiny of what the individual parties are proposing, at least thus far. It is, as Robert Peston of ITV has indicated, very much in Labour’s interests that there is almost zero policy scrutiny of the Reform party, given the tactical advantages to Labour of a strong Reform vote in Conservative-held seats. At the same time most prominent Tories have likewise shied away from any attacks on Reform, conscious that Tory members, if not all Tory voters, generally harbour Reform-ish sympathies and to go for Mr Farage might alienate supporters in any Tory leadership contest subsequent to the Election. David Cameron’s has been an unusual, critical voice in this context.

So there is a very odd hole in the heart of the campaign. Both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have struggled for national exposure, although Sir Ed Davey’s various escapades, and his very unusual and effective ‘Care’ party political, have secured some media attention, and a modest but thus far sustained uptick in his party’s fortunes. The various debates and media leadership events have not dominated in anything like the same way that they did in 2010—the first election in which TV leaders’ debates were arranged—and that seems unlikely to change in the second half of the campaign.

6. Polls and electioneering

One recent YouGov poll gave Reform a single-point advantage over the Conservatives in the battle for second place. For hard-pressed broadcasters desperate for something interesting to talk about, this was manna from heaven, and prompted Nigel Farage to describe himself as the new Leader of the Opposition. This poll is nonetheless very much an outlier, in an overall polling context which when averaged out looks like more like this (as of close of play on 14 June; changes in brackets are since the start of the campaign and with the 2019 General Election):

  • Labour: 41.7% (-3.0 / +8.7) 
  • Conservative: 21.2% (-2.3 / -23.5) 
  • Reform: 14.9% (+2.9 / +12.8) 
  • Lib Dem: 10.7% (+1.4 / -1.1) 
  • Green: 6.1% (±0.0 / +3.3) 

Why the polling discrepancies? The answer is methodological, and stems in part from how particular questions are posed, and in part from how the large number of ‘Don’t Know’ voters—in whom the Tories, in particular, place great faith—are treated. Different pollsters calculate the latter in different ways, and in general a higher Tory vote-share will suggest a greater proportion of Don’t Knows being allotted to the Tory pile. From 1992 to 2015 the Tory vote-share was consistently under-estimated by all pollsters with (as in 2015) some very important consequences, but we are assured that things are better and more accurate now. Only time will tell.

What is unquestionably true is that some parties, including (very unusually) the Tories, are fighting this election with very serious financial constraints upon their activities. All political parties are a fraction of their former selves in terms of mass memberships, and in recent years the Tories in particular have taken to buying in campaign services like mail delivery, but this time round they simply can’t afford to do so. Reform, likewise, have very little activist infrastructure to work upon, which is one reason why personally I am at the more sceptical end in projecting the former’s likely electoral performance, especially in terms of seats won—which conceivably could be zero, including Farage’s chosen seat of Clacton. The single most important aspect of fighting and winning marginal elections is what is called Get Out The Vote (or GOTV, to the trade), and this is impossible if, like Reform, you have little idea of who is going to vote for you in the first place. Conversely the Liberal Democrats can be extremely good at this aspect of the electoral ground game.

7. The media and social media election

Stephen Bush of the Financial Times has described the 2024 campaign as ‘the first post-TV election’, in that the audience for ‘legacy terrestrial elections’ has now fallen so sharply that social media exposure via TikTok and other platforms and small gobbets of political information are now much more important to most voters than extended television news coverage, and certainly to voters under the age of 40. That said, the single most important source for election news remains the BBC news app, and election ‘pushes’ thereon, which reach several million people within seconds.

IPG members will know, because our friend Amol Rajan has told us so at our Conferences, that the average age of those watching national news bulletins whether at 6pm or 10pm is now approaching 60. The BBC and ITV regional news programmes which go out around the 6pm news bulletins remain the most-watched news programmes of all, but again attract a demographic firmly at the upper end of the age spectrum and much more likely and importantly, therefore, to be thinking of voting Conservative or Reform. Even with all sorts of Ofcom regulations about ‘balance’ in place, this basic fact of audience is bound to impact on coverage, and is one fundamental reason why Reform and Farage tend to garner rather more legacy attention than, say, the Green Party.

Local vox pops and ‘ordinary voter interviews’ are, I think, particularly dreadful and unbalanced in this respect. A trip to a market or town square in the middle of the day ‘to gauge public opinion’ will do no such thing, leading to over-representation of the non-working population and the self-employed and massive under-representation of (inter alia) the millions of voters who work in the public sector.

The other critical and related point is that both BBC and ITV would much rather be covering a 1950s or 2017-style binary election with an effective choice—at least in England—of two parties, rather than the highly fragmented multi-party contest that is the 2024 General Election. Broadcasters love the US Presidential contest for precisely this reason: it is so much easier, and cheaper, to cover a contest between two parties, the leader of one of which will become Prime Minister, than to do justice to 650 multi-candidate constituencies in which a variety of outcomes are possible, and in which at least seven parties have a legitimate claim to a national say.

The final point to stress here is that traditional print newspapers are likewise of declining importance in British election campaigns. What has been very striking in recent days has been the lack of front-page coverage of election issues, notably by the Daily Mail. The signs seem to be that the Murdoch stable may come out for Starmer’s Labour, in a rather lukewarm way, leaving perhaps the Express and the Telegraph as the last real Tory cheerleaders, although even at the Telegraph columnists are now flirting with Reform. This lack of warmth is reciprocated by the Tory party itself, with some Tory-supporting analysts holding the Tory press in significant part responsible for the deep hole in which the party now finds itself.

8. What might happen, and the strangeness of first past the post 

This is the interesting bit, especially this time. That the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system we use produces unbalanced and unrepresentative parliaments is hardly a novel observation: electoral reform has been a Liberal policy plank for well over a century and was also one for the Labour party for much of its early existence. What is new this time is the growing perception on the right of British politics that, having benefitted greatly from the workings of FPTP for so long—particularly during the leadership of Margaret Thatcher)—our electoral system just might be about to destroy the Conservative party.

This is because, in FPTP systems where more than two parties are competitive, what matters is not just how many votes your candidate gets but how the votes of your opponents are split. This can be well illustrated with one specific historical comparison. In the 1987 General Election, Thatcher’s Tory party secured 42.2% of the vote and won 376 seats, enough for a majority of 102. In the 2017 Election, the Theresa May’s Tory party secured 42.3% of the vote (putting on an additional 5.5% from 2015), but only won 317 seats, thus losing the Westminster majority. The massive difference between the two was that in 1987 the non-Tory votes were split between Labour (30.8%) and the Liberal / SDP Alliance (22.6%), enabling the Tories to cruise through the middle, whereas in 2017 the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn put on an additional 9.6% of votes cast—a post-war record—and secured 40% overall, concentrating opposition votes far more effectively than in 1987 and presenting a far more formidable proposition in electoral terms.

There is one part of the UK where we have already seen what can happen under FPTP systems to major political parties whose vote-share fails to reach a certain level. It is often said that during the New Labour years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Scotland was a ‘Tory-free zone’ and in terms of Westminster representation that was moreorless true. But in fact in 1997 the Tories still received 17.5% of the votes cast in Scotland, for their return of zero MPs. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, secured only 13% of the votes but returned ten Scottish MPs, making them the second Scottish party at Westminster—a position they retained comfortably in terms of seats won until their annihilation in 2015.

The danger for Reform in this election is that they replicate the fate of the Scottish Tories, and secure (say) 15% of the vote, but a vote so evenly spread across England and Wales that they secure the bare minimum of seats—exactly as happened to UKIP in 2015, securing 12.6% of the vote but only one MP. The existential danger for the Conservatives is that at the 2024 General Election they replicate the Scottish Tories of 1997, secure less than (say) 25% of the vote and are reduced to a number of MPs measured in the tens, rather than in the hundreds. 

The Lib Dems, by contrast, could easily replicate their 1997 Scottish experience. Because of how their vote is concentrated, 15% would win them far more seats than 15% would for Reform. Indeed 15% of votes for the Lib Dems and (say) 22% of votes for the Tories could produce a truly exciting contest for second place, in terms of Westminster seats won, which is why some shrewd observers think the betting value is represented by a wager on Ed Davey to be next Leader of the Opposition; only 11-4 as I write, and shortening all the time. That is not a sentence I ever thought I would be writing.

Electoral effectiveness in this sense is a new trick for the Lib Dems, and in this spreadsheet you can see how effectively, or otherwise, the major parties have converted their votes cast into seats at every General Election since 1945. This Index of Vote Efficiency has no statistical validity other than of itself, but to election anoraks like me the trend line is very interesting indeed.

This leads on to my final point about this whole campaign. At 59%, levels of voter turnout in the 2001 General Election were the lowest for generations. Since 2001 voter engagement has happily recovered, and in 2019 stood at a more respectable 67.3%. Nonetheless, all current polling suggests a level of voter distrust and wariness of politicians of all stamps that can only indicate, I think, considerable levels of voter apathy on 4 July. I really hope to be proved wrong. In addition, the new restrictions on voting without photographic ID can only have a further suppressant effect on turnout, even if—and this has prompted a wry smile in some quarters—it now seems that this measure will impact on elderly Tory voters just as much as on progressive youth. This is a good place to remind you all of the absolute necessity of taking proper ID to the polling station on 4 July.

Conclusion

So that’s where I think we are, as of the middle of the campaign. I must apologise to IPG members in Northern Ireland for the lack of proper coverage of the rather different campaign being fought from Belfast, and to those IPG members hoping for an extended assessment of the impact of the various party proposals on publishing and the creative industries. That is not the purpose of these briefings, which, in best IPG tradition, are designed to help IPG members (and their families) understand the electoral and political dynamics at play, and what is going on in an election which, with postal votes sent, has now started.

Whatever your political persuasion, enjoy having a vote. It is absolutely not a universal privilege to have one.

Richard Fisher

IPG Academic and Policy Correspondent

https://twitter.com/Richard08156270