UK General Election 2024: The Results & Aftermath

[JonathanH]

The Tories even gained Leicester East which is the seat with the highest Hindu population of all

That wouldn't have happened had Claudia Webbe and Keith Vaz not been involved.

 

[tommy2215]

That wouldn't have happened had Claudia Webbe and Keith Vaz not been involved.

Not true, I highly doubt many of those who voted for those two would've voted for Labour if they hadn't stood. And the Tory vote held up there a lot better than elsewhere.

 

[Falcon1200]

I don't know why you keep saying that the SNP should give up on independence; that's why it exists!

Yes, you are right, the SNP will never give up on independence, and I don't expect them to. What I would like, however, is for the SNP Scottish Government to stop endlessly blaming Westminster for everything wrong in Scotland, to stop wasting taxpayer's money pointlessly planning for something which is not going to happen, and to focus all their energy on running effectively those things for which they are responsible. I would hope that the chastening General Election result might have that effect, however I am not at all convinced that it will.

 

[Magdalia]

I have to confess that my interest in politics is much like my interest in cricket - totally statistics-based - so I apologise for being boring, but digging into the statistics really shows how different it is even to 1997.

No need for the apology, I agree that this election has been fascinating from a statistical perspective.

One other little fact I heard is that Starmer is our oldest new Prime Minister since Callaghan.

 

[jfollows]

Its also interesting that he has appointed in several people as Ministers of State, who aren't MPs, because of their expertise, although making them life peers to do so doesn't feel right to me

I understand what you’re saying, but I think the choice of Prisons Minister was a very good one. I used to read his (James Timpson) articles in The Times and he impressed me with what he said, he appears different from mediocre management stereotypes and already engaged with our prison system. The issues of our entire criminal justice system were hardly mentioned in campaigning, but something radical and significant needs to be done now. Locking people up and throwing away the key has been the approach and it doesn’t work, except for those people who thinks it’s appropriate, and I also hope the IPP scandal of locking people up for tens of years for relatively minor offences can be resolved - I’m referring to those convicted under the discredited regime and still in prison.

 

[Irascible]

Tangentially related to this, but nevertheless interesting - I believe that Sidmouth has no Conservative MP for the first time in 189 years. The abolished East Devon seat's predecessors, which were generally roughly aligned with the current Honiton and Sidmouth seat, had had at least one* Conservative MP since 1835. Sidmouth, I think, lies within those boundaries, although of course Honiton went orange as Tiverton and Honiton in the by-election a couple of years ago.

I haven't popped over to Sidmouth yet, but there is general amusement about that in the rest of the constituency... ofc I don't think Tiverton had had anything but a Tory for some time either ( 1923 apparently for Tiverton itself ) until we installed Mr Foord who's done very well for himself - even if everyone who voted Reform here had voted Tory he'd still have just got in anyway. The Honiton constituency which became part of Tiverton & Honiton was also Tory since it reformed in 1885.

Looking at the swathe of yellow in the south-west and the extremely close runs in the few Tory seats left, if the boundary reforms were an attempt at gerrymandering rather than the Electoral commission cleaning things up ( well done for going across a county border ) then it's gone as amusingly well for the blues as anything else they've tried in the last couple of years.

 

[telstarbox]

One little remarked aspect of the election is that the opinion polls just before the election appear to have been almost universally spectacularly wrong: Right through the campaign they were predicting a Labour lead over the Tories of around 20%. On the day it was 11%. That's a massive error, which has been largely hidden by the fact that, in part because of tactical voting, that much smaller Labour lead gave a landslide in terms of seats anyway. 11% vs 20% makes no difference to the fact that Labour are going to win.

But if Labour hadn't been so far ahead and the Tories so unpopular, a 9% error could have been enough to make the difference between a Labour Government and a Tory Government - for example it's the difference between Labour being 5% ahead and the Tories being 4% ahead. I think the polling companies need to do some soul-searching about what went so wrong in their figures.

Looks like the exit poll on the other hand was fairly accurate.

The last few polls showed Labour % falling but overall yes, still a significant error. They got the Tory and Lib Dem shares about right.

The election really was polled / projected to death, I saw several campaigns using Electoral Calculus and similar data to squeeze undecided voters.

An interesting outcome is that more of the seats are now marginal than in previous cycles.

 

[edwin_m]

Its also interesting that he has appointed in several people as Ministers of State, who aren't MPs, because of their expertise, although making them life peers to do so doesn't feel right to me

Many MPs have a background in law, which is probably appropriate considering that making laws is a big part of their job. I haven't seen a breakdown but I would expect of the others who are graduates, most probably studied "arts" subjects rather than sciences. And it's unlikely there will be specialists in particular fields such as prisons, so I agree with others above that it's creditable to bring in outsiders particularly to address specific problems and in roles that are junior and probably less political.

It's unfortunate that the only way to do this is to appoint them for life to the undemocratic House of Lords, but their expertise may have value there even when their ministerial role ends. Whatever is done about the Lords, there should still be some way of making this sort of appointment either in the replacement chamber or by some other means. In my view appointing political cronies or to return favours is much less palatable.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Not true, I highly doubt many of those who voted for those two would've voted for Labour if they hadn't stood.

Why not? They are both well-known ex-Labour MPs and in both cases the reason they departed Labour was because of personal conduct, nothing to do with policy differences. I would therefore have expected that almost all those voting for them would have been Labour supporters if Webbe/Vaz weren't standing.

And the Tory vote held up there a lot better than elsewhere.

That is true, and I can well believe that that large Hindu population there was a factor in the Tories winning that seat. But at the same time, the combined votes for Labour plus the two ex-Labour MPs standing as independents was well above the Tory vote share, so it seems very plausible that Labour would still have won if it wasn't for the additional candidates.

 

[telstarbox]

The last few polls showed Labour % falling but overall yes, still a significant error. They got the Tory and Lib Dem shares about right.

The election really was polled / projected to death, I saw several campaigns using Electoral Calculus and similar data to squeeze undecided voters.

An interesting outcome is that more of the seats are now marginal than in previous cycles.

PS in canvassing I met a lot of still undecided voters in the last week and even on polling day, and I guess it's easiest for those people to to stick with an incumbent. Not sure how the polling companies account for this.

 

[Snow1964]

Its amazing the sheer number of Tory seats Labour won which have never voted for them before, thinking especially of seats like Bury St Edmunds, South East Cornwall, Suffolk Coastal, Aldershot, Poole, Folkestone & Hythe, Ashford (Kent), South West Norfolk, Aylesbury etc. Also the huge swings from SNP to Labour in Scotland. I don't think any Labour supporter is going to get tired of watching the election coverage on repeat!

And that gives Labour a variation of the problem of Conservative on-off policies about Northern powerhouse.

Just look at the list you have given, many of them are in a ring roughly 80-110 miles from London, outer South East for want of better name. If Labour doesn't pander to these areas with some policies that actually deliver, rather than just talk and hot air, could easily go away from Labour at next election.

 

[The Ham]

I had an interesting thought yesterday, if the Tories end up splitting the party (and/or MP's defecting to Reform) if enough do it then we could even see the Lib Dems becoming the official opposition (not that I'm thinking it would actually happen, as when the numbers started to get close I'd hope that they'd be aware and decide to stay put).

 

[Bald Rick]

I had an interesting thought yesterday, if the Tories end up splitting the party (and/or MP's defecting to Reform) if enough do it then we could even see the Lib Dems becoming the official opposition (not that I'm thinking it would actually happen, as when the numbers started to get close I'd hope that they'd be aware and decide to stay put).

That’s one of the main reasons the party won’t split.

 

[Senex]

I had an interesting thought yesterday, if the Tories end up splitting the party (and/or MP's defecting to Reform) if enough do it then we could even see the Lib Dems becoming the official opposition (not that I'm thinking it would actually happen, as when the numbers started to get close I'd hope that they'd be aware and decide to stay put).

Is there any way the Tories can now avoid a split? Is there any hope that the centre-right to right coalition can now be put back together again after the way those on its right have behaved in recent years? But if the party splits whilst Labour keeps its centre-left to left coalition working reasonably comfortably, where does a strong parliamentary opposition come from?

 

[eoff]

Is anyone involved in the election betting fiasco still in parliament?

I had a quick look at the law (I'm not a lawyer so take the following with a pinch of salt.):

As far as criminality goes there is an offence of "cheating", but that is not defined in the Act so would need some case law to apply here.
There is no concept like insider trading applied to betting (despite discussions along these lines on television discussoins at the time).
The Gambling commission could void the bets if it could prove priior knowledge of the election date but that would just be a slap on the wrist for unfair betting.
There could be some investigation relating to not meeting standards befitting someone in public office.

 

[cactustwirly]

Is there any way the Tories can now avoid a split? Is there any hope that the centre-right to right coalition can now be put back together again after the way those on its right have behaved in recent years? But if the party splits whilst Labour keeps its centre-left to left coalition working reasonably comfortably, where does a strong parliamentary opposition come from?

I don't think there'll be a split, a few MPs might defect but not in significant numbers.

 

[Yew]

Is anyone involved in the election betting fiasco still in parliament?

I had a quick look at the law (I'm not a lawyer so take the following with a pinch of salt.):

As far as criminality goes there is an offence of "cheating", but that is not defined in the Act so would need some case law to apply here.
There is no concept like insider trading applied to betting (despite discussions along these lines on television discussoins at the time).
The Gambling commission could void the bets if it could prove priior knowledge of the election date but that would just be a slap on the wrist for unfair betting.
There could be some investigation relating to not meeting standards befitting someone in public office.

Am I the only one who has a hart time being sympathetic with the bookmakers, if they thought something was amiss, they could have declined to take on the bet?

 

[bspahh]

Is anyone involved in the election betting fiasco still in parliament?

I had a quick look at the law (I'm not a lawyer so take the following with a pinch of salt.):

As far as criminality goes there is an offence of "cheating", but that is not defined in the Act so would need some case law to apply here.
There is no concept like insider trading applied to betting (despite discussions along these lines on television discussoins at the time).
The Gambling commission could void the bets if it could prove priior knowledge of the election date but that would just be a slap on the wrist for unfair betting.
There could be some investigation relating to not meeting standards befitting someone in public office.

No-one listed in this article is an MP now:
https://www.theguardian.com/politic...tical-figures-police-officers-betting-scandal lists these people who were in involved in the election betting:

Russell George. He is still a Conservative member of the Welsh Parliament

Alister Jack. He didn't stand for election. The Conservatives won his former seat (Dumfries and Galloway)

Kevin Craig. Conservatives held the Central Suffolk and North Ipswich where he stood. He came second

Craig Williams. He lost his seat Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr

Laura Saunders. She came 3rd in Bristol North West

Tony Lee stood down from his role in the campaign but does not seem to have an elected role.

Nick Mason is still a county councillor in Herefordshire

 

[D6130]

Is anyone involved in the election betting fiasco still in parliament?

Not certain....but the wife of one of them (Esther McVey; Con. Tatton) still is. Her husband, Philip Davies placed a bet on himself losing his Shipley seat and won (the bet....not the seat!).

 

[edwin_m]

I don't think there'll be a split, a few MPs might defect but not in significant numbers.

The more moderate Tories may see the LibDems as a good destination, as they are now a significant party in the Commons. This avoids some of the problems they would have as independents or smaller parties.

Am I the only one who has a hart time being sympathetic with the bookmakers, if they thought something was amiss, they could have declined to take on the bet?

I believe it was the bookmakers that first flagged the problem - certain individuals are known as "politically exposed" and some system picked up retrospectively that one of them placed a political bet. I assume they aren't set up to do so in real time as a bet is being placed.

 

[Magdalia]

PS in canvassing I met a lot of still undecided voters in the last week and even on polling day, and I guess it's easiest for those people to to stick with an incumbent. Not sure how the polling companies account for this.

This was one of the aspects of this election that led to different predictions from different pollsters. In traditional small sample National polls it was usual to apportion the "don't knows" in the same proportion as the "knows". This time I've seen reported that there were three times as many "don't knows" amongst 2019 Conservative voters than amongst 2019 Labour voters. This made the traditional assumption questionable and pollsters responded with different ways of modelling how the "don't knows" would vote.

the Electoral commission cleaning things up ( well done for going across a county border )

Can you say a bit more about the geography here please? Cross border constituencies were a feature of the last boundary review, I have already commented about Waveney Valley which is part Suffolk and part Norfolk. Are there others?

 

[Darandio]

The majority of elections in the last 100 years of so have returned a conservative government

That's like something straight out of CCHQ.

 

[cb a1]

Yes, you are right, the SNP will never give up on independence, and I don't expect them to. What I would like, however, is for the SNP Scottish Government to stop endlessly blaming Westminster for everything wrong in Scotland, to stop wasting taxpayer's money pointlessly planning for something which is not going to happen, and to focus all their energy on running effectively those things for which they are responsible. I would hope that the chastening General Election result might have that effect, however I am not at all convinced that it will.

Would doing that still fulfil the manifesto on which the SNP were elected and fulfil the wants of those who voted for the SNP to be the government?
Ministers are ultimately still elected politicians and as such will have one eye on the optics of their decisions on the future of not only their own seat but the seats of their colleagues.
If they did what you ask (and asked for at every opportunity by D Ross) that would be electoral suicide. I appreciate that would be a wonderful outcome for anyone who wishes to see the back of the SNP in government and is precisely why the SNP government won't do that.

 

[Busaholic]

Let's split the difference and meet Vlad the Impaler instead.

There's a menace to Galloway, believe me, no doubt carefully curated since his boyhood days. He's immensely touchy about his (lack of) height, which is the real reason why he wears that hat all the time and tries his best not to be filmed standing, or even sitting, without it next to another male. Thank goodness Corbyn refused to be suckered into his recent plans; if he had, he wouldn't have retained his seat. Anyway, Galloway is back to being a deserved nobody, whereas Trump is an existential threat to humanity

 

[WelshBluebird]

I wonder whether this might put more pressure on the Greens to become more of a conventional Green party and less of a left wing/socialist-utopia party. I'm sure all the left wing stuff in the Greens' manifesto goes down well with the student populations in Brighton and Bristol, but I doubt it will be very popular with the farmers and rural residents in Waveney and Herefordshire, who I would suspect voted Green based on general perception plus local issues. But it's going to be tough for them to sustain all the left wing stuff if half their MPs represent seats where the feedback they'll be getting from their voters is likely to be that nationalization and Corbyn-style 'student' politics is not what they want.

Maybe this is just semantics, but I'd be hesitant to write off the greens left wing policies as just student politics.

I live in the Bristol North West constituency where the greens came 2nd, but in a very green leaning ward (elected green councillors a couple of months ago and we are actually only about 200m from the boundary with Bristol central having bee part of that constituency before the boundary changes so it just feels like a continuation of that area). And not that long ago I lived in a part of town that is now part of Bristol East after the boundary changes but at the time was part of Bristol West (which is what had been renamed Bristol Central). So have pretty good visibility on this.

Plenty of the support they party has in Bristol are from people who very much are not students and they did well in some of the Bristol areas that just aren't student areas. Hell even lots of Bristol central aren't that studenty. I'm probably fairly typical of that support and it's been well over a decade since I was a student. A lot of their support in Bristol is what you'd probably call young professionals, often with decent jobs but having to deal with the mess that is our rental market. And a decent amount of the support also comes from older homeowners with families too - either because they are seeing the issues their children are having or because they are left leaning anyway.

Saying that, I actually think your general point about the support in Bristol / Brighton and the two more rural seats is a different kind of support and being unsure how the greens navigate it all is pretty bang on though, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

 

[Busaholic]

That's like something straight out of CCHQ.

I agree: actually I object to the media's quite recent adoption of those initials all the time, making it sound like GCHQ. The BBC, for instance, always used to say 'Conservative Central Office' which couldn't allow confusion.

 

[Magdalia]

Its amazing the sheer number of Tory seats Labour won which have never voted for them before, thinking especially of seats like Bury St Edmunds, South East Cornwall, Suffolk Coastal, Aldershot, Poole, Folkestone & Hythe, Ashford (Kent), South West Norfolk, Aylesbury etc.

The voters of South West Norfolk and Suffolk Coastal had particularly strong incentives to oust the sitting MP.

I suspect that the Greens are kicking themselves that they didn't have the resources to go big in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket where they already have a strong local government presence.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Would doing that still fulfil the manifesto on which the SNP were elected and fulfil the wants of those who voted for the SNP to be the government?

Maybe. it seems plausible that, if the SNP concentrated on effective governance and trying to solve people's problems, and people see that things are improving as a result, then that could eventually boost their popularity. Blaming everything on Westminster can get you so far if people believe that, but they do seem to have come to the end of the road there.

 

[McRhu]

I wouldn't say that the SNP is finished. It lost out this time around because of exactly the same system that gave it so many seats in the last few elections; the same system that killed off the Tories in 1997 and almost made Labour MPs exinct - First Past the Post. In terms of share of the vote, it wasn't that far behind Labour, but our voting system distorts things so much.

The SNP has issues that it needs to work through, I don't doubt. As far as independence-supporting parties go, I had a choice this time around (I could have voted Green) but if I thought that Labour had a decent chance of taking the seat, I may well have held my nose and voted for that party in order to get rid of the Tories.

The brand is certainly tainted - that's one of the reasons why I thought twice about voting SNP. However, political parties can turn things around relatively quickly - just look at how quickly Labour expunged the Corbyn factor!

A very honest and considered reply. Thank you.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Maybe this is just semantics, but I'd be hesitant to write off the greens left wing policies as just student politics.

I live in the Bristol North West constituency where the greens came 2nd, but in a very green leaning ward (elected green councillors a couple of months ago and we are actually only about 200m from the boundary with Bristol central having bee part of that constituency before the boundary changes so it just feels like a continuation of that area). And not that long ago I lived in a part of town that is now part of Bristol East after the boundary changes but at the time was part of Bristol West (which is what had been renamed Bristol Central). So have pretty good visibility on this.

Plenty of the support they party has in Bristol are from people who very much are not students and they did well in some of the Bristol areas that just aren't student areas. Hell even lots of Bristol central aren't that studenty. I'm probably fairly typical of that support and it's been well over a decade since I was a student. A lot of their support in Bristol is what you'd probably call young professionals, often with decent jobs but having to deal with the mess that is our rental market. And a decent amount of the support also comes from older homeowners with families too - either because they are seeing the issues their children are having or because they are left leaning anyway.

Saying that, I actually think your general point about the support in Bristol / Brighton and the two more rural seats is a different kinf of support and bejng unsure how the greens navigate it all is pretty bang on though, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Yeah, possibly 'student politics' wasn't quite the right phrase. What I was trying to convey was that much of current Green policies seems to be very left wing, related more to progressive/minority interests than to the environment, and of a nature that would appeal to much the same people who liked Corbyn and his approach. That kind of thing tends to go down well with students and also often with professionals of a metropolitan/progressive mindset, but is unlikely in the long run to appeal to small-c conservatives who also care deeply about the environment - who I would imagine are the main demographic that has given then victory in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire.