Analysis by Keith Rankin.
The above chart shows the votes for the principal ‘leftish’ political parties in England from 1992 to 2024. The important thing to note is that vote tallies should be rising over time in any country which has a rising population. England had had a rising population trend, yet the numbers of votes cast for the established centre-left parties have been on a falling trend.
For Labour the situation is worse than it looks. In 1992 Labour was comfortably defeated by Conservative. Yet Labour got a million more votes in 1992 than it did in 2024.
We may blame ‘apathy’ for this situation. Many more people are not voting at all. But apparent apathy is usually a symptom of something else. Ideally, when we vote we are voting for some ideal or somebody. More people vote when they perceive at least one of the options in a positive light. There is another situation which can lead to a high propensity to vote; namely if the existing government is perceived as being so bad that people will vote for whoever they must vote for in order to dismiss the government. This was the situation in England in 2024; yet even that urgency failed to galvanise voters. The total number of votes cast in England was the lowest since 2005, when Labour ‘won’ with 35% of the vote. (In 2024 Labour got 34% of the vote.)
In 2024, the total votes cast for Labour in England fell by nearly a million, after the 2019 election which was disastrous for Labour. Yet the number of seats Labour gained nearly doubled. Clearly this last distortion is a result of the ‘plurality’ voting system used in elections to the Westminster Parliament. But there’s something more important going on. The centre-left is losing favour.
The vote for the Liberal Democrats also fell in 2024, despite that party gaining a huge increase in the number of seats won. Their decline in votes is the result of what is commonly known as tactical voting; in this case it appears that about a million people who would have voted LibDem in an MMP election chose to lend their votes to Labour. (Probably more LibDem supporters than this lent their votes to Labour, because it is also clear that, where the LibDem candidate was better placed to beat the Conservative candidate, many otherwise Labour voters lent their votes to LibDem candidates.
It was this ‘efficient’ and rational vote-lending behaviour that enabled the centre-left to win so many seats. So, while, for once, ‘progressive’ voters were clever this time, the bigger story is the decline of popular support for the centre-left political agenda.
Another feature of the 2024 election is the Palestine-Gaza factor. In many traditionally Labour seats, there were ‘independent’ pro-Palestine candidates who cannibalised the Labour vote; indeed a few of these candidates won their seats.
The other important feature is the rise of the Green Party as a left-wing party winning pro-Palestine votes; especially votes of non-Muslims who are disturbed by what is currently happening in the Levant. For this see the two tables below. The Green Party may have gained ‘critical mass’, being poised to be the new left presence in British politics.
| England General Election Results | ||||||
| Votes | ||||||
| Total | Labour | Conservative | LibDem | Green | other | |
| 1992 | 28,148,506 | 9,551,910 | 12,796,772 | 5,398,293 | 401,531 | |
| 1997 | 26,058,712 | 11,372,329 | 8,780,881 | 4,677,565 | 60,013 | 1,167,924 |
| 2001 | 21,870,762 | 9,056,824 | 7,705,870 | 4,246,853 | 158,173 | 703,042 |
| 2005 | 22,713,855 | 8,043,461 | 8,116,005 | 5,201,286 | 251,051 | 1,102,052 |
| 2010 | 25,085,097 | 7,042,398 | 9,931,029 | 6,076,189 | 258,954 | 1,776,527 |
| 2015 | 25,571,204 | 8,087,684 | 10,517,878 | 2,098,404 | 1,073,242 | 3,793,996 |
| 2017 | 27,165,789 | 11,390,099 | 12,379,200 | 2,121,810 | 506,969 | 767,711 |
| 2019 | 26,909,668 | 9,152,034 | 12,710,845 | 3,340,835 | 819,751 | 886,203 |
| 2024 | 24,288,122 | 8,365,122 | 6,279,411 | 3,199,060 | 1,780,226 | 4,664,303 |
| England General Election Results | ||||||
| Seats | ||||||
| Total | Labour | Conservative | LibDem | Green | other | |
| 1992 | 524 | 195 | 319 | 10 | ||
| 1997 | 529 | 329 | 165 | 34 | 1 | |
| 2001 | 529 | 323 | 165 | 40 | 1 | |
| 2005 | 529 | 286 | 194 | 47 | 2 | |
| 2010 | 533 | 191 | 298 | 43 | 1 | |
| 2015 | 533 | 206 | 319 | 6 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | 533 | 227 | 297 | 8 | 1 | |
| 2019 | 533 | 180 | 345 | 7 | 1 | |
| 2024 | 543 | 348 | 116 | 65 | 4 | 10 |
Watching that election on UK Sky TV (live on You Tube), one commentator repeatedly mentioned the “efficiency” of Labour, meaning that Labour won many seats on small margins. This so-called efficiency will make Labour very vulnerable in the next election, which, luckily for them, may not be until 2029.
Unless Labour performs exceptionally well, the votes lent to Labour will return to their LibDem homes.
What about the votes Labour lost to Independents and Greens in safe Labour seats? And the votes, Labour lent to winning (and near-winning) LibDem candidates. They are most likely to stay with the Liberal Democrats who will need these votes to fend off Conservative candidates.
The Tories
What of the ‘Tory’ Conservatives? They clearly got trounced; their vote count fell by more than 50% in the 2024 election. They may or may not get votes from people who voted Reform, the biggest of the ‘other’ parties in 2024. A useful strategy for them could be to cultivate the large conservative Muslim vote. A significantly higher proportion of voters in England are now Muslims; that proportion will only grow as Muslim households continue to have more children than the national average. And, Islam is a very conservative religion.
There is a natural fit here, going forward. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi was born in Iraq and is “thought to be a Muslim”. Likewise, another former Conservative Chancellor, Sajid Javid – born to Pakistani parents – “still identifies as being a Muslim”. If the Tories wish to be relevant in England’s future, they will need to adopt a wider political vision that is attractive to non-radical Muslims as well as to conservative people of other faiths. Otherwise, the future of the Right in England may fall to the new Reform Party; such a change has already happened in France.
So, I am predicting that – in 2029, or before – the LibDems may come through the middle, just as Emmanuel Macron’s party did in France in 2017, leaving both Labour and Conservative to play the role of small ‘legacy parties’. Labour’s ‘landslide’ is likely to accelerate, but in the wrong way; indeed, a landslide is actually a disaster.
Note
In this chart and text, I have looked at England only, which is the core of the United Kingdom, but not its entirety. This is because, especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, other parties play significant roles. In Scotland in 2024, the big story was the crash of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Labour was a beneficiary of that crash. But it is likely that votes lent to Labour by regular SNP voters will not stay with Labour.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
