The 2024 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 4 July 2024, to elect 650 members of Parliament to the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The opposition Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, defeated the governing Conservative Party, led by Rishi Sunak, in a landslide victory.

The election was the first general election victory for Labour since 2005, and ended the Conservatives’ fourteen-year tenure as the primary governing party. Labour achieved a 174-seat simple majority and a total of 411 seats, the party’s third-best result in terms of seat share following the 1997 and 2001 general elections. The party’s vote share was 33.7 per cent, making this the least proportional general election in British history according to the Gallagher index. Labour won 211 more seats than the previous general election in 2019, but received half a million fewer total votes. The party became the largest in England for the first time since 2005, in Scotland for the first time since 2010, and retained its status as the largest party in Wales. It lost seven seats: five to independent candidates, largely attributed to its stance on the Israel–Hamas war; one to the Green Party of England and Wales; and one to the Conservatives. The Conservative Party was reduced to 121 seats on a vote share of 23.7 per cent, the worst result in its history. It lost 251 seats in total, including those of twelve Cabinet ministers and that of the former prime minister Liz Truss. It also lost all its seats in Wales. The combined Labour and Conservative vote share was 57.4 per cent, the lowest since the 1918 general election.

Smaller parties took a record 42.6 per cent of the vote in the election, in part due to anti-Conservative tactical voting. The Liberal Democrats, led by Ed Davey, made the most significant gains by winning a total of seventy-two seats. This was the party’s best-ever result and made it the third-largest party in the Commons, a status it had previously held but lost at the 2015 general election. Reform UK achieved the third-highest vote share and won five seats, and the Green Party of England and Wales won four seats; both parties achieved their best parliamentary results in history, winning more than one seat for the first time. In Wales, Plaid Cymru won four seats. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party was reduced from forty-eight seats to nine and lost its status as the third-largest party in the Commons. In Northern Ireland, which has a distinct set of political parties,[9] Sinn Féin retained its seven seats and therefore became the largest party; this was the first election in which an Irish nationalist party won the most seats in Northern Ireland. The Democratic Unionist Party won five seats, a reduction from eight at the 2019 general election. The Social Democratic and Labour Party won two seats, and the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionist Party, Traditional Unionist Voice, and an independent candidate won one seat each.

Labour entered the election with a large lead over the Conservatives in opinion polls, and the potential scale of the party’s victory was a topic of discussion during the campaign period. The economy, healthcare, education, infrastructure development, environment, housing, energy, and immigration, and standards in public office were main campaign topics, with little discussion on Brexit: a major issue in the 2019 election. This general election was the first in which photographic identification was required to vote in person in Great Britain,[e] the first fought using the new constituency boundaries implemented following the 2023 Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies and the first called under the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022.

Sources and further reading:

Starmer says UK will work with whoever wins US election, declines to back Harris

https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-wont-back-kamala-harris-says-u-k-will-work-with-whoever-wins-democrat-race/

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-business-activity-picks-up-july-pmi-data-shows-2024-07-24/

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-business-activity-picks-up-july-pmi-data-shows-2024-07-24/