What the 2024 General Election Result Could Mean for the Parties
Prognosticating the next two years for a truly multi-party parliament
The UK General Election of 2024 isn’t yet a fortnight old, but there has already been plenty of analysis of extremely varying depth and quality, including the broadcasts across different stations on the night itself. I found myself seriously disappointed by the BBC’s coverage in particular, especially when compared to previous polls. There was in general far more airtime devoted to the revolving door of talking heads from different parties and the guests on each station, rather than footage from the counts themselves.
It gave the average, less politically engaged viewer only the broadest sense of the flow of the election on a night when a hand grenade was thrown at the archaic electoral system, exploding the two-party duopoly that had restored itself over the Brexit elections of 2017 and 2019 into five or seven disproportionate pieces in Great Britain. With voter volatility at its highest and party loyalty/identification at its lowest, it’s unclear how the multi-party reality can be undone, even without the serious prospect of a move to proportional representation under a Labour government with a majority of over 170.
The massive fragmentation makes any predictions about the first half of the new parliament for each party even more fraught with difficulty, but it’s something I’m going to attempt in any case. I can then review it in two and a half years’ time and laugh about how wildly inaccurate it all was.
Labour (411)
Much talk during the election night was understandably taken up by the simultaneous (correct) heavy praise for Keir Starmer’s landslide victory, whilst also damning his new government from the start because of the historically low winning voteshare in which he stacked up those 411 seats. The efficiency of the campaigning machine showed how ruthless the party have become under his and Morgan McSweeney’s direction, and work has already begun on building a coalition of the electorate for 2029.
Though this post is only really concerned with the first half of the parliament (should it run for the full five years), a lot of what the new government will be judged on at the next election is already coming into view—delivering positive change that can start to be appreciably felt in enough pockets of the UK for a second mandate in a similar vein to the one achieved by Tony Blair in 2001, albeit with a far gloomier economic outlook a generation later.
The King’s Speech outlined 36 bills, ranging from scrapping the expensive and unworkable Rwanda scheme to renationalising passenger rail services. Early ‘tests’ for Starmer are almost certain to come from within his own ranks, with backbenchers old and new seeking an end to the two-child benefit cap and mounting opposition to Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ambitions to ban puberty blocking medication for young trans children, though it must be said that even substantial rebellions in terms of size are usually more impactful further into a parliament than right at the outset, especially if it’s still in the midst of a honeymoon period.
Another challenge within the first two years will be satisfying the ambitions of many of the new intake, who will be jockeying for position whenever the first reshuffle occurs. Starmer is unlikely to be afforded a long honeymoon by either the public or the media as a whole, but could enjoy calm waters within the parliamentary Labour party by being seen to be a uniting force.
Elsewhere in the Commons, with the Conservatives very much turning in on themselves (at least while the leadership contest is still in progress) and the SNP a diminished force, the most vociferous opposition he’s likely to face in the coming months will come from the unlikely combination of the Greens on the left and Reform UK on the right—for the former, few of the measures in the King’s Speech will go nearly far enough, whilst for the latter group, almost all of them will be condemned as an overreach of the state in one capacity or another.
The role the Liberal Democrats will play for the foreseeable will be explored in their own section, but the topline is almost certain to be one of support in areas outside the details of the housing reforms.
In Wales, Vaughan Gething managed to last three times longer than Liz Truss did as leader of their respective parties and parliaments, though he seemed doomed from the start, both because of the questions put to him during his bid to be First Minister surrounding that £200,000 donation, and because of the seriously slender nature of the victory.
Whoever his replacement in the Senedd ends up being, they’re certain to have a better, far more constructive working relationship with the Westminster government, though the elections in 2026 are certain to be much more about defending what they have, given the changes to the electoral system, quarter of a century in power, and plenty of recent controversial measures. Labour MSs are far less likely to be as vociferous in calling for a snap poll as their counterparts in Holyrood and London did when the third leader of those chambers took their places, put it that way.
At the 2025 and possibly 2026 local elections, look for Starmer’s party to make further gains, primarily at the expense of the Conservatives. Even though most of the public are not constantly engaged with the goings-on in SW1 or especially in their councils, the governmental ‘deficit’ the Tories built up over 14 years is certain to bleed into their remaining contingent of councillors.
Conservative (121)
Since the worst election in their bicentennial history, many column inches in Conservative supporting newspapers and magazines have understandably been dedicated to how the ‘most successful party in global democratic history’1 recover, and whether they should seek some form of embrace or merger with Reform UK to realign/’unite the right’ to take on Labour, or alternatively, look closely at why far many more seats (if not votes) were lost to Starmer, the Lib Dems, and even the Greens.
That dilemma will be central to the process for selecting the new leader, an event that will take four months and only conclude in early November, both after their own party conference and the first Labour Budget in 15 years, but also mere days before the outcome of the US Presidential Election.
There were advocates still firmly ensconced within the inner circles of power in the Tories who believed the process should’ve been all over well before the agreed timeline, and moreover, Rishi Sunak shouldn’t have stayed as a kind of inert Leader of the Opposition all the while. Though I obviously had no stake whatsoever in these machinations, I’d have been firmly in the latter camp; Labour are sensibly already planning for their strategy at the next election in 2028 or 2029, and the prospect of nearly 16 weeks of navel-gazing for the main opposition party does neither them nor parliament itself much service. It won’t be an edifying or enlightening spectacle.
Anyone sad enough like me to have had the responses to the King’s Speech on in the background on Friday will have heard three (Tom Tugenhadt, Alicia Kearns, and Kemi Badenoch) Conservative MPs making their respective pitches for the gig with varying degrees of subtlety; however, the odds are that whoever from that trio or elsewhere within their greatly diminished ranks will take on the cudgels of an utterly thankless task that could end up a close mirror of 1997 where William Hague gave Tony Blair as good as he got in Prime Minister’s Questions, but ended up being too early in his career trajectory to make even a dent in Labour’s landslide majority. Put another way, it’s likelier that the leader after the next one will have a serious crack at forming a government, despite misplaced overemphasis on how ‘narrow’ and ‘shallow’ Starmer’s own comparable landslide is 27 years later.
There are also mutterings that some of the MPs want to cut ordinary card-carrying members out of the leadership election altogether, citing previous spectacular failures chosen by the increasingly elderly and hard right cohort of the population such as Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss. However, despite said membership being wholly unrepresentative of the Tory-supporting/curious electorate, it would be a mistake for a whole plethora of reasons to do this, not least because the link between the parliamentary party and the membership has probably never been weaker, with morale at an all-time low.
If modest reforms are made to the method by which a new leader emerges, it might actually serve the Conservatives better if they allowed more than two to be on the final ticket. This is both more democratic, and would prevent a kind of fait accompli pairing being presented to them. The alternative is certain to be messy, especially with some of the favourites advocating some kind of deal with Nigel Farage and Reform UK. That could lead to a duo with minimal difference in either rhetoric and ideology being the final ones, and the stupid games played behind closed doors in the summer of 2022 ensured Rishi Sunak’s ‘spare’ supporters bumped Penny Mordaunt off the ballot in favour of Truss. His eventual loss to the latter should’ve been all the warning the party needed. I will return to this subject in a future post when things develop.
Returning to the topic of Conservative ‘recovery’, there does seem to be a built-in assumption that a recovery will happen. Of course, I am in some way predisposed to not wanting it to take place, though I would caveat that to suggest that though there is likely to always be a sizeable centre-right party (or parties) in the UK, they need not necessarily bear the name ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’.
The perfect counter-argument to those pointing at the shallow but large majority Labour now enjoy is that, though the Tories are obviously in second in hundreds of seats, very few of the ones they hold have any sort of safety net: 77 of the 121 remaining blue constituencies would take a swing of just 5% or lower to fall, and it isn’t just the governing party they’d be defending against; Reform UK, the Lib Dems, the SNP, and to a lesser extent, the Greens. A plausible scenario for the next election is for Labour to lose seats ‘net’ to the Tories and others, but for them to actually gain some of the near misses in 2024 whilst piling up votes in many others as voters start to belatedly feel the benefits of their substantive changes.
The fracturing of the old two-party duopoly isn’t yet terminal, but it’s hard at present to see how it can be even partially reversed, not least of which is because the 72 Lib Dem MPs are not in government. This has been an understated component of the post-GE reality that makes it that much more difficult for the Tories to plot a route back to Downing Street, and it’s far from impossible for a volatile electorate in areas in the south of England where Ed Davey’s swollen contingent are now taking root to spread, especially if there is no tack back towards the centre by the Conservatives in the next four or five years.
It isn’t impossible that an election can be won from the right under First-Past-the-Post. It does however require the kind of abilities and political acumen rarely seen in British politics, and it would almost certainly a lot of the Tories’ attentions to be trained on hammering Reform UK first before moving onto Labour and the Lib Dems. This is another reason why it’s likelier to take at least a decade before they look like a credible alternative, regardless of the bigger changes under the hood.
Liberal Democrat (72)
Despite my own prediction of 71 seats for the Liberal Democrats at the general election, it was at the extremely optimistic end of almost everyone’s calculated guesses. Nobody was more surprised than I was to be out by only a single seat, but far more importantly, it represents the absolute apex of the party’s performance in any guise for a century, achieved as it was with a national vote share just a touch over half of what the SDP-Liberal Alliance managed in 1983 (only having 23 seats) or Charles Kennedy in 2005 (62 seats). It was also disappointing but unsurprising to watch immediate analysis of this record-breaking outcome either reduced to a simple ‘Get the Tories Out’ sentiment, or eschewed completely in favour of speculation whether Reform UK would really end up on 13 seats as per the exit poll.
It should be said though that, despite the healthiest, almost proportional voteshare to seats ratio, the party should prepare to be routinely looked over once more in some sections of the media, partly because there’s a perception and expectation that Ed Davey won’t oppose the Labour government on all that much of consequence, and also because, with the paddleboard and bungee jump cord safely stored away somewhere for another four or five years, there just isn’t the wide interest out there for the UK’s third force when it comes to the more quotidian parliamentary process.
An under-analysed factor of the new reality however is the running of the Commons itself, especially with regard to the Tory-Lib Dem numerical relationship; 121 to 72 is the smallest the gap has been since the First World War, and it does throw a massive spanner into the operations of parliament, a system which deliberately caters for exclusively two party politics. Is it right that Sunak and his eventual successor get six questions at the weekly PMQs and Davey only two? Is it right that they are still set to get more than the lion’s share of Opposition Days and the highly sought-after spots on Select Committees? The Tories only account for 51% of all of the opposition combined, so it isn’t even just that the Lib Dems themselves could miss out, but the SNP, Reform UK, Plaid Cymru, and the Greens as well.
Away from such nerdery, it is true to suggest there is plenty of Labour-Lib Dem overlap in major policy areas, as has been seen by the current frontbench team’s responses to the King’s Speech. The amiable nature of the parliamentary relationship between the new government and the second opposition party will be tested most keenly by two issues: firstly, the obstinate refusal of Starmer to consider any major rapprochement with the EU (such as rejoining the single market) and if growth flits between non-existent and sluggish over the next two years as is widely forecast; secondly, the planning reforms.
Oh, the planning reforms. It will so tempting for Davey and Lib Dem MPs and councils with large tracts of land earmarked for new housing and infrastructure to resort to their very worst NIMBYist tendencies. It would be a big mistake, akin to flies seeing a bright light and being drawn inexorably towards it, only to be zapped out of existence. The recent manifesto, despite pledging to build more than Labour (with a good mix of social and affordable housing), did have the get-out clause of these being ‘community led’, which could be uncharitably deemed as a euphemism for ‘the planning committee/commissioner says no’ more often than not.
To expound, it would be a mistake because it would favour very short-term gain for medium to long-term pain and possibly a return to irrelevance. There will be a latent fear that not grasping the NIMBY ‘opportunity’ will cause angry constituents in those hard-won former Tory heartlands to rise up and switch back at the next election. It’s certainly possible, but the Lib Dems, on the whole, should be on the side of younger voters who want to be able to rent and/or buy a house in the area they grew up in, or to have more of a free rein where they’d like to live—it shouldn’t feel like a process of elimination away from their friends and families. To not err on the side of ‘yes’ to housing risks abandoning and alienating these voters forever, with the remaining demographics aping the Tories and even becoming an existential threat.
The vast majority of the cohort of MPs are completely new to the Commons. It will take time for them all to bed in, and until at least the party conference, the frontbench team will be small, doubling up or even tripling up on their briefs. Davey’s party management skills will be tested in a way they simply weren’t in the last parliament, though I don’t claim to know any areas at this stage where unhappiness could surface.
Looking ahead, there are far more Labour-Lib Dem battlegrounds at local government level than will at the next general election. There are only a handful of the latter. How Davey and the party leadership differentiate themselves from the new government sufficiently enough to be a viable alternative in those contests, whilst also paying attention to how to arrest any Conservative recovery. That balancing act will be a difficult but intriguing one to keep an eye on.
SNP (9)
Future tomes dedicated to the 2024 UK General Election, political scientists and psephologists will argue amongst themselves about which party had the worst election—the Conservatives or the SNP? There are strong arguments on both sides of a debate neither of them would want to have, but the fall from a notional 48 (north of 80% of all Scottish seats after a reduction of two from 59 to 57) to single figures is at least equally as dramatic as the Tories’ utterly wretched showing.
In a ‘change’ election, Holyrood First Minister John Swinney, who had only just been elected in that position prior to the Westminster poll being called, didn’t have the resources or the time to pitch a strong argument as to why his party could be part of that change, i.e. ‘a strong voice for Scotland’, holding a largely English and Welsh Labour contingent to account.
In place of that, a resurgent Labour north of the border, unaffected (and untainted) by being the incumbent governing party in Edinburgh, were able to target not just the marginal ‘Central Belt’ seats between the capital and Glasgow, but also some rural constituencies outside of the more heavily populated urban areas.
The Lib Dems also won every serious contest against the SNP, holding the notional two they had, ‘retaining’ two more they held before boundary changes, and gaining two particularly symbolic seats they had held in earlier elections2—former leaders Jo Swinson and, more poignantly, the late Charles Kennedy, were ‘avenged’.
The SNP’s closely fought tussles with the Tories in the Borders and Aberdeenshire were all cases of ‘whose share of the vote is going to fall the least?’. Former Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross’ heartless chicken run to a safer seat turned out to be Swinney’s only gain on the night. Meanwhile, Labour also recovered across the large southern constituencies, coming from poor thirds to making many of them into three-way marginals in 2028 and 2029.
How does the greatly diminished Westminster representation affect a party struggling financially and mired in scandal in the next two years in the run-up to 2026? Assuming there’s no snap election (and Swinney would really, really want to avoid having to call that3), it means there’s not much scope for the kind of long soul-searching the charismatic Commons leader Stephen Flynn would otherwise like to see. They remain in sole control in Holyrood after their deal with the Scottish Greens (a separate entity to the English & Welsh party) came to an end earlier this year, which led to Humza Yousaf’s resignation.
There are lots of reasons to forecast the SNP’s temporary doom between now and that election, especially with independence from the rest of the UK as an issue that motivates people to come out to vote for them as the standard bearers of it greatly reduced, as well as the aforementioned (ongoing) financial and legal situations. However, support for independence itself has not reduced in line with the SNP’s fall from 45% to 30%. Instead, it has remained roughly where it was prior to the party’s downturn, roughly between 45% and 50%.
The performance of Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster could greatly effect the SNP’s prospects, perhaps even more than Flynn and his eight other colleagues will in the wider UK context, given they’re barely the fourth party in seats now. If they are widely perceived as a collective not to be ‘standing up for Scotland’ (insofar as there are a plethora of interpretations of that phrase), then Swinney, who is seen as a savvy, unifying operator, could minimise the likely losses after a generation of being in power, and could still be the largest party in the Scottish Parliament—the currently leaderless Tories need 33 to beat the SNP’s current total; Labour need 40.
Sinn Féin (8)
First Minister Michelle O’Neill ran a quietly savvy Westminster campaign, which avoided the woes currently affecting her party in the Republic of Ireland by sticking to a modest, far more coherent platform that sought to avoid loud proclamations about a border poll or make promises on immigration to a section of the electorate far outside their comfort zone.
Now emerging as the largest Northern Irish party in both Stormont and Westminster (abstentionism aside), they have successfully taken that mantle off the DUP in the space of three years, allowing them to have the aforementioned position of First Minister for the first time ever (for SF or nationalism as a whole), and to set the political weather away from the Commons whilst three shades of unionism tear stripe off each other. They have also held off any recovery by the SDLP whilst simultaneously being accused of standing down in certain Westminster contests to help out Alliance, where vote-splitting in FPTP contests against a strong unionist party/candidate usually results in failure for the alternative force.
It remains to be seen how the next Irish general election (due in the next eight months) will affect them north of the border, but the situations are not contiguous—all of their main rivals had distinctly mixed performances at the beginning of July, and any improved showing by the UUP or TUV on the other side of the political spectrum helps diminish the DUP. Retaining control of a functioning executive, and being seen to work well across the divide, will be crucial in firming up their own support whilst the others continue to fragment.
Independents (6)
In the end, he won resoundingly. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory as an independent candidate in different circumstances might’ve been perceived as a massive blow to a nascent Keir Starmer government, but the former Labour leader’s impressive showing was just as story amongst hundreds of intriguing ones on the night. A clutch of those stories came very much against the grain of an otherwise ruthless electoral operation by Morgan McSweeney—independent candidates without Corbyn’s fame/notoriety, allied ostensibly on the issue of Israel’s war on Gaza, not just polling well, but in several instances, unseating Labour MPs.
Jonathan Ashworth, a key Starmer ally in the Shadow Cabinet up to the election, was the highest profile loser, unexpectedly being edged out by Shockat Adam on a ridiculous swing of 35%. Adam had never been a member of a political party prior to his candidacy, nor had he held any elected office. Nevertheless, he was able to emerge as the winner in an electoral system stacked against smaller parties and independents of all hues and none.
Adam’s remarkable rise was mirrored elsewhere in constituencies with a large Muslim presence: in Birmingham Perry Barr, Dewsbury and Batley, and Blackburn. There were also significant ‘near-misses’ in other Birmingham seats, Inner London, Bradford, and Greater Manchester—newly appointed cabinet ministers Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting, as well as Jess Phillips, clung on with their majorities slashed into the hundreds against a backdrop of particularly unsavoury campaigns.
Ayoub Khan was the victor in BPB, besting Khalid Mahmood by just 507 votes. Unlike Adam, Khan has a long history in politics, having previously been a Lib Dem councillor for several spells across the last 21 years. He fought the seat as an independent, alleging that he had been told to ‘tone down his (Gaza) concerns’ by the party.4
In Blackburn, a town and constituency that has had a long history of British involvement/influence in the Middle East affecting election results (just ask Jack Straw), the margin of Adnan Hussain’s victory was even slimmer—132 over sitting MP Kate Hollern. Hussain was successful at his very first attempt to get into politics, only deciding to even stand when Rishi Sunak called the election.
There was nothing small about Iqbal Mohammed’s win in Dewsbury and Batley, however. Coming from nowhere, he now has a majority of close to 7,000 over Labour in the newly created constituency. His campaign focused on the cost of living crisis as much as it did the conflict between Israel and Hamas—Kirklees is a metropolitan borough with plenty of deprivation, so a message centred on those two planks understandably won over an electorate ostensibly given a free pass to vote with their hearts in the face of a huge Labour majority.
Corbyn is also an outspoken proponent of peace in the Middle East, so could those five independent voices ‘coalesce’ in some form to provide a unified opposition to the new government from the left? Quite possibly, though it’s important not to clump all of the MPs together, even though four of the five were elected on very similar platforms—they are still individuals who will distinguish themselves on their own merits or otherwise. They will also need to prove they can be a voice for their constituents across a wide range of topics in a parliamentary (as well as electoral) system that tends to squeeze them out.
The sixth independent, Alex Easton, won his contest against Alliance in North Down in Northern Ireland. Backed by both the DUP and TUV, he reciprocated after his win by effectively giving his place in Stormont to the former despite resigning from the party in 2021. His presence in Westminster will further fracture the unionist contingent—in the 2019-2024 parliament, only the DUP represented unionism with eight MPs. The total remains the same, but it is split between them with five, and Easton, the UUP, and the DUV with one each. In an environment where nationalism and cross-community identifying parties combined outnumber unionist voices, it remains to be seen what effect Easton’s ‘independent’ presence will have.
DUP (5)
Much like the Conservatives, the DUP avoided a total wipeout at the general election by quite small margins in several seats to more than one opponent, making reading the tea leaves and coming to a firm conclusion all the more difficult. Even so, their tally has been reduced from eight to five, rendering them a clear second to Sinn Féin, but still with the largest presence in Westminster because of the former’s abstentionism.
Indeed, freshly appointed leader Gavin Robinson could’ve lost his own seat of Belfast East, but was returned with an ever so slightly increased majority of 2,676. The party’s polling heading into the election, not helped whatsoever by Jeffrey Donaldson’s ongoing court case (precipitating Robinson’s temporary presence at the head of the main unionist force), was dire by their recent standards. Many of their hitherto staunch supporters used the UK ballot to punish the DUP for several reasons, including but not limited to collapsing the Executive for two years, ‘betraying unionism/Brexit’ by then agreeing to the Windsor Framework, and for presiding over a decline in living standards and public services, especially during the lack of a functioning Stormont administration.
Numerically, they still dwarf the UUP and TUV in the Commons, but neither of their unionist rivals had a presence there in the last parliament—they’re no longer the only show in town. How Robinson reacts to that, as well as the threat of Alliance on their other flank, could determine a lot of the discussion points up to the next NI Assembly vote in 2027. He is likely to make his interim leadership permanent—the outcome of the general election could’ve been far worse with only a small redistribution of the votes cast, but also because he’s a good campaigner, as evidenced by his own Westminster hold.
Success for Robinson and the DUP would be nullifying his immediate rivals before turning to Alliance and Sinn Féin whilst also laying down a path for the future for his party’s brand of unionism. Besides Robinson himself, of the post-GE Commons contingent, only Carla Lockhart isn’t a grizzled veteran of the circuit, though at 39, she has been involved in politics almost all of her adult life.
There are however plenty in the sizeable contingent in Stormont who could emerge to help Robinson and Lockhart out more widely. For example, Emma Little-Pengelly, despite ‘only’ being Deputy First Minister, has enjoyed a popularity boost, with her frequent appearances alongside Sinn Féin’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill tending to go down extremely well.
Reform UK (5)
Of all the parties featured in this post, the next two years for Reform UK seem the most unclear in outcome, if not in ambition. As soon as Nigel Farage ‘returned’ to frontline politics in the first couple of weeks of the general election campaign as party leader, a very different trajectory was set for both his latest vehicle and the subsequent results he and his colleagues achieved. The exit poll denoting 13 MPs did seem on the ‘optimistic’ end of possibilities, and thus it proved; however, without his direct involvement, it’s plausible Reform UK would’ve been looking at one or two maximum in total, and far fewer strong second places in the north of England and in the Midlands.
Though the electoral strategy was deliberately less ‘targeted’ than the Lib Dems, it’s no mean feat to achieve a better share of the vote (14%) and greater obvious scope for advancement on their current position of 5 MPs. Many of >20% shares across the country were achieved without a particularly organised central operation, nor local ground games, nor even in some cases the Reform UK candidates themselves stepping foot in their respective constituencies.
One of Farage’s key pledges since taking over again has been to professionalise the party, including in those areas of the machinery. Successfully managing this will reduce the likelihood that the bulk of votes a few weeks ago were 2019 Conservative voters simply unhappy with the salience of issues they cared about being continuously raised up the agenda whilst not being acted on in the way that they hoped. The Short money they’ll now receive will certainly help with day-to-day and electoral operations, as will appointing his predecessor Richard Tice as his deputy in place of Ben Habib as the former was successfully elected, though the handling of the ‘changing of the guard’ was abysmal.
Building on their success, Farage wants to take the fight to Labour. At present, the wide but shallow electoral coalition Starmer built up has little demographic crossover with Reform UK, and only a small group of current Labour voters are reachable without some repositioning. The more obvious and ‘sellable’ route to bring along the vast majority of Reform UK voters on would be economic, not social. That means at least changing the framing of their pitches around income tax, making it more about helping struggling individuals and families have some breathing room, rather than primarily entrepreneurial or an argument about the size of the state.
Outside of another small subsample of people who are primarily nonconformist/anti-establishment/’None of the Above’ types, the groups who could be attracted the easiest are the economically insecure, a depressingly large tranche of the population. Many of those will have voted Labour at the start of the month, and many of those will need to see the pressures on their finances, currently coming from different directions outside of their control, eased over the course of the parliament, preferably sooner rather than later.
Additionally of course, the issue of (im)migration won’t magically disappear, and the government’s grip on it will need to be perceived as sufficiently ‘tough’ by those who wish to see numbers reduced to avoid both unwanted headlines and a further rise in Reform UK support.
It will be interesting to see what approach is taken to the elections next year in 2025 and 2026; will they be largely dismissed as irrelevant to their growth in spite of the planned professionalisation of the party, or will they, like with UKIP under Farage a decade ago, become centres of support to help keep their momentum going?
Their relationship with the Conservatives, such as it is, will also be paramount to their medium-term future. A reverse takeover is unlikely, but some sort of merger is not impossible, depending on the identity of the new Tory leader. It would however precipitate a permanent schism in the old grouping.
Avoiding any serious further ill-discipline within their own ranks and maintaining focus on the largest two parties (though mostly Labour) will help assuage voters’ concerns about their public image and previously openly bigoted candidates, many of whom had support withdrawn from them over the course of the recent campaign.
Green (4)
It can be risky for a party of any size to explicitly (and publicly) announce not just how many target seats they’re aiming to hold and gain, but specifically where. That’s precisely what the Greens of England & Wales did before the last election—they wanted four—Brighton Pavilion (already theirs, but with the redoubtable Caroline Lucas stepping down), Bristol Central (Labour), Waveney Valley, and North Herefordshire (both Conservative). Few observers seriously paid attention to this pronouncement by co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, and fewer still expected it to happen.
But it did, and convincingly. The common received wisdom was that the Greens’ relatively high VIs (voting intention polling) between 5% and 7% midway through the previous parliamentary term was a typical ‘protest’ by some small sections of the electorate, dissatisfied at how Starmer was reneging on many of the promises he made during the Labour leadership contest, and many of those when faced with the election campaign would melt away and unenthusiastically put an ‘X’ next to their local red candidate instead.
However, that notion was to spectacularly misread the kinds of people who now support the Greens, the perceived gap between them and Labour, a slow but relentless build-up of councils and councillors, and moreover, how the actual base of those who went against said received wisdom is actually quite broad, ranging from those with Corbyn-adjacent views on defence and public ownership of utilities, 2010 Lib Dem voters whose chief concerns are climate change and NIMBYism, and what some commentators are calling ‘the CPRE wing’—ex-Tories who can stomach the big shift towards the Greens because their positions on biodiversity and the green belt are mixed in with a pinch of a nostalgia for a past that never truly existed.
None of that is to disparage the achievement Denyer and Ramsay have executed in truly breaking through in a media landscape where almost all of the focus outside the main two parties during the campaign was obsequiously directed towards Farage and Reform UK. Denyer did distinguish herself during the televised debates, announcing herself to an electorate that, outside of political obsessives like yours truly, had never heard of her or her fellow co-leader. They saw someone young (by political leader standards), modern, clearly to the left of Labour, still not yet the finished article à la Lucas—in other words, someone who looked and sounded exactly like the people the Greens needed to capture to finally increase their single representative in the Commons and be taken seriously.
Reaching nearly 7% and getting 4 MPs now makes it that much more difficult for Labour or any other party to ignore them; like the group of independents (including Corbyn), they will be relentless in pushing in parliament for Labour to go further and faster—more climate action, the recognition of Palestine as a state, and the nationalisation of failing public utilities, especially water with regards to the ongoing sewage scandal.
Another aspect that’s indicative that they’re here to stay are the number of second places in Labour-held seats they now have—39 (40 if you include Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s Chorley constituency). These are primarily located in inner city areas: Bristol, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Sheffield. A generation ago, the main challengers to Labour in seats like those at a general election would’ve been the Lib Dems, but the Greens have totally usurped them, benefitting from the lack of taint over the coalition in tandem with climate change becoming an ever larger factor in people’s lives.
As for the next two years, Denyer and Ramsay will greatly benefit from their increased media profile and ‘legitimacy’ by being seen on the green benches. Almost all of the councils up for grabs in 2025 are Conservative-held, so the party should be looking to advance in the more rural ones; Gloucestershire, Suffolk, Worcestershire stick out as ones where they could become prominent, particularly if the Tories go even further away from their previous traditional positions on farming and, aptly, conservation.
It won’t all be plain sailing for them, though. Some of the people who voted for them at the election will be left behind as the party continues to involve and in some ways professionalise/adjust policies in a similar vein to Reform UK. They’re therefore likely to lose some of the more radical left as a consequence, though there’s no other vehicle on the horizon for them to latch onto. There’s already evidence of this happening—Denyer’s totally inoffensive statement on Joe Biden standing down as the Democratic presidential candidate in the US went viral, sparking outrage and dissent, even from those who had stood in the general election on the Green ticket.
They will also be scrutinised on the tensions between bold action on climate change, the need for more affordable housing, and NIMBYism. Expect Labour to go big on this ‘package’ as the planning reforms start to be felt in many areas of the country, even as they’ll face opposition in their own ranks.
Plaid Cymru (4)
Rhun ap Iorwerth can be pleased with Plaid Cymru’s electoral performance in the general election. Labour have dominated Wales for generations, and a UK poll where the overwhelming sentiment was to remove the Tories from government (and by extension, replace them under FPTP with the only viable alternative) could easily have translated in less skilled hands to voters in Plaid heartlands reaching for the red lever.
Instead, with Wales’ Westminster presence as a whole reduced by 20% from 40 to 32 MPs as a consequence of boundary changes, Plaid managed to ‘double’ their seat total from a notional two to four.5 This can in be attributed chiefly to three factors: the electorate feeling able to choose, with the looming prospect of an overwhelming Labour majority, alternative voices to help hold the new government to account; secondly, ap Iorwerth distinguishing himself quite well with the elevated platform provided for both him and Plaid during the televised debates where he joined the SNP and Greens in attacking Labour from the left; thirdly, the Labour administration in the Senedd being embroiled in scandal which dogged the short-lived premiership of First Minister Vaughan Gething, during which Plaid withdrew their tacit support for the Cardiff government.
This third factor will be the one with the longest electoral tail. Though Reform UK’s support/presence in Wales does now complicate matters, Plaid still stand to be the primary beneficiaries of any further drop in Labour’s support (which dipped in the country as a whole despite the Tories being wiped off the Westminster map), particularly with the increased number of MSs there’ll be following the 2026 election—Plaid want a snap poll, but are almost certain not to get their wish granted by a Starmer government that will rally around whoever the new Prif Weinidog turns out to be.
In the Commons, look for Westminster leader Liz Saville Roberts to cooperate closely as ever with the SNP, but also with the increased Green contingent, even though the Welsh Greens could eventually be competitors for a similar voter profile to Plaid—a centre-left electorate concerned about the environment who also want a stronger voice for the country in the UK. A successful two-year period for Plaid sees them, rather than Reform UK or the Tories, being seen by enough people across Wales as the next government in waiting at the Senedd.
SDLP (2)
On the face of it, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood can be pretty pleased with his party’s performance at the start of July. Both he and the always impressive Claire Hanna held on to their seats to retain their position as the third Northern Irish force at Westminster, despite some pre-election polls indicating that feat might be difficult, particularly in Eastwood’s own constituency of Foyle.
However, a closer look at the underlying data and the trends does point to some big concerns for the centre-left nationalists. They are now a clear fifth in votes at NI and UK level, with the electorate sympathetic to their policy positions opting for the bolder/more strident (depending on your point of view) Sinn Féin or more forward-facing/fence-sitting Alliance (again, your mileage may vary). They are only above third place in one seat they don’t currently hold, and under FPTP, that makes the prospects of improving on their tally of two extremely tricky.
Additionally, there is limited benefit in being the official opposition at Stormont unless the four-party Executive badly fumble the relationship with the new Labour government to the detriment of crumbling public services in the country. Eastwood is confident that his sister party’s thumping majority and subsequent mandate should augur well for Northern Ireland as a whole, though how much of that stardust gets sprinkled on them is debateable.
Eastwood and Hanna are excellent speakers with more than a touch of charisma. That can count for a lot when opportunities to opine are severely limited, and having two such figures compares favourably with many of their rival parties. Retaining their current support up until 2027 should be their primary aim.
Alliance (1)
Alliance retained their position as the third force in Northern Ireland in Westminster by votes, matching their Stormont one in 2022 to remain the ‘main’ alternative to Sinn Féin and the DUP whilst the others below them either treaded water or regained the same representation in the Commons as Naomi Long’s party do, but on significantly lower shares of the vote.
There’s no disguising the reality that it was a mixed bag. Granted, they are a close second in three of the four seats they did not hold before the UK general election, but Deputy Leader Stephen Farry lost North Down to Alex Easton by over 7,000 votes in a contest where the latter was ostensibly backed by the DUP, but neither they nor Sinn Féin stood a candidate in a campaign marred by some ugly scenes of intimidation and veiled threats.
Elsewhere, Long failed to unseat interim DUP leader Gavin Robinson in Belfast East, Michelle Guy finished 5,000 votes behind Jim Shannon on a slate featuring no fewer than 10 candidates, Danny Donnelly narrowly missed out in a three-way battle for Sammy Wilson’s constituency, and Kate Nicholl was a distant second to the SDLP’s Claire Hanna in Belfast South and Mid Down.
The single consolation was at least a big one—Sorcha Eastwood winning the previously unionist stronghold of Lagan Valley on a swing of over 11%, doubtlessly aided by Jeffrey Donaldson having to stand down as mentioned above, but testament to her charisma, growing presence in Northern Irish politics, and ability to work cross-community. She will also be bolstered by Alliance’s sister party, the Lib Dems, having their largest presence in Westminster for a century (or ever in their current form), meaning it will be easier for her to find support for progressive, socially liberal causes to take back with her across the water as evidence of what a party of neither unionists nor nationalists can achieve.
In Stormont, Long remains in the cabinet alongside Andrew Muir. Demonstrating the efficacy of working across political lines in a functioning executive will be crucial in keeping and growing the party’s support as more than a ‘neither of the above’ repository, and they must be steadfast in their social liberal ideals to be returned to office in 2027 in significant numbers.
UUP (1)
The dominant face of unionism in Westminster for generations until the new millennium (and often in government with the Conservatives for the first half of their stranglehold on Northern Irish politics), Doug Beattie’s party have a single MP once again after Robin Swann unseated the DUP’s Paul Girvan by a considerable margin in South Antrim.
Now considered the most liberal and conciliatory of the three unionist forces,
they also outpolled the SDLP in the number of votes, suggesting that their strand of centre-right politics could yet have a successful future, with their main competitors driven ever more to the extremes. Swann’s main job will be to use his platform to appear as a moderate alternative to the DUP and TUV.
Starmer’s Labour government are almost certain to have a closer eye on the goings-on in Stormont than the previous administration, and both Swann and Beattie would do well to appear as cooperative as possible within and without the ‘coalition’ in the Assembly a viable proposition all the way up to 2027.
TUV (1)
TUV Leader Jim Allister shocked the entirety of Northern Ireland by pinching North Antrim from the Paisley dynasty in the early hours of Friday morning. Formed initially as a protest movement rather than a party in 2007, the group are now the third, most overtly unionist force in the country, and ideologically very much on the right of, well, everyone. That said, the hardliners have been successful in returning their leader to Westminster, enjoying an increase in support in socially conservative communities who feel as though the movement as a whole is losing ground to nationalist and non-sectarian policies and sentiment.
I don’t claim to be an expert on precisely how Short money works. That said, the pre-election ‘pact’ between Reform UK and the TUV (later utterly undermined by Farage’s personal endorsement of two DUP candidates) seemed to me to be an attempt, if both parties returned a sufficient number of MPs at the election, to share in the millions under the current allocation riles. At the time of writing, Allister has taken the Reform UK whip on some issues. Whether that’s sufficient to take a share in the aforementioned pot, I’m more unsure about.
Either way, Allister’s lone voice in the Commons is going to have an outsized impact, adding both to the plurality of Northern Irish party political representation in London, as well as providing a much wider, visible platform back across the Irish Sea to his party’s positions. It will be interesting to see what effects, if any, he can exert on his peers or the UK government, but it does stand the TUV in good stead for greater representation in Stormont in 2027.
If you made it to the end, thank you very much for reading! If you like my writing, please consider subscribing for free by clicking the button below.
Post-war, it’s got to be the Liberal Democrats in Japan—no relation to the UK party bearing the same whatsoever…
Extensively redrawn, but nevertheless, retaining that powerful mythos in both cases.
A snap election in Holyrood would not eliminate another being held in May 2026; it would just mean two in the space of three years maximum!
It’s certainly true that Davey’s campaign made no mention of it, though even a cursory glance at both the manifesto or Layla Moran’s widely shared videos setting out both her own family’s tragic involvement in the invasion and the party’s position on the issue would’ve at least persuaded most that it was and still is something taken very seriously. Nevertheless, Khan was endorsed by the pressure group The Muslim Vote, and his bid was successful.
Yes, they had four between 2019-2024, but that was one tenth of 40 seats on a 9.9% voteshare. Now, it’s one eighth on a 14.8% voteshare.