Change of government in Britain – and the strengthening of Nigel Farage’s far right Reform Party

Note: This post was updated 12/12/2024 to clarify the Reforn UK Party vote.

The Labour Party in the British general election on July 4 more than doubled their number of seats in the House of Commons. And the far-right Reform Party won 14%, while the Conservative Party (Tories) lost a large number of votes compared to the 2019 election. The number of votes cast for Reform, much of which presumably came from previous Tory voters, apparentlly also helped Labour win a far higher portion of parliamentary seats than represented by the popular vote, thanks to the British winner-take-all electoral districts.

Results in 2017¹:

These are the results from the 2019 election for the top four parties²:

Under the previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour received 13.6 million votes in 2017 and 14 million in 2019. According to the current figures with almost 100% of votes counted, Labour this year pulled 9.7 million votes³:

Overall turnout on July 4 was lower than in 2010, 2017 and 2019.⁴

Britain has winner-take-all districts, like the US. For people familiar with other European parliamentary election system, that can seem baffling at time. But it means that whoever gets the most votes in a three-way race in an electoral district is the winner, whether or not it’s a majority.

That means that the big jump in Labour’s number of parliamentary seats is affected not only by their own percentage of the vote but also by the fact that the badly faltering Conservative Party lost votes to a surprisingly resurgent rightwing Reform Party.

Labour's vote share is up by less than two points from 32% to 34%, but the Conservatives have seen their vote share fall by about 20 points to 24%.

Reform have found it difficult to convert votes into seats. With almost all the results declared, the party has returned four MPs, including party leader Nigel Farage in Clacton.

The Conservative vote share suffered particularly in areas where high numbers voted to leave the European Union, falling by 27 points in constituencies where more than 60% voted Leave. ⁵

The Tories devastated themselves in the 2010s when they agreed to hold a referendum on Brexit, though they were a pro-Brexit party. They calculated that the Brexiteers would lose the referendum, but that they would pick up votes from the pro-Brexit party. Instead, the Brexit referendum passed in 2016, and the Tories thought they were stuck with having to proceed with leaving the European Union. The shrill, anti-EU Nigel Farage, formerly chairman of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP), enters Parliament now as head of the Reform Party.

The main story is the orderly transfer of power from the Conservatives, who, after 14 years in office, have suffered the worst defeat in their long history, and the remarkable reversal of fortune for Labour, which was decimated in the election just four and a half year ago and is now back in power with a stonking [sic] majority after winning over 400 seats in the 650-member Parliament.⁶

With European and American democracies, I guess we’ve reached the stage that it needs to be specified that a peaceful and orderly transfer of power is taking place after an election.

Again, the percentage of Labour’s parliamentary seats is much bigger than its actual percentage of the votes. But with their solid majority, presumably their voters will expect them to deliver for them.

Daniel Finn explains:

The absolute number of votes cast for Labour was lower than it was in 2019. If we take account of the fall in turnout, Keir Starmer added less than 2 percent to the party’s 2019 vote share. Labour’s final score, 33.7 percent, was well below the average vote share for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, let alone the 40 percent it took in 2017. Yet Starmer has won a landslide majority of seats in the House of Commons, thanks to a Conservative meltdown and Britain’s winner-takes-all electoral system.

As the polling expert John Curtice put it, “This looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour has won.” The Tory vote share dropped by 20 percent. In 2019, the Brexit Party of Nigel Farage stood down hundreds of candidates to give Boris Johnson a clear path to victory. This time, Farage’s vehicle — now rebranded as Reform UK — set out to damage the Tories and took 14 percent of the vote, driving a wedge through their electoral base.⁷ [my emphasis]

The Labour party under its leader Keir Starmer – excuse me, Sir Keir Starmer – is following a Tony Blair model of neoliberal economics and foreign policy deference to whatever the current Administration in Washington might want.

Daniel Larison is not expecting anything particularly new and inspiring from British foreign policy under Starmer:

Prime Minister Starmer is the heir to [hawkish Tony] Blair in more ways than one, and when it comes to foreign policy he has given us every reason to expect him to be almost as bad as his predecessor. His support for the war in Gaza is one important example of that, and that position has already cost Labour a few seats to independent candidates that ran in opposition to the war and the party. Judging from Labour’s election manifesto and Starmer’s record, we can expect mostly continuity in Britain’s foreign policy. That will be reassuring to many in Washington that count on having a subservient Britain as a reliable supporter of the U.S. position, but it will be bad news for Britain and for whichever countries next end up in the crosshairs of our two governments. Starmer has also backed the ongoing war against the Houthis in Yemen, for example, so U.K. involvement in that useless conflict will continue.⁸

1. 2017 United Kingdom general election. Wikipedia 07/05/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2017_United_Kingdom_general_election&oldid=1232732090> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

2. 2019 United Kingdom general election. Wikipedia 07/05/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2019_United_Kingdom_general_election&oldid=1232776770> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

3. 2024 United Kingdom general election. Wikipedia 07/05/2024: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2024_United_Kingdom_general_election&oldid=1232816494> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

4. General election 2024 in maps and charts. BBC News 07/05/2024. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nglegege1o> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

5. Ibid.

6. Pfeffer, Anshel (2024): Despite Starmer's Stonking Win, U.K. Election Results Signal Rise of Far-right and Far-left Populism. Haaretz 07/06/2024. <https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2024-07-05/ty-article/.premium/u-k-election-results-signal-rise-of-far-right-and-far-left-populism/00000190-8295-d12c-ab9a-dff736a00000> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

7. Finn, Daniel (2024): Keir Starmer Already Faces a Real Challenge From the Left. Jacobin 07/05/2024. <https://jacobin.com/2024/07/starmer-election-labour-gaza-greens> (Accessed: 2024-05-07).

8. Larison, Daniel (2024): The Dreadful Continuity of British Foreign Policy. Eunomia 06/05/2024. (Accessed: 2024-05-07).