Mike Phipps reviews The British General Election of 2024, by Robert Ford, Tim Bale, Will Jennings  and Paula Surridge, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Some features of the 2024 general election were apparent in the immediate aftermath: a Labour landslide on the smallest share of the vote in modern times, on an almost unprecedentedly low turnout. For less obvious aspects, we have had to wait over eighteen months for political scientists to crunch the numbers. Has the wait been worth it?

“Brilliant,” “written by the wisest heads in academia,” “masterpiece,” “vital,” “definitive,” “perfection,” “must-read” – the advance plaudits for this account of the 2024 general election perhaps raise expectations too high. In reality, I found much of the analysis proffered by this book to be run-of-the-mill, second-hand and lacking rigour, particularly in the build-up to the big event.

Problematic pre-election coverage

A central weakness is its acceptance of the Keir Starmer / Morgan McSweeney version of how the Labour Party was ‘transformed’ into an election-winning machine in the run-up to 2024. Keir Starmer may still be convinced that the now sacked McSweeney is one of the greatest strategists in the entire world, but that lack of judgment may tell us more about Starmer’s own current predicament.

This book went to press before McSweeney’s demise, but it should not have been relying on this lazy narrative in the first place. Its one-sided approach is particularly evident in the coverage of the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey and the suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn.

In places, the book’s acceptance of the Labour leadership’s version of events stands reality on its head. “McSweeney inherited a mess,” we are told. “Labour’s grassroots campaigners and managers had been neglected by the Corbyn leadership.” Anyone who took part in the mass canvassing sessions organised in the Corbyn years would without any doubt question this. Worse, it overlooks the fact that Keir Starmer actually disbanded Labour’s Community Organising Unit and oversaw the suspension of a number of local CLPs and activists, demoralising members and undermining grassroots efforts.

For something that is being promoted as the definitive account of the 2024 general election, there are some curious omissions, particularly on the full significance of the Labour apparatus’s factional eve-of-campaign removal of popular candidates and other self-inflicted wounds during the campaign. The sense conveyed here is that because Labour won the election by a landslide, therefore the people who masterminded its strategy must have their insights promoted uncritically.

“This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with piss poor candidates anymore,” a Labour insider is quoted, unchallenged, regarding Labour’s ‘tightened’ selection process. But it clearly was factional, as in the removal of Brighton MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle. Meanwhile, unsuitable candidates continued to be nodded through on an entirely factional basis, sometimes with disastrous consequences, as in the Rochdale by-election earlier in 2024. The failure of this “definitive” account to delve further into these issues looks sloppy, to say the least, and worse, over-reliant on self-interested leadership sources.

Positives

So what will you find in this book that is new and interesting? First, the account of the digital campaign, particularly the dominance of TikTok. This is surprising, as the platform did not significantly feature in 2019, does not allow political advertising and has a young demographic in an election where most parties were focused on older voters. But significantly, material that appeared on TikTok resurfaced as newsworthy in more mainstream media outlets. Digital, the chapter concludes, is now  “a pivotal component for those seeking electoral success.”

Newspaper circulation, by contrast, has plummeted since the 2019 general election. Sky News political editor Beth Rigby remarked that “this will be the first time in the general election, probably, that nobody really cares whether they’re endorsed by the editorial of a particular newspaper or not because it doesn’t matter anymore.” On the day, the Sun was the only title to switch allegiance from the Conservatives to Labour, but it was a “tepid, qualified editorial endorsement.” More significantly, many newspapers were instrumental in establishing Reform UK as the main alternative to the big two parties early in the campaign.

The breakdown of the new House of Commons is also worth noting. While a narrow majority of Conservative MPs attended state schools for the third Parliament in a row, the share of privately educated Tories actually rose in 2024. “Three out of the five Reform UK MPs were privately educated, making the populist right-wingers fond of railing against an out-of-touch establishment the only party with a majority of privately educated MPs.”

The gender gap among MPs narrowed and their current ethnic diversity – up from 65 ethnic minority MPs to 90 – for the first time corresponds to that of the voting public. But in other respects, MPs are drawn from an increasingly narrow background and constitute a distinct political class: well over half of all MPs in this Parliament were already working in political professions immediately prior to their election. Furthermore, over half of Britain’s MPs are new to the Commons, including 56% of the Labour intake.

Drilling down into the Labour vote

How people voted constitutes the heart of this book. Age and educational polarisation were again key features of the 2024 election; and while the Tories lost votes across all their strongest demographics, mainly to Reform, there was no “rising tide” for Keir Starmer’s Party: Labour’s largest gains were much smaller than the Tories’ largest losses. In short, “instead of the pendulum swinging directly from government to opposition, the government suffered a record collapse, but the main opposition barely rose as voting fragmented like never before… the 2024 election delivered unprecedented fragmentation.”

Geography was another decisive factor. “Never before in the post-war era has the outcome in seats been so sharply at variance with what would have happened if the rises and falls in party support had been the same throughout the country,” note the authors.

Brexit continued to exercise an influence. The seats which had voted most heavily for Leave in the 2016 referendum were also those where Reform did best in 2024. Additionally, the Tories lost support more heavily in seats where the party was previously strongest – particularly to Reform.

Labour’s vote also merits close examination. Remember: Keir Starmer’s Labour won fewer votes overall in 2024 than in their 2019 defeat under Jeremy Corbyn, and far fewer than Corbyn won in the narrower defeat of 2017.

In England, the Party’s overall share of the vote increased by just half a percentage point on what the Party had achieved in 2019 – so much for the great Starmer transformation.  In contrast, in Scotland, Labour enjoyed a spectacular revival with a +16.7-point increase in its support.

In Wales, Labour’s share of the vote fell by −4.0 points, which the authors attribute to having to defend their record in devolved government. But the retirement of the popular Mark Drakeford as Welsh First Minister with a brand image clearly distinct from Keir Starmer’s and his replacement by the scandal-hit Vaughan Gething should also be mentioned as a central factor in Welsh Labour’s falling popularity.

Writing on this site about the general election in Llanelli, Welsh Senedd member Mike Hedges noted: “Having campaigned for decades, I expected areas of council estates and older terraced housing to do well for Labour but in newer private estates and larger detached houses Labour to do poorly. The opposite was true at this election.”

This anecdotal evidence was confirmed by the authors of this book across Wales and England too: as with the Conservatives, Labour recorded their worst performances in seats where they had previously been strongest. “Labour’s share of the vote typically fell back in constituencies where the party had won more than 45% of the vote in 2019 and did so heavily, by nearly 15 points.”

The defection of the Muslim vote was one factor, a consequence of the Labour leadership’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the strong showing of independent candidates who highlighted this. Independents on average won 14.8% of the vote in seats where more than 20% of voters identify as Muslim. Another factor was that Labour support fell back in seats with a relatively young population, this time losing votes primarily to the Greens.

Labour’s higher vote in areas where they had previously been weak can be explained by anti-Conservative tactical voting. For similar reasons, they were also the main beneficiaries of the decline of the SNP vote in Scotland.

But Labour’s  efforts to reconnect with the working-class Leave voters who had seemingly cost the Party vital support in the traditionally Labour ‘red wall’ constituencies captured by the Conservatives in 2019 came to nothing. “Of this,” the authors say baldly, “there is no sign.”

Labour’s ‘Jenga tower’

“‘Change’ was Labour’s slogan in 2024, and change is what voters delivered in an election which sent records tumbling,” conclude the authors. If Labour’s recent by-election results show the Party having its worst ever quarter, it’s because Labour in office have not provided the change they promised and that voters so desperately want.

Labour MPs are worried: the outmoded electoral system, combined with clever targeting, has given the Party a big majority, but with insecure foundations, like an electoral ‘Jenga tower’. Flimsy majorities that will disappear on a small voter swing mean the next election will be fought on a map with more competitive marginals than any recent contest. Will this make backbenchers more rebellious? The next few months may prove decisive.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.