Election preview: United Kingdom

History repeats, but with a twist. Back in 2017 Britain and France voted in the same week, and I was able to report on them under the heading “​A cliffhanger and a landslide.” France’s then-new president, Emmanuel Macron, won a big legislative majority, but at the same time British prime minister Theresa May, having called an unnecessary early election, came perilously close to defeat.

This year the boot is on the other foot. It’s France, as we reviewed on Monday, where the outcome is very much in doubt and the stakes high, while the British election being held tonight is notably lacking in suspense. Labour will win a big majority; the questions are how big, and how will the other parties fare relative to one another.

Like France (and Australia), but unlike most of Europe, Britain votes in single-member districts; there are 650 of them in the House of Commons. Unlike France, there is no second round: voting is first-past-the-post, meaning that tactical voting, when it happens, is more speculative. Sudden shifts in sentiment can have unexpectedly large effects, and the overall vote totals can be a poor guide to the number of seats won.

Last time around, in 2019, the Conservatives (then led by Boris Johnson) won 43.6% of the vote and 365 seats. Labour (led by Jeremy Corbyn) had 32.1% but only 202 seats. The Liberal Democrats won 11.6% and just 11 seats, while the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), with a much more concentrated 3.9%, won 48 seats. Most of the other seats went to Welsh and Irish parties with very small but concentrated votes. Only two other parties had more than 1% of the vote: the Greens, whose 2.6% won them a single seat, and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which with 2.0% won no seats at all.

A lot has happened since 2019. Johnson, having delivered withdrawal from the European Union, was dispatched by his party in 2022; his replacement, Liz Truss, lasted only a month and a half, and upon her resignation Rishi Sunak was elected unopposed. Meanwhile Corbyn resigned following his election loss and Keir Starmer was chosen to replace him; Corbyn was subsequently suspended from the party and earlier this year, after announcing that he would contest re-election as an independent, he was expelled.

But through it all, the trajectory of the polls has been relentless. The Tories fell behind when Johnson first got into trouble, and apart from a sudden slide (and subsequent slight recovery) in the Truss era, the trend has just been steadily downwards. They are now stuck in the low 20s, about twenty points behind Labour; the Lib Dems have long been hovering around 10%, although the drop in the Conservative vote means they should be much better placed in terms of seats than last time.*

And then there’s Farage’s party, now called “Reform”. As the Conservatives’ position has become more and more hopeless, voters from its right flank, with nothing to lose, have been peeling off towards Reform; having hit 10% in the polls about the beginning of this year, it is now in the mid teens and apparently still rising. But polls for a protest party are always unreliable, and it’s unclear whether they will translate into real votes or (even more difficult) seats.

In addition to the general feeling that the Conservatives have been in power for too long and have presided over national decline, Labour has other things in its favor. One is the fact that its opponents, as in Australia and the United States, are largely captive to a grassroots membership that has been aroused to fever pitch by deceitful media and now believe that the solution to any problem, in the teeth of all the electoral evidence, is to move even further to the right.

Another, of course, is Brexit: Starmer is in the happy position where he does not need to say anything on the subject for it to assist him. He doesn’t need to suggest that he might do anything in office towards reversing it – indeed he can disclaim any such idea – and therefore can avoid alienating the diminishing number of pro-Brexit voters, while knowing that the motivated pro-Europeans will flock to him anyway.

A third thing is the steep decline of the SNP, beset by internal troubles and punished for having been in government in Scotland for too long. At the last three elections Labour has been attacked for the very possibility (which it has implausibly denied) that it would govern with SNP support, but that is no longer an issue. The broader question of dealing with minor parties and possibly making moves towards a fairer electoral system has also faded from view.

Projections made in the last week have Labour on track to win somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 seats, as against perhaps 100 Conservatives, 60 or so Lib Dems, around 15 SNP and single digits for all the rest, including Reform. That would be a shattering result, although not all that different from Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide – which, despite many forecasts, did not in the end wreak any fundamental change in the landscape.

Starmer does not look like a man who is seeking fundamental change, but rather one who, having brought his party back from the fringe to a moderate respectability, now plans to do the same for his country. The voters seem willing to let him try.

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* A redistribution of seats since last time will help the Conservatives slightly, but in the context of the numbers we’re talking about that can pretty much be ignored.