In the immediate aftermath of the UK parliamentary election of 2024, the big lesson is the accountability of political parties. As the adage goes, the people essentially ‘threw the rascals out’. The electorate was unhappy with the governing Conservative Party (and the Scottish National Party in Scotland, which is another but similar story of accountability) and punished them by voting for other parties.

As John Curtice (2024), one of Britain’s most prominent election scholars noted, people did not ‘flock to Labour’. The Labour Party may have won a landslide in parliamentary seats, but not in the popular vote. Labour won 35 percent of the popular vote but this translated through the first-past-the-post system into 63 percent of the seats in Parliament. The proportion of the electorate voting Labour was far from a landslide. It was not even a swing to Labour and certainly not a ‘manifesto’ for Labour, as argued by Tony Blair (2024).  

It was the collapse of the Conservative Party in Britain and the SNP in Scotland, that fueled such a huge parliamentary majority for Labour. For example, the Conservative Party won only 131 seats compared to 365 won in 2019 when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. They have not had a worse outcome in the 190-year history of the Conservative Party. As many pundits noted, the election was all about the losses of the Conservative Party rather than the rise of Labour and the minority parties.

Voters left the Conservatives for one or more of the other minor parties, with the Liberal Democrats being the biggest winner, becoming the third largest party, just behind the Conservatives. But remember the thrashing the Liberal Democrats received in 2015, when they lost 48 of their 56 MPs in the general election. This was under the leadership of Nick Clegg, when the party broke some of its election pledges, such as on not raising tuition fees. That was another unforgettable lesson in electoral accountability.

The good news for everyone is that the electorate will hold incumbent politicians accountable for problems. Elections matter. No fine tuning around this or that policy but incumbents are often punished for bad times. Elections are a blunt but powerful instrument of holding politicians to account. The impact of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration flows following wars and famines, Russia invading Ukraine, and the ensuing cost-of-living crisis have been felt around the world and Britain was no exception. As households felt their standard of living declining, they held the parties in power accountable.  

Labour has ambitious plans for addressing problems with healthcare, crime, public transportation, education, and more, and with up to five years to demonstrate progress. They have new ideas and are not simply proposing to throw money at problems. It is a promising power shift. But more broadly, this election’s lesson in accountability can only be a constructive incentive for all the political parties in the UK. And there might well be similar patterns across the liberal-democratic world, such as in France and the USA. There is no right or left-wing swing, as it seems less ideological than pragmatic, as electorates hold their incumbents to account. This is not chaos but one of the primary ways democracy works.

My apologies if this is blindingly obvious, but I don’t see this point being made by others. Don’t over think this: Elections matter. Democracies are healthy in the long-run because they are accountable to the public. We’ve just seen it.   

References

Blair, Tony (2024), ‘Get Tough on Crime and Don’t Fall Prey to Wokeism’, The Sunday Times, 7 July: 5.

Curtice, John (2024), ‘Don’t be Mislead, Britain Did Not Flock to Labour’, The Daily Telegraph, 7 July: 16.