The Polls Were Not Wrong: Labour Crushes the Tories

July 5, 2025

London, Friday morning, July 5, 2024. It’s been a bit cool and rainy in London this week. However, it was nice and sunny yesterday for election day. That did not result in higher turnout, but perhaps it prevented an even lower one. Today, it is back to cool and rainy as power transfers here in an impressive show of democratic stability. Americans can learn a thing or two about democracy from the Brits. There was a time I never thought I would say such a thing.

Later today, Keir Starmer will be appointed the 58th Prime Minister in British history. The King will ask him to form a government after outgoing PM Rishi Sunak presents him with his resignation. Once Starmer is PM he will start appointing his government, possibly as early as today. As of this writing, all but five of the 650 constituencies have finished counting. Labour has so far won 411 seats, far more than is needed for a majority. 

However, the massive landslide in seats masks the relatively soft voter share. Labour appears to have gotten just under 34% of the vote. This is a lower share than Tony Blair got in his winning effort in 1997, but it is also lower than the share former leader Jeremy Corbyn got in his losing effort in 2017. (Corbyn won a seat in Islington - right next to Starmer’s Camden constituency - as an independent yesterday.) The election appears on the surface to be more of a rejection of the Tories than an embrace of Labour.

And what a rejection it is! The Tories have just 119 seats, the lowest the party has ever had since the modern party system began in 1835. There were a lot of notable losses among the Tories, including former PM Liz Truss, moderate leader and once-potential party leader candidate Penny Mordant, and Chancellor Grant Shapps. A dozen or so cabinet members lost their seats, and the Tory candidates in former PMs David Cameron (who is a life peer) and Theresa May’s (who retired this year) constituencies lost.

Source: BBC News

Who is left to lead the party? We know Suella Braverman will try. She announced she was going to run for leader in her acceptance speech. Braverman is not well-liked by the more moderate members of her party and she intends to push the Tories to be more like Reform. There is a debate among Tories right now about whether to move quickly or deliberately in selecting a new leader. (By tradition, Sunak will resign. However, some would like him to stay on in a caretaker capacity while they take their time selecting his successor.) 

Probably only bright side for Tories is they did make it to triple digits - but they lost even fewer seats than the exit polls suggested

Turnout was 60%, which is down by 7.6 points from 2019. I spoke with several people yesterday who told me they were not voting because it wouldn’t matter. They seemed to think the election was already over (because it was going to be a landslide). A couple of people suggested that while they were happy the Tories were getting dumped, they were not really sure anything will change. But I can’t say how representative that was of people’s thinking in general because I was in Starmer’s home constituency - it is solid Labour and solid Starmer.

Reform only got four seats, but 7-time loser Nigel Farage finally won a seat. Farage will be a right wing nuisance in Parliament, especially since Reform won a lot of votes but they were diffuse enough to win them few seats. There has been some chatter that he may make an effort to take over the Conservative Party. Several Tory MPs said last night on television that they would not welcome him into the party because of his xenophobic and racist statements. Farage does not care about the Reform Party; it is a means to his ends - taking over the Conservative Party and making into a neofascist party appears to be one of them. (But he’ll settle for replacing the Tories with another party.)

Reform underperformed according to the polling (vote share) and the exit poll (seat allocation). Last night, they thought they were getting 13 seats and perhaps as much as 18% of the vote. In the end, the got four seats and 14% of the vote. The vote share was still enough to make them the third largest party in terms of vote share, but it is a few points lower than polling suggested. The deputy leader of the party was on television last night after the exit poll was released boasting of how they would be running the government after the next election. “If we can go from zero to 13 in four years, what can we get in five more years?” If you are doing the math, it would be 29, but that didn’t stop Reform from thinking they were on the cusp of governing. Fascists are relentless, as the National Rally in France has shown. So do not sleep on Reform; they are going to work tirelessly on grievance politics, particularly with white youth.

The Nations

The Scottish National Party (SNP) was wiped out by Labour - nine seats, which is down 38 from 2019. It was expected that Labour would retake the southern districts in Scotland around Edinburgh and Glasgow, the party beat the SNP in a lot of northern constituencies. This may appear to be a repudiation of the SNP in my ancestral homeland, but the politics are a bit more complicated. Labour gave Scots their best chance to get rid of the Tories in the UK Parliament, but the Conservatives are no threat to anyone in the Scottish Parliament. There will be a Scottish election in two years, so time will tell - but this election could signal the end of SNP leader and Scottish First Minister John Swinney’s very short tenure. From multiple reports, the SNP sounds like it is in some disarray this morning.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein has won seven seats and is now the largest Westminster party in that nation. Sinn Fein MPs have famously boycotted the UK Parliament for years, although apparently they deny this (that was news to me, but I heard it reported this morning that way). It’s unclear whether they will send their MPs this time. Sinn Fein is the largest party in Ulster and the Republic now, although they are shut out of government in Ireland thanks to a coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It may be high time the republican democratic socialist party participates at Westminster. The clock for Irish reunification may be ticking.

In Wales, the nationalist party fared relatively well, but does not command the support there that Sinn Fein does in Northern Ireland. Plaid Cyrmu (PC) won four seats, up from two. But Labour is the dominant party in the western nation, winning 27 seats. This is an increase of nine. The Tories lost 12 seats there. They couldn’t catch break anywhere.

In the nations, Reform got more votes in Wales than PC yet got no seats. The Scots were having none of that Reform rubbish. The party finished fifth in the north with no seats. And in Northern Ireland, Reform was such a non-entity that whatever votes they received have been lumped into “Others,” which made up 3.1%. Unsurprisingly, Reform is strong in England and Wales, the two nations that voted for Brexit. Unfortunately for Remainers and other decent people, there are a lot more people in England than in the other nations combined.

What to watch for right away: the argument for political legitimacy

Conservatives in Parliament will challenge Labour because they will claim they do not have a popular mandate. The combined Reform and Conservative vote share was 35%, slightly above Labour’s 33.8%. However, the remaining parties and independent vote is largely center-left. The vote share that is center-left is about 60%, with just over half of that going to Labour. It would be as inaccurate to say that conservatives won more votes than the center-left (which is where Labour is) than to say Labour won 60% of the vote. But expect vote share to be a political issue going forward, perhaps immediately. There will be calls for proportional representation, something that even Labour representatives have called on in the past. A former Tory MP claimed last night that Labour will not support PR now, but a former Labour MP disagreed with her. He said there is more support for PR than the “political class” realizes.

The UK - in fact the US as well - would be well-served by using the German model of combining geography-based districts with national party lists. The good thing about this approach is it is an animal already in existence in the UK: Scotland uses this model in electing the Scottish Parliament. This gives voters a chance to be represented by a person (geography) and by their political values (party list). How those types of representatives are proportioned in Parliament is an additional consideration.

Another thing to watch for: quick policy action

Labour and Lib Dems will move quickly to pass legislation, while the Tories and Reform try to stop it. We should expect to see Starmer try to capitalize on the electoral landslide to enact some important parts of Labour’s manifesto. Starmer knows how to read election results. The 34% vote share will give him pause, but hopefully it will not be to slow down. IF he waits too long, he risks the Tories getting their act together and working with Reform to undermine the government’s legitimacy. The UK doesn’t have the massive billionaire-run media that the US does, but the right does have important allies in the British media who will amplify their message. I expect to see Starmer putting a legislative package in front of Parliament as soon as next week.

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey was ecstatic at the party’s celebration last night. His 71-seat result is the best the party has ever done. Some were suggesting they could reach numbers that hight, which got Davey worried because he thought a good night for them would have been 40-45 seats. In Davey’s speech to supporters early this morning he said that he move forcefully to present legislative solutions in Parliament - particularly on housing (something the Lib Dems and Labour might agree on). When asked why did he think the Lib Dems could pass legislation with only 71 seats, he responded: “Because our ideas are better.”

We’ll see.