Hi, my name's Ollie and in this Politics Explained video I'm going to go through a large number of content updates to the UK politics and UK government sections of the Edexcel A-Level Politics specification in the wake of the 2024 election and the new Labour government. All of the updates you can see in the PDF on your screen are included in the updated tech books for UK politics and UK government that can be purchased on the Politics Explained website. Once you've bought these, these continuously update with new examples and new content. throughout the year all the way up until your exam. And on the Politics Explained website you can also find essay plans, tutoring and a place to sign up to the newly launched Politics Explained Classroom which is a weekly membership including weekly example packs, weekly detailed quizzes and three exclusive videos every week to put you on the path to achieving an A star in A level politics.
Yeah without further ado let's get into it. So starting off having a look at the contents of the different parts of the specification this is going to go through. So the vast majority of the updates are to UK politics because that's kind of where elections, party policy etc come in.
So we're going to first look at electoral systems, the kind of how the election can be seen in relation to first-past-the-post or other more proportional electoral systems and in particular the fact that it's the least proportional election result in British history. We're then going to have a look at the voting behaviour in the media topic, crucially giving a big case study of the 2024 election across a wide range of areas, whether that be leadership, competence, social factors, everything like that. We're then going to look at political parties, first by looking at party policy that was shown in the manifestos of Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Reform, as well as the Greens, actually, in the 2024 election.
Before, crucially, looking at how we look at the party system. So whether there's a two party system, a one party dominant system, whether crucially, is there a multi-party system now in the wake of the 2024 election and the importance of minor parties within that system. And then finally, there are also a few UK government updates to go through.
So we're going to look at devolution in particular, what Labour's proposed reforms are as a new government to devolution in England in particular. Then you can have a look at PM in the Cabinet, a number of the key appointments to Keir Starmer's first Cabinet and why he chose them. And finally, some small updates to Parliament as well. So yeah, that's everything we're going to go through.
It's going to be a very long video, so I'm going to add chapters in throughout the video. So just skip between different parts, don't watch it all in one and keep coming back to this video as it should be useful throughout the whole year, all the way up until your exams as well. Yeah, let's start off by having a look at...
electoral system. So as I said in the introduction, the 2024 general election in the UK was the least proportional election result in British history. And this is according to the Gallagher Index which is used to measure proportionality. So Labour and the Lib Dems in the 2024 election performed far better than they did five years earlier in 2019, despite their vote shares only marginally increasing.
So Labour won a landslide, they won 411 seats, 63% of all the seats and a 174 seat majority so just short of Blair's 179 seat majority in 1997 but that was on just 33.7% of the vote. This is a clear example of the winner's bonus that First Past the Post brings. The party that wins not only wins, they get a share of the vote that far exceeds their vote share as you see here, almost double their vote share in terms of seats in terms of the election result for the Labour Party.
So actually what you see is in 2019 they received just over, so less than 2% less of the vote, but less than half of the seats effectively. So they increased the vote by 1.6%, but increased their seats by 209. That simply shouldn't work and that shows the distorting impact of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Similarly, you look at the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems pretty much had exactly the same vote share.
So they got 12.2% in 2024, which is only marginally up from the 11.6% that they got in 2019. But their seats increased from 11 to 72. So they massively increased their seats. And that shows that votes in certain places matter far more than votes in other places in the first-past-the-post system. What you saw with the Lib Dems is they targeted seats absolutely brilliantly in this election, were highly effective at targeting.
I felt pretty, really affluent, the nicest parts of England, the most affluent parts of England were very successful as a result of that, despite increasing their number of votes by only a little bit. You see that as well with the minor parties. So minor parties, and here we're considering other than Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, increased their share of the vote significantly. So they got just 12.7% of the vote in 2019. And we're going to talk about this a lot more when we look at minor parties in the party system later on in the video, to 30.4% of the vote in 2024. But due to first-past-the-post, it was still greatly underrepresented in terms of seats.
The most egregious kind of example of this is Reform UK. So they were the third largest party in terms of vote share at 14% of the vote. Really not far off what the Conservatives got, but they got just five MPs, 0.8% of MPs. It's a clear example of First Past the Post under-representing minor parties who don't have geographically concentrated support. And you see that with the Green Party as well, 7% of the vote, but just four MPs.
Part of the reason, as I kind of mentioned, for greatly increased electoral success for Labour in the Lib Dems was that they targeted seats, marginal seats, very effectively. And there was significant tactical voting. So many voters, particularly in England, supported whichever of the Labour or Lib Dem candidate was most likely to win in their constituency, as their highest priority was to remove the Tories. So combined, Labour and the Lib Dems won 74% of the seats with less than half of the vote. And Pressure Group Make Votes Matter reported in 2024 a fifth of voters intended to vote tactically.
So that's where you see tactical voting also have a big impact within First Plus Post and in electoral success. Ultimately, it's very clear that the first-part post electoral system is designed to create a two-party system where only Labour and the Tories can realistically win. In the past, this was less of a problem, as the parties were broad churches and the vast majority of voters supported one of them.
In 2024, though, over 42% of voters didn't vote for Labour or the Tories, showing there's no longer a two-party system in voters'preferences in how they vote. Despite this, The first-past-the-post system upheld a two-party system in the results, with the parties receiving 81.8% of the seats, with just 57.4% of the vote. And crucially, to show this, it's really interesting to look at how the result would have been different under more proportional systems that are also used in the UK.
This was kind of displayed by, or made by, Pressure Group, Make Votes Matter. So you see, first-past-the-post gives Labour far more votes. than more seats than they would have got in the more proportional systems. In particular, AMS, STV are ones that are used. STV are not minor than AMS in Scotland.
So it really shows that under more proportional systems, they would have had much more fair and more proportional results, in particular Labour having a lot fewer seats and the Greens and Reform in particular having a much larger number of seats. What we're going to have a look at now is some of the arguments in relation to first past the post for versus against which is a key debate you get asked in your exam and watch is one that is potentially quite likely to come up in this year's exams in 2025. So firstly how can we use to demonstrate the advantage of first past the post? So it did demonstrate speed and simplicity as an advantage of first past the post. The first constituent result was announced at 11.15 on the day of the election and the result was really clear by the early hours of next morning.
with Starmer arriving in Downing Street as the new Prime Minister at 12.40pm, the day of the election. That simply doesn't happen in a lot of coalition, proportional systems that deliver coalitions. Often there's days, if not weeks, of negotiating behind the scenes to form a coalition government before the government can kind of hit the ground running effectively.
The election also demonstrated that first-past-the-post does create strong single-party governments, which is one of the key stated benefits of first-past-the-post. Starmer's Labour Party won 174 seat majority with just 33.7% of the vote. So ultimately, it should have led to a massive outrage at his, does he have a mandate? Do the Labour government have a mandate? And should be massive outrage at first.
But you don't really see that in the media. You don't see that in public opinion, limited public outrage and questioning of his mandate. People are quite happy with the first pass the vote system, first pass the post system, as was seen in the 2011 AV referendum, where they ultimately rejected a more proportional system.
The election also shows that a key benefit of first-possibility votes is that voters can hold MPs to account by removing those who have performed poorly when in office, which is potentially not possible if you have a system like AMS, where you have party lists, where the parties decide how high people get up on that list. So you see that in particular, for example, in South West Norfolk, with a huge 26.2% swing in Liz Truss's constituency. And what you saw is Labour 1, James Bagger, former...
Conservative even won over 6,000 votes after running with the specific aim of taking votes away from trusts. So you see that kind of it does enable voters to hold their MP to account. And the election also showed that the electoral system allows for candidates with strong local support to be elected, creating an effective MP-consituency link. The most high profile of these is Jeremy Corbyn, who was re-elected in 2024 despite being an independent candidate, having been a Labour candidate in every previous election he'd won since 1983, where he had been the MP there. And in total, five pro-Palestine, including Corbyn in this here.
independent MPs were elected in seats for significant Muslim populations for whom the issue was the most important and a number of these had been Labour seats. So that's where you see single issue voting can be quite important as well which we'll come back to later in the video. However, and I think more compellingly, in my opinion at least, it can be used to support the disadvantages of first-past-the-post.
The election clearly showed that many MPs are elected with limited support from their constituency. with most failing to win a majority, so 58% of voters ended up with an MP they didn't vote for. And Terry Jermey in South West Norfolk won with just 26.7% of the vote, which is just 15.7% of the total constituency population if you take into account turnout. Also clearly demonstrated the winner's bonus as I mentioned beforehand, winning 63% of the seats with 33.7% of the vote and it crucially showed that First Postal Post greatly under-represents the majority of minor parties that lack geographically concentrated support.
So Reform being the clearest example of that, with 14.3% of the vote finishing, a pretty good third behind the Conservatives, but winning just five seats. And finally, it shows that the lack of voter choice means that many voters are forced to vote tactically, as I mentioned earlier in the video. Make Votes Matter estimated around a third of voters, a fifth, sorry, of voters voted tactically in the 2024 election. and it was a significant reason for the success of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. They targeted different seats and kind of kept away from each other and voters followed and voted tactically very effectively to get the Tories out.
And finally the election also showed that there's a lack of voter choice due to votes mattering far more in marginal seats than in safe seats leading to a greater turnout in these marginal seats. So Manchester Rushome was won by Labour with 50 1.9% of the vote on a turnout of just 40% because it was a clear safe seat for Labour, whereas Central Devon was a really marginal seat and that saw a lot more people turning up to vote, with Conservatives and Mel Stride holding on by just 61 votes. So that's electoral systems. What we're going to have a look at now is go to the voting behaviour and the media topic, and crucially looking at the 2024 election as a case study and the key reasons for the result. So.
starting off by having a look at an overview of the general election result and its impact. So Sunak surprised many when he did call the election on 4th of July 2024. The Tories were 20 points behind in the polls at the time and it's expected as a result that he would wait until later in the year to call an election. As predicted by the polls the election saw an unprecedented swing from the Conservatives to Labour with a Tory landslide in 2019 turning into a Labour landslide of even bigger proportions in 2024. Despite only increasing their vote share by 1.6%, the Labour Party won a landslide with 63% of the seats and a 174-seat majority.
It was the least proportional election since elections began and shows the impact of first-past-the-post. Having been wiped out in Scotland by the SNP since 2010, which is a key reason for their failure to come back into government since then, Labour returned to become the dominant party in Scotland. They won 37 out of 57 seats with the SNP reduced to just nine seats, down from 48 in 2019. And the Conservative Party had its worst result in its parliamentary history, winning just 121 seats with 23.7% of the vote.
The party's 2019 gains in the North were almost entirely reversed, whilst they also lost many of their traditional heartlands in the South East to the Liberal Democrats. Ultimately they held on to just over half of the voters that they got in 2019, so a massive drop in their vote share. The party was challenged not only by Labour but also by Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats, both of which did extremely well. So the Le Dems picked up a record 72 seats as I mentioned with 12.2% of the vote. Reform did incredibly in terms of vote share, becoming the third largest party with over 14% of the vote and they also finished second in 98 seats which suggests that in future elections they have the potential to really increase their seat share if they only increase their vote share marginally.
Although they only received five MPs though due to first-past-the-post. Minor parties increased their share of the vote significantly from 12.7% of the vote to a 30.4% 4% of the vote in 2024 but were greatly underrepresented in terms of seats and turnout was really low at just 59.9%. It was 7.4% lower than it was in 2019 and potential reasons for that include distrust in politicians, apathy as the policies of the main parties were similar and a belief that people's votes wouldn't matter as a Labour majority was clear in the polling.
What we're going to have a look at now is a wide range of factors that can be used to kind of that determine the outcome and can be analysed for how important they were. The first of these being the campaign. So though Labour's majority was clear in the polling prior to the election being called, and this didn't change through the six-week campaign, the campaign did have a significant impact on the result in a number of ways. The most significant of these was the rise in support for Reform UK, who rose from just over 10% of the polls at the start of the campaign to 14% by the time people voted on the 4th of July. And particularly important to this jump was the announcement in the beginning of June that Nigel Farage was standing clad in and become leader of the party.
And you see that in this graph here from the FT. The reform took votes from both Labour and the Tories. Crucially, they did much more damage to the Conservative Party. And that's because they split the right wing vote in many leave constituencies, therefore stopping the Tories winning a lot of these constituencies, which Labour then won instead, even if they also lost some.
votes to reform. That's a crucial example of the spoiler effect which we'll look more at when we look at minor parties later in the video. The Tory party's decline in support was partly driven by Farage standing for reform with some of their voters kind of defecting as a result of that.
They also shot themselves in the foot on two key occasions and this is potentially an election where we can say that the campaign had a pretty important impact. So of course Labour were always going to win a majority. and they're always going to win a big majority.
But I think the Conservative Party really made very good sure of that and increased the size of their majority and decreased their vote share through a number of things that happened in their campaign. The first key one of these was Rysunak being criticised by the public and other party leaders for leaving an event commemorating D-Day early to attend an ITV interview, leaving Cameron to deputise for him. I think still no one really knows why he did it.
It was politically an incredibly stupid thing to do and was met with a lot of outrage by the public, especially right wing voters, many of whom, as a result, may have been kind of convinced to vote reform instead. On the 12th of June, it emerged that a couple of Conservative Party candidates, including Parliamentary Private Secretary to the PM Craig Williams, have placed bets on a July election days before it was announced, allegedly using insider information. And this contributed to the already well-established. over the past five years view that the Tories were corrupt and self-interested, further eroding their popularity.
And it must be said that also Labour and the Lib Dems ran extremely effective campaigns. Even though neither party's vote share increased significantly through the campaign, they both targeted resources at seats highly effectively and by directing resources pretty much almost exclusively in different seats, they also benefited greatly from tactical voting. So the Lib Dems were described by some as one of the most effective in British electoral history. They won almost every seat they targeted, including long-standing Tory strongholds such as Oxfordshire, in which the Tories have been completely wiped out of.
Leader Ed Davey employed an interesting strategy, it must be said, of consistently doing fun activities such as paddleboarding, bungee jumping, even if in some ways he made fun of himself doing that. This was effective in allowing the parties to cut through with voters, gaining media attention and increasing the public's awareness of Davey, who came across as quite a likeable character. So that shows the campaign actually in the 2024 election can be seen as having a pretty significant impact. By far, in my opinion, and I think the polling shows this as well, and you'll see most people making similar arguments, the most important factor in the election result in particular, in the fact that the Tories'vote share pretty much halved was effectively what they'd done since the 2019 election.
And this is where you see competence, trust and also leadership. And these were... what would often be described as a balance issue sometimes by the exam board. If you see that in question or come up in a textbook they are by far the most important in the election result.
So, apparently since 2019, since the 2019 election, the Conservative government performed pretty disastrously in office. The public viewed the Conservatives as incompetent, untrustworthy and deeply disliked Sunak himself as a leader. So, you see here is a really good graph showing the polling over time.
with a number of key factors at the same time. What you'll notice is a lot of them. There's a lot of scandals, there's a lot of things that the Tories did wrong.
and that ultimately played a massive part in them losing. If you look a bit closer, Partygate, where the Partygate scandal begins, so you see a significant drop-off from when that was announced and crucially Liz Truss becomes leader and her mini budget which effectively crashed the economy, increased mortgage rates in particular which was really bad for the Tories, you see a massive drop-off. in their popularity. Soon it comes back in but really fails to increase their polling and that they actually decrease significantly through it.
So you see in particular Partygate and Liz Truss'mini budget are really important events that undermine trust in the government and painted them as economically incompetent and a lot of people may describe them as corrupt as well. So after the 2019 election, the Tory party was dominant. Johnson seemed set for at least a decade in power, but a large number of scanners, as I mentioned, halved their support by the time of the election.
So they undermined trust in the party and the government, which the public viewed as corrupt and self-serving, and also wrecked the party's reputation for competent economic management. Both of these factors actually were quite important as well in the 1997 election, with Black Wednesday after 1992. and a sleaze in John Major's Conservative Party. So again you see a Labour, a landside Labour majority of similar proportions with de facto's being really important.
So the fact that the government failed to follow its own Covid-19 regulations and held parties whilst the public stayed inside, revealed in the party that the Gates scandal was particularly damaging, led to Boris Johnson's resignation which of course Boris Johnson became largely unpopular because of it and so did the Tory party. But crucially, they also lost Boris Johnson as an asset. He is one of the few potential leaders of the Tory party who could get the sort of voters who then went on to vote for reform. So removing him, viewed by some Conservative MPs as a bit of a failing as well, particularly if you look at who he was replaced with. In particular, Liz Truss's kind of pretty disastrous 49-day premiership as her unfunded tax cuts in the 2022 September mini-budget cost the pounds value to Promet.
to plummet, sorry, increased the cost of government borrowing and led to increased interest rates and mortgage rates and she was forced to resign and the tax cuts were reversed as a result. And then Truss was replaced by Sunak who had been involved in Partygate and failed to improve the party's popularity as viewed by the public as smug, out of touch, particularly because he was he's extremely extremely rich and went into the election with a net favourability of minus 51 percent, even less popular than Corbyn was in 2019. crucially the Labour Party's huge victory wasn't built on major popular support for their policies or leader instead they were successful due to the public strong desire to get Tories out. You guys polling just before the election found the majority of Labour voters voted in such a way to get the Tories out because they felt the country needed a change rather than because they supported Labour's platform which is as you see here is far far down in the reasons why people voted for Labour.
Starmer and Labour also lacked major public support. So Starmer had a net favourability of minus 17% on election day. However, they were very successful in presenting themselves as competent and the antithesis of the Tories.
They tried to present themselves as trustworthy and as economically competent. And this led to electoral success as 2019 Conservative voters, or enough of them, felt comfortable enough defecting to Labour, which they without doubt. did not feel comfortable or would never have felt comfortable doing to Jeremy Corbyn, a lot of these voters.
So Labour moved to the centre ground, points not to raise income tax, national insurance or corporation tax, as well as VAT actually, which made the Conservative Party's usual attack line. They would hike taxes, which the Tory party very much still used, a lot less effective than it was in the two previous elections, when actually they were going to increase taxes, Corbyn was. Starmer continually promised a return to a government of service that was competent rather than self-serving and incompetent, which was the overriding image of the Tory party. Interesting that messaging also helped Labour in Scotland, given the fact that the SNP, since the 2019 election in 2023, I think it was, or 2022, I'm not too sure actually, saw a significant drop in support due to a significant party funding scandal that led to the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, as it implicated.
her husband who was involved in the party, Peter Morrell I think is his name, as well as herself. Interestingly, policy in the manifestos can be seen as a bit less important. So there were differences in policy between the parties, but these differences were less marked than previous elections and the focus of the election and voting behaviour was less on policy than it was on the government record. As I mentioned, the Labour Party moved significantly to the centre since 2019 and was very careful in selecting the differences in policy from the Conservative parties. In many areas they were very similar, so they promised to increase defence spending to 2.5%, at least by the end of the next Parliament.
They both promised not to raise income tax and national insurance. or corporation tax. They both promised to invest in the NHS and they both promised to tackle illegal immigration.
The few policy differences they did select were broadly popular and didn't require major spending commitments but in many cases actually saved money. So that included the VAT exemption, removing sorry the VAT exemption from private schools, nationalising rail and scrapping the Rwanda deportation scheme. In the context of Labour the Conservatives and the Lib Dems having very similar policies, some minor parties did have success in part due to their policy differences.
So the Green Party received significant left-wing support due to its commitment to bring back freedom of movement, introduce a wealth tax and scrap university tuition fees. They had a real left-wing manifesto, maybe not even real, but more left-wing manifesto when Labour certainly didn't. Reform received support from 2019 Tory voters due to their prejudice to freeze non-essential immigration, leave the ECHR and scrap the UK's net zero target. And frankly, what had...
has without doubt happened in the last few elections is that the Tories had promised to reduce net migration and promised to reduce immigration and made that an important policy, an important part of their identity and they failed to do so and Reform really capitalized on that. And further some independent MPs, so five actually, were elected on the single issue of strongly supporting Palestine and opposing Israel's military action. In particular, in Labour seats or former Labour seats where there are a significant number of Muslim voters and that was largely in response to the Labour Party in Starmes'initial response to the attacks and and long delay before calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Rational choice voting played some role but I think we can say it kind of played less role than in previous elections, particularly than in elections in the mid to late 20th century. So we can see in some areas, so home ownership, around 40% of those with mortgages, privately renting or socially rented voted for the Labour Party, reflecting the fact that Labour promised improved rental conditions and mortgage rates have increased significantly under the Conservatives. But by contrast, just 25% of the vote who own their own home outright voted for the Labour Party.
And the lack of difference in taxation policies between the major parties meant there was little rational choice voting based on income, though, in comparison to the 2019 election. as you can see here in this graph produced by YouGov. When we look at the media, YouGov polling really reveals that while new mediums such as social media and podcasts are growing, newspapers, TV and the radio remain an important source of news for a lot of voters. Though print newspapers have declined, their websites receive a lot of traffic. There are some general relational differences, though, of course.
The majority of those under 50 accessing the news through social media, Facebook being the most significant of these, and 69%... of voters using it regularly. Well you'll see, so how do Britons get their news? 58% from television, 43% from social media. Of course these aren't exclusive.
Another thing to look at when we're looking at the media in the 2024 election is the Labour Party received endorsements from significantly more of the press than they did in 2019, with traditionally centrist and right-wing papers backing them including The Sun, Sunday Times and Financial Times. This being said, as the table below shows, the Tory party retained the backing for a number of right-wing newspapers. with significant readerships including the Telegraph and Daily Mail. Daily Mail in particular backed tactical voting to stop Labour and published a tactical voting guide.
This being said, pre-election polling by Best for Britain indicated that 52% of the Daily Mail's readership and 40% of the Telegraph's intended to support Labour in the election, showing how readers don't simply follow the news that they read and we shouldn't necessarily see the media as having too important a role. As with previous elections, TV debates can be seen as having little impact, not only because they simply reinforced views and there was nothing really major that came up during them, but also because they weren't watched by that many people. The first head-to-head ITV debate on the 4th of June between Starmer and Sunak was watched by just 4.8 million viewers, 2 million less than the equivalent debate in 2019. Spending on digital advertising in the election was higher than in any previous election. with google and meta ads focused on by the major parties and over a million spent on the election day alone according to who targets me levy spent far more than any other political party so spent 2 million on google ads during the campaign and over 1.15 million on meta advertising By contrast, no other party spent more than 150 grand on Google Ads and the Tory party spent just 650,000 on meta advertising. Quite a funny thing that Labour did was they bought a large number of online advertising spots in the run up to election day, including on the Daily Mail's website, despite the paper backing the Tories.
Now, something the Tories failed to do is why the Tories, knowing there was going to be an election, I think what Labour ultimately did was looked at the betting numbers, saw that it was becoming a lot more likely there'd be an early election. and decided as a result to before the election was announced just kind of make a bet effectively and buy them without completely knowing when it was going to be announced. In terms of social factors, so age was once more a really important determinant of how people voted in the 2024 election.
Older voters were far more likely to vote Conservative and Reform than younger voters who were more likely to vote for Labour, the Green Party or the Lib Dems. So an estimated 18% of 18 to 24 year olds voted Green, 41% voted Labour, just 9% voted Reform and 8% voted Conservative. In comparison, when you look at the over 60s, only 3% voted Green, so 15% lower.
24% voted Labour, 16% lower. 16% voted Reform, so that's almost double. And 40% voted Conservative, so that's more than, I can't do maths, that's five times. the amount of 18 to 24 year olds or percentage of 18 to 24 year olds that voted Tory.
Gender and class continued to be largely irrelevant in determining voting behaviour apart from the fact that those from C2 and D were more likely to vote Reform than those from the upper middle classes as was the case for men compared to women. So men were more likely to vote Reform than women were and that difference is actually marked even more when it comes to young men compared to women. Education level was once more an important determinant of voting behaviour. Those with higher levels of education and attainment were more likely to vote Labour or the Lib Dem, while those with lower levels of education and attainment were more likely to vote Reform or Conservative.
And ethnicity was also important in determining voting behaviour, and there were important shifts among Muslim and Jewish voters in particular. So in 2019, less than 10% of Jewish voters supported Labour, compared to an estimated 40% in the 2024 election, reflecting the fact that Starmer strongly took on anti-Semitism within the party. Labour's Muslim vote dropped significantly though from estimated 80% in 2019 to less than 60% in 2024 and this is largely due to a Labour failing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza for a long time in late 2023 and early 2024. The election saw major geographical changes in comparison to 2019 and in comparison to the Conservatives traditional heartlands of over 100 years as well.
The Tories were wiped out from a number of different parts of the UK and the remaining 121 seats are almost exclusively rural. Overall region wasn't a majorly important determinant of voting behaviour as the Tories lost a lot of support across all regions in the UK. In 2019 the Tories had made significant inroads in the north of England as we talked about after the 2019 election or a lot of people were talking about the breaking of the red wall. They won 56 out of 130. 31 seats in the north of England and Wales. They were almost entirely wiped out in these regions in 2024 though as they returned to being Labour heartlands.
In total the Tories won just four out of 131 of these seats in these regions and they were completely wiped out of Wales. The Tories also lost a large number of seats to Labour and the Lib Dems in their traditional heartlands in the southeast of England, southwest of England, west midland and east of England. In the southeast they won 74 out of 91 seats in 2019. By 2024 they won just 30 seats with Labour winning 36 and the Lib Dems 24. And the SNPs as we already mentioned dominance in Scotland was already dismantled, was also dismantled sorry, with Labour once more becoming the largest party with 37 out of 57 seats. What I've got here is a couple of graphs, I think I've got from Wikipedia actually, comparing the 2024 election and the 2019 election. If you look at the 2019 election you see the Tories dominating electoral map obviously it's a little bit skewed just because there's a large number of seats in urban areas such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle up here as well.
But what you see, you see the SNP dominating Scotland, you see Labour doing all right in the northeast of England as that is their heartland but a large number of Tory seats around it as well and you see up here in north of England the Tories doing really well. in a number of seats and you see in Wales applied obviously having a few seats but the Tories dominating in Wales in well actually sorry I say dominating I missed out South Wales there so the Tories doing well in Wales in 2019 though not necessarily in South Wales, you see them picking up quite a few seats in Greater London and you see them pretty much dominating the South West, the South East, which are their traditional heartlands. You then go up to 2024 and it's a completely different picture.
You see a lot of Lib Dem seats in the South West and the South East, as well as a lot of Labour seats. So those Tory heartlands in this mantle, you see the same if you go up over here to the east of England, where the Tories used to really dominate, and also in the West Midlands around Birmingham. Obviously not in Birmingham, but around Birmingham the Tories used to do quite well.
It's a very different picture now. You see the Tories largely being wiped out of London, particularly inner city London. You see the Lib Dems picking up some seats as well.
And you go over to Wales and the Tories didn't pick up one seat. Labour did really, really well. You look at the north of England, the Tories pretty much got no seats out there as well.
You look at Scotland and the SNP have been wiped out. Not wiped out, down to nine seats though, with Labour once more becoming dominant. I can't really emphasize this enough, the electoral map just completely completely changed between the two elections.
It was kind of a swing of unprecedented proportions from a Tory landslide in 2019 to a Labour landslide in 2024 and this is really not something you see, this scale of change in electoral geography, but from one election to the next you just don't see it. So it's a hugely significant election. When we kind of bring together the key points from these different factors that influenced the election result. We see kind of the Conservative government's incompetence and self-serving nature since 2019 was the most important factor in the result. So in my opinion you don't necessarily have to agree with that but I think it's what a lot of the evidence shows.
It led to a dislike of leader Sunak and a strong public desire to get the Tories out. The campaign played an important role in particular with the growth in support for reform due to Farage becoming leader which further damaged the Tories and the Tories also treated themselves in the foot a number of times. during the campaign. Policy was largely unimportant due to few policy differences between the Tories and Labour and the Lib Dems in particular, though it did help some minor parties such as Reform and the Greens to do well. Tactical voting hurt the Tories and helped with Labour and the Lib Dems and age and education level continued to be important social factors.
What we're going to have a look at now then is political parties. We're going to look at the policies in the manifestos of Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems. as well as a couple of the minor parties.
I'm also going to look for a couple of these kind of, I think it's the Lib Dems and Reform in particular, really how they emerged and how the 2024 election really changed the narrative for them and changed their success compared to previous elections. Starting off then with the Labour Party, in terms of economic policy I've split it up into kind of, I think it's three key factors. So you've got moderate taxation policies, They moved away from being a high tax high spend party.
They were moving closer again to under Corbyn, pledging not to increase tax of businesses or working people, including income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax. They pledged some limited taxes, including removing private schools VAT exemption, abolishing tax loopholes, particularly associated with non-doms, but these aren't really taxes on working people, on the majority of people. In terms of nationalisation, there was some limited nationalisation, but they moved away from Corbyn's six big nationalisations in the 2019 manifesto. They pledged to only nationalise railways and create a publicly owned energy company, which isn't the same as nationalising all of energy in the UK.
So that's a great bunch of energy they're going to create by allocating £8.3 billion across the parliament. This would be owned by the British people, by the taxpayer, and aimed to deliver clean, homegrown energy production. And finally, in terms of economic policy, economic stability and fiscal responsibility were key parts of their messaging.
Their manifesto emphasised fiscal responsibility and providing a stable economic environment that could provoke economic growth. And Chancellor Rachel Reeves called this approach Secure-nomics. So it's a clear attempt to position Labour as economically responsible and competent and move them away from the image they got, from distance themselves from the image of being quite left wing of Corbyn and old Labour.
It's a similar approach to New Labour effectively. They committed to economic stability by adhering to strong fiscal rules aiming to balance the current budget and ensure that the debt fell as a share of the economy by the fifth year of their forecast. They also pledged to strengthen the role of the Office for Budget Responsibility which this trust had largely ignored, ensuring all major fiscal events were subject to independent forecasts.
After the election they also established a Covid Corruption Commissioner to recoup pandemic-related fraud and misuse of public funds. And this emphasis on fiscal responsibility can also be seen in what they didn't do. So they ditched its previously proposed £28 billion a year green prosperity plan prior to the 2024 election.
and justified it by saying they were prioritising financial stability and they used the same justification for not pledging to immediately scrap the two child benefit cap, which greatly contributes to child poverty. In terms of law and order policy on crime, like New Labour, and I'm going to be saying that quite a lot of times when we look at Labour Party policy, they pledged to increase police numbers to tackle crime while also seeking to tackle the cause of crime. So they pledged to recruit 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and...
PCSOs showing a strong approach to tackling crime. He also pledged to crack down on anti-social behaviour and to tackle the prisons overcrowding crisis by building more prisons and preventing them from becoming breeding grounds for more re-offending. And crucially they also pledged hard violence against women and girls in a decade by fast-tracking rape cases and relentlessly targeting sexual predators using tactics normally reserved for terrorists and organised crime including covert operations and electronic tagging.
In terms of immigration, there's an important focus of their manifesto. In the past, Labour administrations, particularly under New Labour and close enough but not really necessarily as close but much more than than Starmer is, were quite, under Corbyn sorry, were quite supportive of immigration. The Labour Party's 2024 manifesto was certainly not. It pledged to make this the asylum system work and secure Britain's borders to stop illegal migration. So after winning the election they immediately scrapped the Tory Tories'policy of handling the claims of asylum seekers in Rwanda, seeing and describing the Rurus approach as an inhumane gimmick and a waste of money.
Instead, they would use the money saved to stop the small boats through the creation of a new border security command with hundreds of new special investigators and really focus on pursuing and disrupting criminal smuggler gangs. Labour committed to restoring order to the asylum system, hiring additional caseworkers to clear backlogs and ending the use of asylum hotels. They also plan to set up a new returns and enforcement unit to fast-track removals to save countries for those without the right to stay.
In terms of the unions, they pledged to negotiate with public sector trade unions and also bring new pay deals and prevent further strikes. And what we saw in the summer of 2024 was that retrograde announced above inflation pay rises for public sector workers, including a 22% pay rise to junior doctors. It's a big change in approach from the Conservatives and in a way can be seen as a big change. as reflecting old Labour principles and with the importance of unions within the party.
And they also committed to repealing the Strikes Act within 100 days of entering office, as well as the Trade Union Act. And they see this legislation which mandates minimum service levels during strikes for crucial public sectors such as health and I think education as well as ineffective and emphasising focus on negotiation and dialogue with workers to address industrial conflicts. In terms of welfare and other policies, first looking at the NHS, they committed to keeping the NHS a publicly funded healthcare system that's free and point of use. The manifesto pledged to increase funding for the NHS to ensure it is the resources needed to meet the growing demand for healthcare services. You'll pretty much see that in every single manifesto.
The NHS is like a religion in the United Kingdom and saying you decrease funding for the NHS or privatise the NHS would almost be electoral suicide. In order to tackle the crisis in the NHS, the manifesto pledged to cut waiting times by offering 40,000 more. appointments per week, recruit more healthcare professionals, focus on preventative healthcare and bring care closer to the home to reduce pressure on hospitals.
In terms of pay and benefits, they had little detail on it, despite this previously being, I suppose, quite a key part of Labour Party's identity and policy. They pledged to reform disability assessments, set up a task force to reduce child poverty, but provided little detail on how. They pledged to make the minimum wage a genuine living wage, but didn't say what level this would be. And importantly, they didn't pledge to remove the two-child benefit cap.
that's an important driver of child poverty. And actually Starmer suspended seven Labour MPs very soon after the election, after they rebelled against the party on this particular policy, on the King's Speech. In some ways, therefore, I think you could see, in a way, in some ways that, well, they're manifest on pay and benefits, just much less left-wing than the Lib Dems, for example, and you potentially see a bit more closer to new Labour than old Labour. in that regard. In terms of housing they committed to constructing 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament focusing on affordable and social housing to meet the needs of low-income families and individuals.
And on education they committed to significantly increasing funding for schools to reduce class sizes and to recruit 6,500 new teachers in key subjects. And finally on foreign It focused strongly on supporting NATO and Britain's allies in significant defence spending, ultimately very similar to the Tory party's and broadly centrist approach that seeks to differentiate itself from Corbyn. They pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5% when possible, exceeding NATO's minimum requirement of 2%. also supported Trident and NATO of course. Starmer has also strongly supported continued funding for Ukraine.
On Gaza, Starmer, Labour initially didn't call for a ceasefire but now calls for an immediate ceasefire and move towards a two-state solution, as pretty much all parties do. And Labour's manifesto stated that they wouldn't try to rejoin the EU, but would try to reset relations with the bloc, seeking a new UK-EU security alliance and remove unnecessary barriers to trade. Other important policies are they pledged to give 16 year olds the vote, pledged to reach net zero by 2050, spend 24 billion on green initiatives in the next parliament and restore plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. So overall Labour's 2024 manifesto under Starmer moved the party closer to the centre and it's definitely now closer to new Labour's policy than that of Corbyn.
Their moderate policies reflected the fact that they were driven to get back in power and not to appear too radical or out of step with public opinion. which would have prevented them from doing so as it did in the 2019 election. Moving on now to the policies of the Tory party under Sunak in the 2024 election and since, first looking at economic policy.
So pretty similar to Labour, it focused on trying to prioritise natural finances in the context of the cost of living crisis by reducing the natural debt and seeking to bring down inflation, which is successfully achieved even though it was largely out of his control when Sunak was in power. Soon that came in immediately after Liz Truss'major tax cuts and they were reversed due to the fact that they caused a rapid drop in the value of the pound. In terms of kind of while he was in power in the 2024 election, so what you saw in the 2024 spring budget was the Tory government announced a cut to national insurance contributions for employees from 10% to 8% in the 2024 manifesto.
They pledged to reduce it to 6% by April 2027. and their manifesto also pledged to abolish the main rate of self-employed national insurance entirely by the end of the parliament. You see that kind of thatch right idea of tax cuts running through their manifesto in 2024. Other economic policies in the manifesto say promise not to raise income tax, corporation tax or VAT. Their manifesto pledged to increase the triple lock plus on the state pension.
They didn't pledge any nationalisation remaining committed to privatisation. committed to reducing the national debt as a share of GDP over the course of the parliament and maintaining a balanced budget. He promised a review of business rates to ensure they didn't burden small businesses and pledged to save money by cutting civil service numbers and benefits payments especially disability payments. So you see actually in a number of those pro-business policies, classic of the Tory party, but also kind of Thatcherites, Thatcherism remaining strong within the Conservative party.
In terms of law and order policy SUNAP's government at the 2024 manifesto was committed to taking a tough approach to crime, immigration and the unions. So under SUNAP, the Tory party met its 2019 target of recruiting 20,000 additional police officers and pledged in 2024 to recruit 8,000 more. They took a strong stance against drugs and antisocial behaviour by banning the use of nitrous oxide. They failed to build enough prisons, however, resulting in an overcrowding crisis in the summer of 2024. In the 2024 manifesto they pledged to toughen censuses for offences including knife crime, grooming and assaults against retail workers. And what you saw in March 2023 was SUNAC introducing a comprehensive anti-social behaviour action plan, a really strong approach to anti-social behaviour including visible justice within the community.
In terms of the unions and protests on the SUNAC So SUNAP took a very tough approach to striking workers in protest and there again you see that factorism coming through, introducing the Strikes Act which required minimum service levels from key public sectors and the Public Order Act which introduced new offences such as locking on and interfering with national infrastructure which are punishable by imprisonment or unlimited fines and this is in particular in response to Just Stop Oil. You also saw a big policy, I won't touch on too much so I know I've done this in a previous video. was the passage of the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024, which represented a really strong stance to appearing to tackle immigration and illegal immigration, even though it was a massive waste of money and effectively a gimmick, which Labour called it.
So it allowed the deportation of asylum seekers who went to the UK illegally to Rwanda for processing of their asylum cases, intended to kind of deter illegal immigration to the UK through unsafe and unauthorised routes including crossing the channel but it was hugely hugely costly very cost ineffective and it was also introduced just with a specific clause saying that Rwanda has to be considered a safe country and that was in response to the fact that the Supreme Court and other courts in the UK judged under the Human Rights Act that it wasn't so it was effectively bypassing the Human Rights Act. In terms of welfare policy on the NHS he promised to cut waiting times when he became Prime Minister but failed to deliver by the end of his time in office. He also failed to deliver substantial increase in funding to the NHS with the 300 million in emergency funding little compared to the 7 billion the NHS asked for. He took a strong stance against striking NHS workers with and education teachers as well introducing the Strikes Act. In terms of paying benefits, the Tories committed in the 2024 manifesto to raising the national living wage but in April 2024, Sunak delivered a significant speech on welfare policy.
focusing particularly on disability benefits which he said are overly generous and contribute to a sick note culture in the UK despite there being very little evidence of that. He said that the government was spending too much money on these benefits and wanted to tighten these eligibility criteria. On housing, since 2019 the Tories consistently failed to meet their house building targets of 300,000 per year and you saw a significant increase in homelessness between 2019 and the 2024 election.
In the 2024 manifesto, again, you see that tourism coming through. They pledged to reintroduce the help to buy scheme, which provided first time buyers with an equity loan of up to 20% towards the cost of one of these new homes. And pledged to end rough sleeping in the UK, despite failing to meet a similar target in their 2019 manifesto, with rough sleeping in fact seeing an increase since COVID-19.
On education, in October 2023, Sunak pledged to replace A-levels, but it's of course been scrapped by Labour. and the 2024 manifesto pledged to enter low quality degrees which didn't need graduates better off in order to fund apprenticeships. On foreign policy, very similar to Starmer and to Johnson, very supportive of Ukraine, continues to be very supportive of Brexit and strong pledges on defence spending to increase it to 2.5% of GDP. And you see under Sunak and Johnson there was quite strong support for Ukraine. and Israel in the period.
So they committed in 2024 £2.5 billion in military funding to Ukraine and also supported Israel's action in Gaza, failing to call for a ceasefire and targeting Houthi forces through to strategic airstrikes in February 2024. Other policies, sooner reintroduced the ban on fracking, the trust briefly lifted. You see a real kind of culture war in the 2024 manifesto but also beforehand. in particular pushing back and trying to remove transgender rights in particular.
So they kind of, Sunak and other key members of the party, asserted traditional gender definitions to push back against calls for transgender rights and recognition, in particular through stating that women cannot have a penis. And additionally the Conservatives faced criticism for its decision not to fully ban convergent therapy. So while the government initially promised the ban for all LGBTQ plus individuals, it later amended it.
to exclude transgender conversion therapy from the ban. This was met with significant backlash from the LGBT community and pressure groups. They also moved away from environmental commitments. The Sunak significantly changed the Tory party's environmental policies in the summer of 2023, showing a reduced commitment and urgency to tackling climate change.
They still committed to net zero by 2050 but pushed back the target to phase out petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2025. and announced the issuance of 100 new oil and gas licenses to the North Sea. Overall, Sunak's policies moved away from Truss'strong Thatcherite approach that you still see some Thatcherism coming through as I mentioned a number of times and seem instead to be prioritizing national finances. His strong approach to Boris, to immigration, the reward of foreign policy and striking workers was similar to that of Boris Johnson's premiership, though he did move away from the leveling up kind of basis that won the Tory party the 2019 election which considering the result Seems pretty stupid to be honest. Moving on to the Lib Dems now, before we have a look at their policies, I think we'll look in and we've already mentioned this a number of times throughout the video, but just their electoral success.
They're their debut, their leader, and so their resurgence in the 2024 election. So part of the Lib Dems past success was always grounded in firstly tactical voting against the Conservative Party and the fact that they were the natural protest vote for those who normally supported the Tory party but weren't comfortable voting for Labour. These factors came together pretty perfectly for them in 2024 to give the Lib Dems their biggest electoral success in their history with 72 seats despite increasing their vote share by less than 1% to just 12.2%. Ed Davie took control of the party in 2019. Prior to the 2024 election his party gained little media attention or traction with the electorate with Davie a largely unknown figure to the electorate. But the party ran a really successful campaign in 2024. They almost exclusively targeted the most affluent constituencies in the UK and won almost all of the seats they targeted.
The vast majority of these, one, were previously held by the Conservative party including four that are held by ministers. and seats that were previously held by Prime Ministers Theresa May, Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Though some were attracted to some of the Lib Dems'policies, they were largely not that different from the policy approach of Labour or the Tories. Instead of due to policy, their success therefore came from the fact that much of the electorate voted tactically in order to vote against the Tories. And in many affluent constituencies in the south-west and south-east of England, the Lib Dems were the natural tactical vote to do so rather than for the Labour Party.
And they were inoffensive enough effectively. that many former Tory voters were happy enough to vote for them. During the campaign, David was also successful in getting media attention for himself and his party through the really interesting strategy, as I mentioned before, of consistently doing fun activities such as paddle boarding, bungee jumping, even if in some of them he made fun of himself.
The Lib Dems are now, after the 2024 election, once more a significant parliamentary party and conceivably be considered a major party once more. In terms of their policy in the 2024 manifesto, They pledged to raise an extra 9.5 billion in spending for health and social care, raise through reforming capital gains tax to close loopholes and raising levies on banks. And overall they pledged to spend 27 billion more per year by 2029. They pledged to fund this through reforming, as I mentioned, capital gains tax, raising levies on banks, introducing a new aviation duty to penalise frequent flyers and cracking down on tax avoidance.
Though there are some limited tax rises they therefore pledged to keep the vast majority of taxes the same. including income tax, VAT, corporation tax and national insurance. The first three of those you saw, Labour and the Tories also wanted to keep the same, whilst the Tories did pledge a decrease in national insurance and the manifesto didn't pledge to nationalise any industries. In terms of law and order policy, they pledged to restore visible community policing, improve rehabilitation in prisons, very similar to Labour and the Tories in this regard, and they also pledged to scrap the Tory's Rwanda scheme and end some current restrictions on legal immigration, including by reversing the ban on foreign care workers bringing dependents to the UK and reversing the increase in income thresholds for family visas.
But their manifesto didn't mention reducing immigration numbers overall actually, which the other manifestos did. On welfare and other policy, the NHS and Lib Dems pledged to introduce free personal care in England where people needed help with daily tasks don't have to pay. This would remove England where it's currently means tested in line with Scotland and they also pledged 8,000 more GPs in England and significantly increased the speed of cancer treatment. On pay and benefits, their proposed welfare reforms went further than the Tories or Labour's 2024 manifestos. Many of these reforms would have had a clear impact in reducing poverty if they'd gone into government.
They pledged to remove both the two child limit which affects universal credit and child tax credit as well as the benefit cap. the limit on the total amount of benefits one household can claim. And pledge to reduce the waiting time to the first universal credit payment for five weeks to five days and that'll be a really important policy because that delay is actually a big reason why a lot of people are forced into homelessness into debt.
And so pledge to reform carers allowance and expand its eligibility. On housing the Lib Dems manifesto pledged to increase house building to 330,000 a year so more I think than Labour including 150,000 social homes. On education, they pledged to give disadvantaged pupils in education more support through guaranteed tutoring for children with low-income families and increasing school and college funding for each pupil above inflation every year after 14 years of real-term stagnation under the Tories. Whilst they also pledged to reinstate maintenance and gross grants for disadvantaged students at university.
On foreign policy, they pledged to increase defence spending in every year of the parliament. with ambition to spend 2.5% on defence of GDP, as with Labour and the Tories. They didn't pledge to rejoin the EU, unlike their 2019 manifesto, instead pledging to fix the relationship with Europe and create a comprehensive trade agreement. Unlike actually Labour or the Tories, they pledged to reintroduce the commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid.
They supported an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and pledged strong support for Ukraine as well. On constitutional reform. obviously a very key part of any Liberal Democrat manifesto. They pledge to give 16 year olds a vote, introduce proportional representation, single transferable vote, actually would be the system, enshrine the ministerial code and legislation, make the House of Lords elected, and introduce a written constitution for a federal United Kingdom. And other policies included reaching net zero by 2045, five years sooner than the labor, so strong environmental commitments, and pledged to accelerate the deployment of solar and wind power, so 90% of the power would be generated by renewables by 2030 if they were in charge.
Overall, I think we can put it as a more left-wing manifesto than Labour, obviously not really left-wing, especially in terms of tax rises, it's actually in some areas not more left-wing if you look at... their nationalisation policies, but if you look at kind of environmental commitments, if you look at some of their commitments in relation to gender, so particularly on social issues, if you look at pay and benefits, if you look at the NHS, in some ways they're happy to spend more and socially were more left-wing, it was a more left-wing manifesto than the Labour Party's was. Okay, moving on to minor parties now, the first one we're gonna have a look at is the SNP, the Scottish National Party.
Looking at their ideas and policies before we look at their decline in support prior to and in the 2024 election. So in terms of their ideas and policies, the most important policy goal has always been Scottish independence. They committed in their manifesto to campaign for a second Scottish independence referendum. And they pledged to trigger independence talks if they won a majority seat in Scotland, which they didn't. They're also a pretty left wing party and promoted policies similar to the one in the to Labour's in the UK so in 2017, 2019 and 2014 they opposed austerity and in 2024 stated they were the left-wing choice, presenting them very much as left of the Labour Party.
In 2023 the Scottish government increased the higher and top rates of income tax. You see a lot of these kind of classic policies here that came in in all of their manifestos so in 2019 as well as 2024. In 2024 they pledged to increase NHS spending by £10 billion, oppose Trident and support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So overall if you have a look through those policies, quite a left-wing manifesto, certainly to the left of the Labour Party. What you saw since 2023 was a significant decline in popularity of the SNP, influenced by several factors. So it's particularly driven by a significant scandal including involving a police investigation into the party's financing.
which led to the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon's husband and the SNP chief executive Peter Morell, as well as the resignation of Sturgeon as party leader and first minister. Not only did this lead to declining trust in the party, it also overshadowed Hamza Yousaf's leadership as an ex-SNP leader and Yousaf Malti also resigned in April 2024 after a breakdown in government. He was a largely unpopular leader who failed to unite the party and his approval ratings were consistently lower than Sturgeon's.
Under his leadership there were significant divisions over the SNP leadership. over gender and how strongly the party should push for independence in particular. The SLP has also been criticised for dropping school performance and dissatisfaction with the management of the NHS which saw increasing waiting times and staff shortages.
Much more detail on that look at the updated textbook on UK government and the devolution section. John Swinney took over the party just a couple of months before the 2024 election by which time Labour had overtaken the SLP in Scotland in the polls. In the 2024 election their support collapsed and their dominance in Scotland was dismantled. They won just nine seats down from 48 in the 2019 election.
It was the first time they failed to win a majority of seats in Scotland since the 2010 election. The Labour Party became the largest party in Scotland, again winning 37 out of 57 seats. In total, in the 2024 election, the SNP won 30% of the vote in Scotland, with Labour winning more at 35.3%.
The Tories 12.7%. and Lib Dems 9.7% and this compares to the 2019 election where the SNP won 15% higher at 45% of the vote and the Labour's vote share was almost half. So you see a pretty clear movement of some voters from the SNP to Labour which enabled them to regain dominance in Scotland and really tanked the SNP's number of seats. Moving on now to Reform UK now so After the 2019 election, the Brexit party rebranded as Reform UK.
So the Brexit party had previously been UKIP effectively. So UKIP did remain but in terms of what I mean when they'd previously been, it was Nigel Farage as the leader and a similar section of the electorate who supported it. Farage stepped down as leader in 2021 and was replaced by party chairman and main financer Richard Tice who's second from her right in this below picture.
The party announced in 2022 that it intended to stand a full slate of candidates and challenge to win power in the 2024 election, rather than seeing itself as more of a pressure group as UKIP and the Brexit party had potentially seen themselves and certainly acted as in the case of the Brexit party. From late 2023, Reform experienced significantly increased popularity and media attention, consistently polling at between 7 and 9% of the vote. This was bolstered in March 2024 when Conservative Party Deputy Chair Lee Anderson defected to Reform, giving them their first MP in Parliament. And he's the man on the left with the picture there. Reform positioned itself as a right-wing populist party advocating for tighter immigration controls, lower taxes and a revision of the UK's net zero plan to which they...
critically referred to as Net Stupid rather than Net Zero. This platform particularly resonated with 2019 Tory voters who became disillusioned with the party. In fact 25% of 2019 Tory voters voted Reform in the 2024 election, with Reform picking up just over 14% of the vote. So yeah, they were the third largest party and also so they picked up five MPs, third largest party but also finished second in 19 seats.
98 seats, many of which were in the north of England. Though they were greatly underrepresented by First Postal Post, they therefore demonstrated significant support and the potential to dramatically increase their seat share and alter the UK party system in future elections. During the election campaign they also dramatically increased their support.
They rose from just over 10% at the start of the six-week campaign to 14% on the 4th of July. And particularly important to this was Nigel Farage. who announced at the beginning of June that he would return and stand in Clacton, which he ultimately won.
And crucially, reform damaged the Tory party. So they took votes from both Labour and the Tories, but did much more damage to the Tory party by splitting the right-wing vote, which actually in many cases aided Labour as well. And that demonstrates how minor parties can have a huge influence in elections, not by winning seats, but through the spoiler effect, which is when a minor party, in this case Reform, draws votes away from a major party, in this case the Conservative Party, causing it to lose an election and this often inadvertently benefits another party, in another major party in this case the Labour Party, by splitting the vote particularly when the minor party platform appeals to voters who might otherwise support the more dominant party which is the Conservative Party. In terms of their ideas and policies in the 2024 election, the most significant focus with their campaigning and manifesto was on immigration because they pledged to freeze non-essential immigration including banning students from bringing partners and children to the UK.
They pledged a higher rate of national insurance paid by employers employing foreign workers. They didn't provide a little detail on how but their manifesto pledged to pick up illegal migrants out of boats and take them back to France and their manifesto also said that zero illegal migrants would be resettled in the UK. Asylum seekers arriving illegally would be processed rapidly and offshore if necessary and those rejected would be returned. In Cruci they also pledged to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to make it easier to deport asylum seekers. They included in their manifesto significant tax cuts for small businesses and they also kind of pledged to raise £35 billion per year by ceasing to pay interest on £700 billion of bonds held at the Bank of England as a result of the post-financial crisis quantitative easing programme.
Whilst Labour pledged to introduce VAT on private schools, Reform pledged not only to not introduce it, but to give parents who send their children to private schools 20% tax relief on fees. And they also support to appeal to homeowners and landlords by raising stamp duty thresholds from £250,000 to £750,000. On climate change, Reform pledged to save £30 billion by year by scrapping the UK's net zero target, reflecting the fact that opposing measures tackle climate change.
The hit working people are unfair and shouldn't be prioritised. And the culture war is also a really important part of their manifesto. So they said it will tackle divisive woke ideology and pledge to ban what it calls transgender ideology in schools, including banning choosing your own pronouns in school and ensuring parents are informed if their child transitions. Reform also pledged to ban what it calls critical race theory in schools and ensure that any teaching of slavery must be paired with the teaching of non-European occurrence. with the same to ensure what they call balance.
On welfare, they pledged to spend £17 billion per year more on the NHS, significantly more than any of the three major parties, in order to eradicate waiting lists in two years. They also support insurance-based health models rather than the completely nationalised model like the NHS currently is. They also pledged to scrap the BBC licence fee and pledged to cancel the remainder of the HS2 rail link despite it being mid-construction.
Okay, the final part of UK politics we're going to have a look at before we look at a few UK government updates is the party system and the importance of minor parties. And this is something that I think has changed significantly after this election, so it's something you really need to, especially if you're in year 13, really need to look back on compared to what you learned in year 12. Firstly, quickly reintroduce the different party systems, single one party systems, dominant party systems, two party systems and multi-party systems and a history of the UK party systems. So due to first part of post, which under represents minor parties, the UK has almost always had a two party system, especially true in the 19th century with liberals and the Conservatives and the post World War Two period with Labour and the Conservatives. During the 2017 and 2019 elections, factors particular to each election, which I'm going to go through, led to a resurgence of voting for Labour and the Conservatives.
as opposed to the minor parties. Especially in the last four decades, the UK could also be described as a dominant party system, especially when the Tories were in power for a long period, then Labour for a long period, and then Tories between 2010 and 2024. But also, and these are the kind of different arguments you can have, it can't necessarily be one at the same time, due to the declining support of the two main parties in 2010, 2015, and now 2024, there's an argument that the UK is increasingly multi-party system with the Lib Dems, SNP and UKIP or Reform UK winning significant portions of the electorate in 2015, 2010 and 2024. So we're going to have a look at now as a number of stages just to kind of set the scene for what's happened in 2024. So what you saw in 2010 and 2015 in those elections was the growth of a multi-party system. So in 2010, 2015 there was widespread talk about the UK now having a multi-party system due to the the declining vote share of the two main parties and other parties gaining a substantial number of MPs in Parliament. In 2010, the combined vote share of Labour and the Tories was 65.1% and the Lib Dems won 62 seats under Nick Clegg. And in 2015, the combined vote share of the two main parties was 67% and the SNP won 56 seats under Nicola Sturgeon.
Whilst you can also picked up 12.6% of the vote, even if this only led to one seat. Many claim that the UK now had a multi-party system due to the distrust of the mainstream politicians and other parties such as the SNP and UKIP offering something new. Though First Poster Post maintained two-party dominance in terms of seats in Westminster, voters were behaving as if they weren't in a First Poster Post system or voting for other parties to show their dissatisfaction with the Tories and Labour. What you saw in 2017 and 2019 in those elections, though, was a resurgence of the two-party system. This is both in terms of vote share and seats.
So in 2017 Labour and the Conservatives won 82.4% of the vote between them, whilst in 2019 they won 75.7% of the vote. A couple of key explanations for this. So one key explanation is that in both of these elections, there was a much greater difference in policy between the two main parties than there was in 2010 or 2015. The fundamental choice about politics once more came between the two main parties. and the voters were more likely to find the main party they didn't vote for unpalatable and therefore vote for the other main party to keep them out of government.
Whereas in 2010 and 2015, the main parties were largely similar, so it didn't matter too much to voters which one came in. In the 2017 election, in which both parties supported implementing Brexit, the choice was between Corbyn's more left-wing manifesto and May's continuation of centre-right conservatism. Many right-wing voters supported May to keep out Corbyn.
who they saw as a massive threat to the country. In the 2019 election, the fundamental choice was about whether to implement Brexit or not, with Labour not supporting Brexit, supporting a second independence referendum, and the Tories supporting Brexit, along with the other significant difference between Corbyn's even more left-wing manifesto and the levelling up right-wing populism of Boris Johnson. Another explanation for this is to see it as a story of UKIP and the Brexit party. So in the 2015 election, UKIP was the third largest party in terms of vote share, with 12.6% of the vote.
Their right-wing populist, Eurosceptic politics was therefore a key part of the shift of support away from Labour and the Tories. In 2017, they decreased massively, though, to 1.8% of the vote. Farage had stepped down as leader and they didn't run such a strong campaign. Many of their voters saw their work as done, having achieved Brexit, which both Labour and the Tories supported in 2017. In 2019, Farage threatened...
to run a major campaign again with the rebranded Brexit party. They were the largest party in the 2019 European elections showing major support but this demonstration support and potential to do really well in the 2019 general election scared the Tories into replacing May with Boris whose popular support for hard Brexit attracted former UKIP voters. Farage therefore didn't need to run in 2019 as he pressured the Conservative party to become a right-wing populist.
hard Brexit-supporting party, and many believe that Boris would deliver what Farage promised, and that's why they voted for the Tories in the 2019 election. As a result, the Brexit party didn't stand in constituencies where the Conservatives were expected to win and didn't stand in a majority of constituencies. When we now look then at the 2024 election and resurgence of the two party system, it kind of suggests that 2017 and 2019 were aberrations due to particular factors in those elections. And a large portion of the electorate still distrust Labour and the Conservatives and see themselves as far more aligned with one of the minor parties. See, as I've already gone through, Labour won just 57.4% of the vote, massively decreased from 2019 or 2017. So they did, of course, due to first-parts-to-posts, win a much bigger share of the seats.
Electoral support for parties in the UK is now divided into a multi-party system, and I mean this in terms of who people support. At the moment, the first-parts-to-posts electoral system is still just about maintaining a two-party system in Westminster in terms of seats. If support for minor parties keeps growing, however, there'll be a tipping point where this is no longer the case. So Reform finished second in 98 seats. And as I mentioned earlier in the video, a small increase in their vote share could tip them over the edge to win a majority of these seats and deprive any party of a majority in Parliament.
In terms of explanations for this, one is that it was all about tactical voting and getting the Tories out. And that suggests that... Support for parties other than the Tories or Labour was dominated by one thing only and that was showing dissatisfaction and anger with the Conservative government. And that can be seen as a central reason why the Lib Dems did so well.
It was due to tactical voting. And those, whilst those on the right of the political spectrum, the majority of whom voted Tory, voted Reform instead to show their dissatisfaction with Tories. And this suggests that the extent to which there's now a multi-party system was exaggerated by this election. There was a particular factor to this election. and there was a unique level of anger and tap to voting towards getting the Tories out.
And if the Tories are able to recover their reputation and perform better in the next election, we may see more return to a two-party system. Though, firstly, they may have permanently damaged their support. And secondly, it could suggest that the reason why many voted for Labour was an expression of anger against the Tories rather than a strong belief in their policies, as we saw earlier. And therefore, it may even suggest that in the next election, Labour's, um, not only the Tories might still have a much reduced share of the vote, Labour may do as well as they'll struggle to hold on to many who voted for them in 2024. Explanation two is that there's simply declined support for the very similar policies of Labour and the Tories in the 2024 election.
So in the 2024 elections we saw Labour moved to the centre and there were few policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives. And if the policies of the parties don't change this suggests that the multi-party system is here to stay. Labour shifted significantly to the centre and whilst this did allow them to pick up enough former Tory voters to flip enough seats and win a large majority, it also meant they lost a large number of left-wing voters who opted to vote for the Greens of 7% and the voters voted for the Greens or Independents instead.
And there's now an important part of the electorate to the left of the Labour Party that's more likely to vote for minor parties than Labour. The surge in support for reform in the UK can also be seen in the context of the voters viewing the Tories as just the same. as other politicians and other political parties. Many of them voted for Boris in 2019 believing that he brought a new form of politics that was more populist, less supportive of immigration and further away from the political establishment.
His actions in Partygate, Replacement, with Truss and Sunak and the increase in net migration in the last five years proved that this was not the case and many voters went back to Farage. And this suggests that Reform UK is here to stay as a large population of right-wing, populist English voters who distrust Labour and the Tories. They want a new form of politics and want to reduce immigration. They believe that Boris could be that. Ultimately, he proved that he wasn't.
And now they're here to stay voting reform. We were now really looking to contest elections, having finished third in the 2024 election. That's everything in terms of the party system. Final key things we're going to have a look at some UK government updates. Firstly, looking at devolution.
So in Labour's 2024 manifesto, there was a return to after Boris Johnson trusts and soon moving in. bit away support for devolution to supportive rhetoric in relation to devolution. So the manifesto stated that the UK remained too centralised and committed to reset relations with the devolved governments and you saw that earlier in Starmer's premiership.
He visited Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland within days of becoming PM and had a meeting with all of England's regional mayors on his fifth day of office. Labour's manifesto committed to establish a new council of the nations of regions of the UK bringing together the leaders of all devolved governments. governments and mayors and it committed to address and reduce breaches of the Sewell Convention which had happened under the Conservatives. In relation to England, Labour committed to both deepen devolution settlements for existing mayors and combined authority so more powers and to widen devolution to more areas.
And what you saw actually in their first King's Speech was they introduced a bill on English devolution. On to the PM and the Cabinet now. So first looking at reasons for selecting ministers. First one, key one we see is individual competence and experience. And you can see that in Rachel Rees being made Chancellor.
She's been Shadow Chancellor for three years and previously worked for the Bank of England. Yvette Cooper being made Home Secretary. Not only has she been Shadow Home Secretary for a number of years, across a number of periods actually.
but she was one of the few Labour MPs with significant government experience having served in Blair's government and in the cabinet in Brow's government. And James Timpson was made a peer in order to be made prisons minister. So 10% of his company's workforce are former prisoners, and he's been chair of the Prison Reform Trust, and has a long history as a rehabilitation campaigner with significant experience and a positive reputation in the sector. Loyalty was also really important. So the vast majority of whom were in Starmer's first cabinet had served in the same shadow cabinet position for a number of years, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden being particularly key allies.
Ideological balance didn't seem to play much role at all with no one from the kind of left faction of the party. The closest are probably Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner, which potentially says all you need to say because they're not particularly... left wing that they had served under Jeremy Corbyn as had Starmer actually. In terms of direct representation and diversity, 11 of the 21 members of Starmer's first cabinet are women including the first female chancellor and Rachel Reeves, though just three members are from an ethnic minority background, a drop from Sunak and Johnson's cabinets.
In terms of Sunak's special, Starmer's special advisors as well, by the end of the summer of 2024 Starmer had already appointed over 20 special advisors. working for number 10 and 80 across government and key advisors include chief of staff um sue gray who previously was a high-ranking civil servant head of political strategy morgan mc sweeney and director of communications matthew doyle and now finally um thing final thing we have a look at is how representative the new parliament is in terms of gender race and educational background so after the 2024 election just 37 of the house of commons and 29 of the house of lords are women compared to over half of the population So still very unrepresentative, but it is an increase from 34% after the 2019 election. And this reflects the fact that in the 2024 election, of the over 4,500 candidates who stood from 98 different parties, 69% of them were male. So a huge portion of the candidates standing.
After the 2024 election, just 13% of the House of Commons are from ethnic minority backgrounds compared to over 18% of the general population. That's an increase from 10%, though. after the 2019 election. And you also see significantly more of the of Parliament went to university and went to private schools compared to the general population, though actually Rishi Sunak's cabinet and the Conservative party now after the 2024 election has a much higher proportion of MPs and cabinet members that went to private school compared to Starmer's first cabinet and Labour MPs. So actually Star Wars First cabinet is the most diverse in terms of educational background ever recorded with just 8% of the cabinet having attended private school 68% 68 MP sorry in the 2024 Parliament now over 10% at LGBT Plus compared to an estimated 3.1% of the population So yeah, that was a very very long video Of course as I say I expect you to not watch it in one but go through click through different parts I'll add chapters to make that really easy.
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comment section below. As I said at the start of the video, all of the updates in this PDF are in the updated textbooks on the Politics Explained website. So there's UK politics and a UK government. There's also a US one and this year there'll be a global one as well. So purchase those if you want to see these updates, but also they'll be updated throughout the year.
So once you've purchased them, they'll automatically update in your account. So yeah, thanks very much for watching. Let me know if you've got any questions or comments in the comment section below.
and I'll see you in the next video.