General Election Full Results

What can we learn about the general election full results? What can we glean about the direction of travel, voter behaviours and voting trends?

All in all it was a significant step for Reform UK, 5 MP’s elected to parliament and Reform UK came 1st, 2nd or 3rd in 71% of the constituencies where they stood a candidate. This figure stands in contrast with the Lib Dems who came 1st, 2nd or 3rd in just 22% of seats. It stands out that the Lib Dems concentrated their efforts into a limited number of seats to win them, seemingly prepared to sacrifice many others in the process. The Lib Dems came last in 68 seats demonstrating that they either ignored the seat, or that they were involved in tactical voting as is more likely the case.

Reform UK came 3rd in terms of overall vote share:

Labour 33.7%
Conservative 23.7%
Reform UK 14.3%
Lib Dem 12.2%
Green 6.7%
SNP 2.5%
Plaid Cymru 0.7%
Sinn Fein 0.7%
Workers Party 0.7%
DUP 0.6%
Independents 2.3%

Reform UK’s most common final placing was 3rd, Conservative 2nd, Labour 1st, with Lib Dem & Greens both coming 5th the most times.

Without doubt the Reform UK vote was spread across the country.

Imagine 2029, following 5 years of Labour realigning the UK with the EU, a galvanised electorate finally awake to the plot unfolding before them, finally voting to get brexit done.

Turnout

Overall registered voters increased since 2019 from 47,568,611 to 48,214,128 an increase of 700,000. Turnout on polling day dropped however from 67.3% to 60% meaning that 3 million less votes were cast than in 2019.

There was a distinct apathy among some votes who were not inspired to get out and vote.

Labours vote share dropped by 500,000, the Conservative vote dropped by 7 million, halving since 2019. The Lib Dem vote share reduced by 200,000 but the Green Party did well adding over 1 million votes more than doubling their vote. Reform UK at their first attempt achieved 4.1 million votes.

Tactical Voting

Tactical voting was a factor in this election, it looks clear that in many seats votes coalesced around one party sacrificing the other leading to gains for both across all constituencies. In many of the Lib Dem winning seats the labour vote was lower than expected & the Lib Dems came stone last in 68 seats demonstrating that in those seats their vote was transferred to Labour.

Sectarian Voting

We are witnessing sectarian voting in British politics. In this election sectarianism was seemingly more disorganised and fragmented than many feared or expected. Sectarian votes spread across the Workers Party, Independents and the Green Party too as well as some Labour candidates. In some constituencies several competing Independents stood against each other.

Free Palestine / Pro Hamas candidates attracted a proportion of Muslim voters & we can expect to see this vote share as a more organised faction going forwards.

It was a surprise to some that this vote share was not more organised and focused.

The Future

What can we expect in the run up to the 2029 general election?

In the first few weeks of this labour government we have seen an uptick in unrest, we have seen a serving soldier Mark Teeton attacked in front of his wife in uniform in the street, being stabbed outside Brompton barracks, accounts vary but Lt Col Teeton was stabbed between 12 and 70 times in a frenzied attack that according to the news channels was not terrorist related. Please tell Lt Col Teetons wife and family that there was no terror involved.

The attacker was Anthony Esan, 24, a Nigerian living in Kent who arrived in the UK via Italy and France, allegedly suffering from mental health issues.

We have also seen riots in Leeds over some Romanian children being taken into care. The children were returned to the family in order to restore peace in the area enabling rioting as a means of achieving what you want. At the same time we saw more unrest in Whitechapel by a large group of Bangladeshis following the shooting of a Bangladeshi student in Bangladesh.

At the same time we have seen 3 police officers at manchester airport attacked and hospitalised followed by accusations of police brutality following their widely publicised apprehension and detention.

It looks like a concerted effort to malign law inforcement and the police force rather than a miscarriage of justice. On social media we have only been shown a limited portion of the events which show the police using excess force, but prior to that three police officers were attacked by these men.

The social media court of public opinion seems to be working hard at making the Manchester police officers the criminals and the perpetrators of the initial attack are being painted as innocent victims of brutal police officers. It is important that we reserve judgement until we have been appraised of the full facts and have seen the video footage of the initial assault on the police officers which exists and will no doubt be made public in due course.

It has never been more important to support our police, our military and front line first responders of all kinds. While it is only natural to assume that there are bad apples in any and probably every organisation as we have seen in recent years, policing is a difficult job and our officers who quite often run towards trouble rather than away from it need the support of the british public.