Turnout: 66.40%
About this election
The United Kingdom general election of 7 May 2015 returned the Conservative Party of David Cameron to government with an outright, if narrow, majority of the 650-seat House of Commons. The Conservatives won 330 seats on 36.81% of the vote, against 232 seats and 30.45% for Ed Miliband's Labour Party. The most dramatic story was in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party swept 56 of the 59 seats, all but wiping out Labour north of the border. The Liberal Democrats — the Conservatives' partners in the 2010–2015 coalition — collapsed from 57 seats to just 8, and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won 12.64% of the vote but only a single seat. Turnout was 66.4%.
The House of Commons is elected by first-past-the-post: the country is divided into 650 single-member constituencies, and the candidate with the most votes in each wins the seat. There is no second round and no proportional top-up, so a party can win a Commons majority on well under 40% of the national vote, while a party whose support is evenly spread but rarely first — as UKIP was in 2015 — can poll millions of votes for almost no seats. The party that commands the confidence of the Commons forms the government and its leader becomes prime minister; the unelected House of Lords cannot ultimately block the Commons. Under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, 2015 was the first British election held to a pre-scheduled five-year date rather than at a time of the prime minister's choosing.
British politics has long been dominated by two parties: the centre-right Conservatives (Tories) and the centre-left Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats occupy the centre, the SNP campaigns for Scottish independence, Plaid Cymru for Wales, and the Greens on the environmental left; UKIP, then led by Nigel Farage, pressed for withdrawal from the European Union. Northern Ireland has its own separate party system, dominated by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Irish republican Sinn Féin, whose MPs abstain from Westminster.
The campaign was fought against the backdrop of the coalition's austerity programme and a recovering economy. Cameron warned of the risk of a Labour government propped up by the surging SNP, while Miliband promised to end austerity and curb energy prices. Almost every opinion poll pointed to another hung parliament, making the eventual Conservative majority a genuine surprise — a polling failure later investigated by the industry.
Cameron's outright victory, the first Conservative majority since 1992, freed him from his Liberal Democrat partners but came with a heavy commitment: a promised in/out referendum on European Union membership, made to head off the UKIP threat and unite his own divided party. That pledge would dominate the next parliament and ultimately end his career.
Just eight months after Scotland voted to remain in the UK in the September 2014 independence referendum, the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon turned that mobilisation into a Westminster landslide, taking 50% of the Scottish vote and 56 of 59 seats. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats were each reduced to a single Scottish seat. It was a realignment from which Scottish Labour has never fully recovered.
Punished by their own supporters for entering coalition with the Conservatives — and above all for breaking a pledge on university tuition fees — the Liberal Democrats lost 49 of their 57 seats. Leader Nick Clegg survived in Sheffield but resigned the leadership the morning after; Miliband and Farage also resigned, an unusually clean sweep of the main party leaders in a single day.
UKIP's 3.88 million votes (12.64%) yielded one MP, and the Greens' 1.16 million (3.77%) also returned just one, while the SNP's 1.45 million votes won 56 seats. The disproportion reignited debate about electoral reform, only two years after the 2011 referendum had rejected the Alternative Vote.
The map shows the familiar geography of the era: the Conservatives dominant across southern and eastern England and the Midlands, Labour ahead in the North East, North West, Yorkshire, London and Wales, the SNP holding all of Scotland, and the DUP the largest party in Northern Ireland. Click any region for its full breakdown of vote share and seats.
The 2015 election followed five years of the first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s, in which the Conservatives had governed with the Liberal Democrats after the inconclusive 2010 election left no party with a majority. The coalition's defining policy was deficit reduction through deep cuts to public spending — "austerity" — pursued by chancellor George Osborne in response to the 2008 financial crisis. By 2015 the economy was growing again and the deficit had roughly halved, and the Conservatives fought the campaign on a claim of economic competence and a "long-term economic plan", arguing that a Labour government would put the recovery at risk. Labour, for its part, struggled to shake off blame for the pre-2010 deficit, and Ed Miliband never established a clear lead on either economic trust or leadership — weaknesses the result laid bare.
Cameron formed a single-party government and legislated for the EU referendum, which he set for 23 June 2016. When the country voted to Leave, he resigned, and the referendum he had conceded to manage his party instead reshaped British politics for a decade.
House of Commons Library and the Electoral Commission. Constituency results compiled by the House of Commons Library — commonslibrary.parliament.uk.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.