Turnout: 59.70%
About this election
The general election of 4 July 2024 ended fourteen years of Conservative-led government in a Labour landslide. Keir Starmer's Labour Party won 411 of the 650 seats — a majority of 174 — yet on just 33.70% of the vote, one of the lowest vote shares ever recorded by a majority government. The Conservatives under Rishi Sunak slumped to 121 seats, by far their worst result in history, while Nigel Farage's Reform UK took 14.29% of the vote (though only 5 seats) and the Liberal Democrats won 72 seats, their best result in a century. Turnout fell to 59.7%, the lowest at a general election since 2001.
The election was the first fought on new constituency boundaries but still under first-past-the-post, with 650 single-member seats. The system magnified Labour's lead enormously: a modest national vote share, very efficiently distributed, translated into a huge seat majority, while Reform UK's 4.1 million votes — spread thinly across the country — returned only a handful of MPs.
The Conservatives entered the campaign exhausted and divided after a turbulent parliament that had seen three prime ministers — Johnson, brought down by the "Partygate" scandal; Liz Truss, whose September 2022 mini-budget triggered a financial crisis and lasted just 49 days; and Sunak, who took over amid a deep cost-of-living crisis. Years of high inflation, strained public services and Conservative infighting left the government deeply unpopular.
Sunak surprised even his own party by calling a summer election, announcing it in the pouring rain outside Downing Street. The Conservative campaign was beset by missteps: Sunak left D-Day 80th-anniversary commemorations early to give an interview, and several Conservative figures were caught up in a scandal over bets placed on the election date. Reform UK's re-entry under Farage drained votes from the Conservative right, while Labour ran a cautious, disciplined campaign promising "change" and economic stability.
Labour's victory was broad but shallow — often called a "loveless landslide", because its vote share rose only slightly from 2019 and its majority rested on the collapse of the Conservative vote and the splitting of the right. The Conservatives lost more than 240 seats, with many cabinet ministers defeated, including former prime minister Liz Truss. Reform UK finished third in votes and won 5 seats, including Farage's own. The Liberal Democrats surged to 72 seats by targeting affluent former Conservative areas in southern England, and the Greens quadrupled their representation to 4 MPs.
Reform UK came second in over 90 seats and reshaped the right of British politics. The SNP collapsed from 48 seats to 9 as Scottish Labour recovered dramatically, taking 37 Scottish seats. A striking feature was the election of several pro-Gaza independents and the loss of some Labour seats over the party's stance on the war in Gaza — independents and minor parties together won an unusually high 12 seats.
The map underlines the scale of the win: Labour finished first in seats in every region and nation of Great Britain — including Scotland, the South East and the South West, areas it had not led for many years — while in Northern Ireland Sinn Féin became the largest party for the first time at a Westminster election. Click any region for its full breakdown.
Turnout of 59.7% was the lowest since 2001, reflecting widespread disillusionment rather than enthusiasm. The result was less an endorsement of Labour than a rejection of the Conservatives, and the fragmentation of the vote — with Reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and independents all advancing — pointed to a more volatile, multi-party future beneath the surface of a commanding majority.
Beneath the landslide, 2024 was the most fragmented general election in modern British history. The combined Conservative-and-Labour vote share fell below 60% for the first time in the post-war era, a record number of MPs were returned from outside the two main parties, and the gap between votes and seats reached extreme levels: Labour took 63% of the seats on just 34% of the vote, while Reform UK's 14% share — more than four million votes — yielded under 1% of seats. Many Labour seats were won on slim majorities against a divided opposition, so the new government's commanding parliamentary position rested on a shallow and potentially volatile electoral coalition.
In Scotland the contest was effectively a Labour–SNP battle that Labour won decisively, recovering most of the ground it had lost since 2015 as the SNP fell from 48 seats to 9 amid internal turmoil. In Wales, Labour again dominated while Plaid Cymru held four seats. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin became the largest party at a Westminster election for the first time, mirroring its position in the devolved Assembly, while the cross-community Alliance Party and the nationalist SDLP also returned MPs and the once-dominant DUP fell back.
Keir Starmer became prime minister the following morning; Rishi Sunak resigned as Conservative leader and was succeeded by Kemi Badenoch later in the year. Labour returned to power for the first time since 2010.
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.