Politics for Dummies: A quick, introductory rundown on what happened in the United Kingdom’s general election

Who?

“Change begins now.”

Keir Starmer, 61, stepped onto the podium in Tate Modern early on July 5th, right after the previous day’s General Elections, to deliver his victory speech amidst cheers and flag-waving for the first Labour Party leader of the United Kingdom since Tony Blair in 2010. The party had won a whopping 411 seats, a landslide election result after fourteen years of Tory dominance.

But what does all that mean? It is common knowledge that political mass media are often quite reliant on verbose, technical journalese. This phenomenon results in news articles many would find hard to navigate.

Unlike what… other news might have you believe, the United States is not the only country holding an election this year. In fact, 2024 is notable for just how many elections it will see across the world: 97 countries, half the world’s population, will cast (or would have cast) their vote at some point or another this year. This article will focus on the United Kingdom’s general election, held on July 4th as per former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decree.

With a reluctance to regurgitate information that leaves readers about as confused as before, here is a (hopefully) more digestible description of the state of politics in the UK, concise and jargon-free. Here are some common questions regarding the election and its results.

Disclaimer: This does not claim to be a professionally written article. Do try to make your own judgement, and take the author’s thinly-veiled biases with a bucketload of salt.

The United Kingdom? Isn’t that England?

No. The United Kingdom is comprised of four countries, namely England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories, such as the Isle of Man and Gibraltar, are NOT part of the UK, although they are still under the Crown.) The 2024 UK general election saw voters from all four countries head to the booths to decide who would be the MP for their constituency.

MP? What is that? Isn’t this election about the Prime Minister?

Sort of. MP stands for Member of Parliament, of which there are 650. They represent their political party and their constituency (650 divided areas in the UK with roughly equal population) in the House of Commons. By convention, the Prime Minister is the head of whichever political party has the most MPs in the House of Commons.

(The Prime Minister’s official residence in London is No. 10 Downing Street. As such, “Number 10” is a colloquial name for the position of Prime Minister in mass media.)

A voter in the General Election is voting for a candidate in their constituency. The one with the most votes becomes an MP, an election system known as “first-past-the-post” voting (FPTP). The general election this year happened on July 4th (unrelated to the US Independence Day), and results were announced in almost all constituencies in the early morning of July 5th.

The House of Commons in Westminster, London, where they vote over national matters and sometimes shout insults at each other. “Westminster” is a common media shorthand for the Parliament because of this.

What political parties are there in the UK?

Now that is quite complicated.

The UK is historically often referred to as having a “two-and-a-half party” system. Since the last century, the two dominant parties (and the only two to have elected Prime Ministers since 1935) have been the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. 

(Side note: The Conservative Party is often also known as the Tory Party, or Tories for short. It is a nickname which refers to the historic Tories, a now-defunct political faction founded in 1679, from which the modern Conservative Party emerged.)

The Liberal-Democrat Party is a third party that usually takes more seats than any other minority party in the House of Commons, but still trails far behind the main two.

Other parties (and independent campaigners) also exist, holding minority seats in the House of Commons. Some notable ones include:

• Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, is headed by Nigel Farage. It is a right-wing populist political party founded in 2018. They won 5 seats in the 2024 election.

• Green Party of England and Wales, commonly known as the Green Party for short, is co-headed by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay. It is a left-wing, primarily environmentalist party. They won 4 seats in the 2024 election.

• Politics in Northern Ireland is almost entirely distinct from the other three countries of the United Kingdom:

• The perpetually dominant political issue in the country revolves around “unionist” and “nationalist” sentiments. That is, whether Northern Ireland should remain a part of the United Kingdom, or should it split apart and join the Republic of Ireland instead. This has been a contentious topic ever since Ireland’s independence from the UK in 1921, and it was the catalyst for a decades-long, low-intensity conflict known as the Troubles. Violence officially ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, though the political dispute continues.

• Sinn Féin, the main nationalist party, operating both in Northern Ireland and Ireland, won 7 seats in the 2024 election (out of Northern Ireland’s 18 total). This is significant because, for the first time, a nationalist party had won the most seats in Northern Ireland. The second-place Democratic Unionist Party won 5.

• Two prominent nationalist parties also exist in Wales and Scotland: Plaid Cymru won 4 seats (out of Wales’ 32 total) in the 2024 election, while the (creatively named) Scottish Nationalist Party won 9 (out of Scotland’s 57 total). They each play a larger role in their countries’ local parliaments, the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament respectively.

Unlike the US, the generally right-wing Conservative Party have blue as their representative colour, while the generally left-wing Labour Party has red instead.

Prime Ministers have no term limit, though they may end their tenure by being (as mentioned before) voted out of office in the general election every five years, impeachment by Parliament (although that has not happened yet in British political history), or resignment. 

The current Prime Minister is Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party. He’s the first Labour Party PM since Tony Blair, fourteen years ago. For reference, someone who was born in the last election where a Labour Party leader was chosen for PM would now be old enough to drink, drive, and ⸻ fittingly enough ⸻ vote.

The last Prime Minister to be voted in through a general election was Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party, in 2019.

Wait, then who is Rishi Sunak?

The former Prime Minister.

What? I thought-

A series of scandals in July 2022, including the infamous Partygate (where many Conservative Party members were found to be holding parties in No. 10 Downing Street, breaking the UK COVID-19 regulations which they themselves have set), culminated in the resignation of Boris Johnson as PM and Party leader. 

The following election was purely within the Conservative Party, resulting in the leadership of Liz Truss. She then became Prime Minister.

49 days later, after a second government crisis resulting from her disastrous economic policies (not a biased comment here: nobody liked the mini-budget plan, except probably the ultra-rich), she resigned as well, cementing her spot as the shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history.

On October 14th, 2022, The Daily Star, a British tabloid newspaper, famously predicted that the lettuce in the above picture would outlast Liz Truss: That is, that she would resign as Prime Minister before the lettuce wilts. They were right.

An unopposed Conservative Party election resulted in Rishi Sunak becoming the Prime Minister, but his term is still measured in the time that passed since the last general election. The 2024 general election was the one in which Keir Starmer beat Sunak. 

This election result was considered by many to be a “landslide victory”, as the 411 seats which the Labour Party had won were much larger than the 326 required to form a majority government. The Conservative Party had only won 121, a distant second, and the Liberal-Democrats won 72.

The 2024 general election results map by constituency. Courtesy of the House of Commons Library.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Hey, that’s your call.

If you want to know more about each party’s promises and what they have actually done, especially the current Starmer government, you are free to visit each of their party websites or search for news reports and articles related to British politics. We are only at the start of the Prime Minister’s term, and with (if nothing goes wrong) five years ahead of us, we can only wait and see whether he will bring about the Change he promised as part of his campaign slogan.

Hopefully, that clears up some of the most commonly seen queries regarding. There are of course plenty more to be asked, and politics itself is a tricky business that hasn't seen a comprehensive solution even after millennia of philosophical wrangling, let alone a single article.

But what this piece hopes to illustrate is that politics is, at least for most of us, not an intangible thing that only exists for the elites and the Oxbridge graduates. It is something that deserves to be scrutinized and kept tabs on by the general public, or else the purpose of democracy would be moot. To any and everyone with the fortunate ability to, in the United Kingdom or otherwise, do not forget to vote, vote, vote.