The 2024 United Kingdom Election: A Primer

It’s election season in the United Kingdom!

On July 4, 2024, the people of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales will vote for their next prime minister.

The two main candidates are incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer of the Labour Party. (Note: In the UK, the right wing is represented by the color blue and the left wing by the color red).

Starmer is widely expected to win the election. 

What are the main political parties in the UK?

The United Kingdom has two main political parties — the Conservative Party (whose members are called Tories) and the Labour Party (whose members are called Whigs).

The Conservative Party is akin to the Republican Party in the United States, and the Labour Party roughly corresponds to the Democratic Party in the United States. However, both the Tories and the Whigs are politically farther to the left than their American counterparts.

How do UK elections work?

The United Kingdom follows a parliamentary system of government. This means that British citizens don’t vote directly for the prime minister. Instead, they vote for a local member of parliament, like when Americans vote for a member of Congress. The leader of the party that wins the most seats in parliament becomes prime minister. In that way, the prime minister is chosen similarly to how the Speaker of the House is picked in the United States, except that the prime minister has power closer to that of the American president.

What’s the historical background for this election (Tory Edition)?

The Tories have been in power in the United Kingdom for the past 14 years. In 2010, after 13 years of Whig rule, the British elected David Cameron, a Tory, as their prime minister. Cameron governed until 2016 when the British people decided to leave the European Union (a process known as Brexit). Cameron opposed that decision, so he resigned as prime minister. He was replaced by Theresa May, who promised to support the will of the British people and pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. May ran into political trouble when it came to negotiating the details of Brexit. Three years after she had succeeded Cameron, the United Kingdom was still in the European Union. Unable to come to exit terms with the European Union and under pressure from the Conservative Party membership, May resigned as prime minister in 2019.

She was replaced by the American-born Boris Johnson, who managed to get the European Union to agree to let the United Kingdom exit the union. In the summer of 2022, Johnson resigned as prime minister after losing the support of his own party due to several scandals — including the revelation that, during the mandatory coronavirus pandemic lockdown period, Johnson had hosted parties. Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, who only remained prime minister for a few weeks. She resigned after losing the support of the Conservative Party, which felt that her plan to lower taxes was too extreme for the UK’s more socialist sensibilities. Truss was replaced by the Tory politician Rishi Sunak, who has been prime minister since.

What’s the historical background for this election (Whig Edition)?

Things haven’t gone smoothly for the Whigs, either. In 2010, after the Whigs lost the parliamentary elections following 13 years in power, the Labour Party elected Ed Miliband — who is Jewish — as its leader. After David Cameron won re-election in 2015, Miliband resigned as the leader of the Whigs. He was replaced by Jeremy Corbyn, who allowed open antisemitism to flourish in the Labour Party and seemingly encouraged it. Corbyn’s enmity towards Jews and Israel became a defining and central characteristic of his five years as Labour leader — even outside of Jewish circles.

Under Corbyn’s leadership, senior Jewish members of the Labour Party resigned from their positions because of the uncomfortable work environment that he created. Others who remained in the Labour Party required bodyguards to protect them at Labour Party meetings from other Whigs. Corbyn famously laid a wreath at the grave of one of the terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and referred to Hamas as an organization of his “friends” (he later distanced himself from that wording). Corbyn compared Israel’s government to the ISIS terrorist group and defended people who engaged in antisemitic tropes, including about Jewish influence in financial markets and, formerly, in the slave trade.

Corbyn’s obsession with attacking Jews and Israel — he denied being an antisemite, claiming his only issue was with Zionists — contributed to the Labour Party’s historic loss in the 2019 elections. As a result of the loss, Corbyn resigned as leader of the Labour Party in early 2020. He was replaced by Keir Starmer.

Since taking the helm of the Labour Party, Starmer, whose wife is Jewish, has worked to remove the stench of Corbynism. Among the first steps he took was expelling Corbyn from the party, as well as his biggest supporters.

Who is Rishi Sunak, and what does he believe?

Rishi Sunak, who is a member of parliament from North Yorkshire (a region in England’s north), has been prime minister since 2022. He is 44 years old, making him the youngest person to become prime minister in more than 200 years. Sunak, the son of a Kenyan-Indian father and Tanzanian-Indian mother, is Hindu — the first non-Christian British prime minister in history (Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880, was born Jewish but converted to Christianity for career advancement). Sunak previously worked in the banking industry and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer — a position equivalent to Secretary of the Treasury.

Sunak has outlined his electoral priorities as including:

• Providing more government welfare to the poor, elderly, and disabled
• Providing government subsidies for energy and insurance bills
• Increasing the minimum wage
• Building more government hospitals and hiring more doctors and nurses
• Providing more funding to schools
• Building new schools for special needs students
• Recruiting more police officers specifically to combat child abuse, drug smuggling, and human trafficking
• Recruiting more non-police officers to reduce crime by engaging with at-risk communities
• Holding police officers accountable for their actions
• Making the government’s hospital system more financially transparent

Who is Keir Starmer, and what does he believe?

Keir Starmer, who is a member of parliament representing central London, has been leader of the opposition since 2020. His background is as a lawyer; Starmer was, at one point, the third-highest-ranking government attorney in the United Kingdom. He was the Labour Party’s representative in the negotiations around the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

His campaign promises include:

• Provide more financial transparency for how government money is spent
• Reduce the amount of government spending
• Bring to court people who illegally took Covid bailout money that they weren’t entitled to
• Prevent politicians from giving government contracts to their friends
• Increase the size of the British Army and Navy
• Stay committed to remaining in NATO
• Improve the quality of military housing and of life for military families
• Stop spending government money for illegal immigrants to stay in hotels
• Secure Britain’s sea borders to protect against smugglers and criminal gangs
• Create a unit to expel illegal immigrants from the country

Wait a minute… the Tories sound more like Democrats, and the Whigs sound more like Republicans?

This is part of what makes the 2024 election in the UK so odd. After 14 years in power and concerned about losing it, the Conservative Party is arguing for more government spending, hoping that it will woo traditionally liberal voters.

On the other hand, given numerous scandals that have rocked the Conservative Party during the past 14 years, the Labour Party is hoping to win over voters by promising financial stability and a tough-on-crime approach — in essence arguing that the Tories have failed to uphold their most basic principles.

Assuming they win the election, however, the Whigs may revert to their historically socialist and progressive policies.