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Is the United Kingdom (Still) Unstable? The 2024 General Election and Beyond

Le Royaume-Uni est-il (encore) instable ? Les élections générales de 2024 et après
Thibaud Harrois, Clémence Leveque and Pauline Schnapper

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1On July 4, 2024, the United-Kingdom held a general election in a context of deep social and political instability, to which the Labour Party pledged to put an end. The 2017 and 2019 general elections were both snap elections, called by Conservative Prime Ministers (Theresa May and Boris Johnson) in search of political legitimacy and leverage in an attempt to strengthen their hand in fraught Brexit negotiations. On the contrary, the 2024 election was the first since 2015 to be held close to the scheduled date; it was also the first general election since the UK effectively left the European Union. After 14 years of Conservative rule, it marked the return to political alternation, with Keir Starmer having been elected as the new Labour British Prime Minister.

2The 2016-2023 period left the country weakened by a series of (geo)political and social crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and the change in monarchs, to public service strikes, the management of the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas and Brexit, with the latter revealing and reinforcing profound political, geographical and social divisions. The Conservative period was also marked by the continued erosion of political trust, with successive Prime Ministers quickly losing support in Parliament and failing to stop the downward spiral of voter disengagement from politics. Indeed, the electoral decline of the two major political parties, Conservative and Labour, is one of the most striking features of the present political landscape in the UK.

  • 1 Leon Hurwitz, “Contemporary Approaches to Political Stability”, Comparative Politics 5:3, 1973, pp. (...)
  • 2 Keith M. Dowding and Richard Kimber, “The Meaning and Use of ‘Political Stability’”, European Journ (...)

3The 2024 general election was therefore a timely moment to gauge the depth and durability of this turbulence and question the stability of the wider British polity. Conceptualising the notions of stability and instability is not an easy endeavour. The Oxford English Dictionary defines stability as ‘Immunity from destruction or essential change; enduring quality.’ In political science, the notion has been less explored than in International Relations, where the stability of the international system is commonly assessed. The difficulty stems in particular from the complexity of finding criteria that can be relevant in very different national and political contexts. As early as 1973, Hurwitz identified several possible approaches, listing governmental longevity, a legitimate constitutional order, the absence of structural change or the permanence of behavioural norms respected by social actors as criteria for assessing the stability of a system.1 However, Dowding and Kimber are keen to point out that a stable political system is not incompatible with structural change, but enables it to adapt without breaking down.2 As for the lack of longevity of governments, their fall may have a voluntary or involuntary dimension, and a distinction must be made: did governments come and go so quickly by choice or under the pressure of events that took away all room for manoeuvre from those in power? Similarly, it is less change itself that leads to instability, or even threatens the survival of the system, than whether or not change is under control. Following their lead, political stability can be understood as a relationship between the object considered to be stable or unstable and the contingent event that threatens it. The notion of expected behaviour or of the role assumed by political and social actors is also useful to shed light on the evolution of the British political debate during the last term of office, in particular the decisions and attitudes taken by Conservative Prime Ministers and Members of Parliament.

4Can we therefore consider the period following the 2016 referendum as an illustration of the instability of the British political system, marked by a series of changes of government and elections that failed to provide clear directions for public policy at home and abroad? If this is the case, do the 2024 elections mark a return to a form of stability? In this special issue, drawn from a conference held at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle on 31st January and 1 February 2025, we look in particular at how the main political parties, in England but also in Scotland, evolved and attempted to adjust to an increasingly volatile and discontented electorate, and how the rise of smaller yet influential parties, particularly on the far-right of the political spectrum, reflected as well as contributed to these trends. We analyse whether and how institutions dealt with the Brexit drama which continued after 2019 and with political instability and whether and to what extent, now that it is in government, Labour might seek to reform some of these institutions. We finally pay close attention to culture war issues and foreign policy, two spheres of policy debates which, despite having been seldom mentioned during the campaign proper, have grown more salient in recent years, provided a backdrop to the campaign and are likely to continue disrupting British politics in the coming years.

5In the inaugural article, Richard Rose vividly captures the shifting dynamics of stability and instability in British politics, culminating in the transformative 2024 general election. For much of the post-war period, the country's political system was characterised by a stable two-party equilibrium, with the Labour Party and the Conservative Party monopolising votes and seats. From 1951 to 1970, this duopoly won over 90% of the vote and nearly all parliamentary seats. However, this balance began to erode in 1974 with the rise of the Liberals, ushering in a relatively stable three-party system which endured for almost half a century.

6The 2024 election marks a definitive rupture. Rose demonstrates that the fragmentation of party competition has reached unprecedented levels: five parties (Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Greens) contested almost every seat, and seven parties retained their deposits. Labour secured a landslide majority in seats with only 33.7% of the vote, while the Conservatives suffered their worst ever result. This disproportionality highlights the growing instability of the electoral system's ability to reflect voter preferences.

7Furthermore, Rose contends that the left-right ideological axis no longer adequately captures the essence of British political competition. In 2024, voters faced a multidimensional field including divisions around nationalism, immigration, or environmentalism among other causes. The result is a patchwork of localised contests with no clear national narrative. The article suggests that further volatility is likely. Indeed, by examining these dynamics, Rose both diagnoses the current instability and outlines potential paths to 2029, including coalition governments, minority rule, or even electoral reform. His analysis highlights the resilience and fragility of British democracy, suggesting that stability may require new institutional arrangements to accommodate an increasingly pluralistic political landscape.

A redefined political landscape?

8Political parties, key actors in the 2024 general election campaign and wider political life, are both victims and generators of political stability and instability. As the 2024 general election redefined the British political landscape, notably by putting an end to 14 years of Conservative rule, and giving the far-right its first seats in the House of Commons, the contributions to this issue offer insights into the performances of the four main political parties and the future challenges they face.

9Focusing on the Labour party, Emmanuelle Avril analyses the changes the now governing party made to its ground campaigning strategy in order to bolster its electoral success in the hope of putting an end to 14 turbulent years in opposition. She traces the shift in the party’s campaigning model, both in philosophy and in practice, from one previously focused on mobilisation and turnout, to one based on persuasion. This change in strategy was primarily designed with a view to regain the trust of floating “hero voters”, once captive working-class, socially conservative voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands in the North and in the now infamous “Red Wall”, who had gradually abandoned the party under new Labour before voting Leave in the 2016 referendum and lending Boris Johnson their support in 2019.

10Overall, these “persuasion pathways” proved effective in turning out voters and winning the election, but also in developing a new rapport both with voters, whose concerns were dealt with in longer conversation with canvassers, and activists, whose skills were developed through party-provided training. Labour efforts were however focused on “battleground”seats which left aside a range of more urban and socially progressive voters as well as the activists in those seats. As the Reform threat now affects Labour as well as the Conservatives, Emmanuelle Avril argues that the party could do well to keep refining its persuasion model to build long-lasting relationships with these voters.

11The Liberal Democrats are another party which, perhaps more surprisingly, did particularly well in the general election. Clémence Leveque thus analyses the contribution the party’s ruthlessly disciplined and targeted top-down ground campaign and its interactions with a sometimes comical media campaign personalised around its leader, made to the overall performance of the party. After a disastrous counter-performance in 2015, the British centre party spent years in the doldrums, failing to capitalise on its opposition to Brexit. Eventually its focus on capturing disaffected Conservative voters in the “Blue Wall” ever since 2020 allowed the party to regain its third-party status, with a number of MPs (72) not achieved since 1923.

12Yet the analysis reveals the challenges hidden by the party’s performance, with some long-lasting and others brought to the fore by the results. Like Labour, the party focused on targeting a limited number of marginal constituencies in the “Blue Wall”, and left activists in the rest of the country to fend for themselves. With barely any campaigning activity in those no-hope seats, particularly Labour-facing ones, the party will need to fight hard to build its presence and is likely to struggle against the incumbent during the 2024-2029 Parliament. What is more, the party’s performance relied heavily on anti-Tory tactical voting and does not point to voters’ positive endorsement of the Liberal Democrats, who once again failed to offer voters a positive vision for the country. Finally, the party’s results, with a roughly proportional vote-seat ratio under FPTP, highlight like never before the ambiguity of the party’s commitment to the introduction of proportional representation.

13Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Luca Augé and Axel Bercq offer three different perspectives on the current and future challenges facing the now main opposition party: the Conservatives. The Tories indeed faced a period of increasing instability in the 2016-2024 period with five consecutive leaders, four of whom resigned due to intra-party divisions.

14Agnès Alexandre-Collier tackles another of the main functions of political parties: candidate selection. With the Conservative party’s projected defeat prior to the election, she focuses on the socio-demographic and ideological profile of the 71 first-time candidates fielded by the party, which will likely be the future faces of their party and can give us an indication of the party’s target voters and ideological position post-2024. While the party’s candidates remain overwhelmingly pale and male, she demonstrates that they are also more likely to be local, and less vocal, having toned down their ideological preferences, a characteristic which challenges the party’s description as increasingly radical and provides a stark contrast to their leader, Kemi Badenoch, which could prove a cause for intra-party instability.

15Coming back on the fraught issue of intra-party management, Luca Augé assesses intra-party divisions within the Conservative party during the 2019-2024 Parliament by focusing on the disintegration of the party’s parliamentary party, and provides avenues to explain how this instability contributed to the party’s defeat at the general election. The author tackles three consecutive periods experienced by the party’s MPs. Following their landslide victory in the 2019 election, MPs appeared particularly hopeful as to the policies they were about to be able to implement, notably the levelling up agenda. Yet growing structural tensions caused by Brexit and the Covid pandemic, notably between long-standing MPs in the South of England and newer MPs from the “Red Wall” turned into inter-personal divisions as the 2024 general drew nearer, which left the party divided into factions and unprepared for the campaign as the party descended into internal political instability. Luca Augé points to this instability being a symptom of the party’s lack of leadership, which it will need to solve if it wants to regain its dominance.

16Building on the notions of intra-party instability and fragmentation, Axel Bercq specifically focuses on Conservative factions in the post-Brexit period. Studying six intra-party groups, Bercq argues that only the infamous ERG can be described as a faction, while the five others were single-issue and temporary groups. While they did not contribute to the party’s organisational instability, they were instrumental to its ideological instability. Instead of fragmenting the party’s ideology, they contributed to the party’s shift towards the right, with an emphasis on populism and social conservatism. Damaging the party’s tradition as a broad church of competing ideas, they also contributed to the party’s downfall in the general election.

17Perhaps the greatest force for instability in recent British politics has been Nigel Farage and his successive parties, which proved instrumental in the Brexit-related chaos. Karine Tournier-Sol deals with this destabilising power in her contribution to this issue by focusing on the latest of Farage’s parties, Reform UK, and its use of disruption both as a strategy and as a goal. The new far-right populist party acted as a disruptive force in the general election campaign, a disruption from which it largely benefited, proving particularly detrimental to the performance of the Conservative party and winning its first ever five seats in the House of Commons. This strategy was then continued in the post-election period, where Reform actors “performed crisis” both on the media and in the streets in the context of the summer 2024 riots, and in staging its own success in the electorate. Both strategies pertained to the core of the populist ideology, which aims to disrupt the established order in order to change politics for good, something Farage might finally have succeeded in doing by now being a threat to the two main parties.

18Finally, focusing more specifically on the Scottish case, Edwige Camp explores the causes of Labour’s victory in the 2024 general election and shows caution as to the likelihood of a Labour victory in the 2026 Scottish elections. She argues that Labour’s victory was mostly due to British-wide momentum and to the SNP’s setbacks with internal divisions, an ineffective independence strategy and a mixed record in government. Rather than a realignment in Scottish politics, with Scottish Labour having replaced the SNP as the dominant party, Edwige Camp argues that Labour’s failure to deal with Scottish interests since the election might fuel demands for independence once again. The Scottish political landscape might thus prove more stable than expected.

Institutions at a crossroads

19As Edwige Camp’s contribution highlights, the British-wide party system was not the only dimension of political life affected by dynamics of stability and instability during the period, so were devolved politics and British-wide institutions.

20In her contribution to the special issue, Coree Brown Swan assesses the relative absence of constitutional debates during the general election campaign, and argues that this “quietude” was misleading, rather than a symbol of constitutional tensions having been put to rest. While valence issues dominated the campaign and Labour won in England, Scotland and Wales, this departure from the previous years of territorial crisis are due more to the collapse of the SNP, the rejection of the Conservatives and wide-ranging geopolitical crises. As such, the article shows that this return to relative stability hides deep territorial divisions. While the relationship between central government and devolved institutions has improved with the change of government, long-lasting debates remain - between and within the nations as well as within the Labour party itself. With no strong nationalist force in Scotland and Wales, and a dominant Labour party with centralist tendencies and a minimalist approach to reforming the constitutional settlement, these might cause further instability during the 2026 round of devolved elections.

21Moving on to institutions, Aurélien Antoine tackles a long-standing debate in British politics, House of Lords reform. While the executive power has long held an ambiguous position to Britain’s unelected second chamber, he highlights the dilemmas and tensions in Labour’s Lords’ reform strategy. Following 14 years of conservative government marked by problematic uses of the power of patronage by several Prime Ministers, Labour had originally planned to transform the Lords into a fully elected chamber. Yet, the party’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) 2024 Act shows once again Labour’s “cautious pragmatism” when it comes to Lords reform and its historical struggle to find a third way between radical changes and immobilism. Drawing on constitutional and political history, Antoine argues that while political analysts might deplore the lack of consistency between Labour’s promises and actual reforms, constitutional law experts help us see the House of Lords’ slow but stable evolution throughout centuries as in keeping with the very character of the British constitution as an unwritten and adaptable framework.

22Laurence Harris concludes this section by focusing on the Bank of England as a mitigating force against instability in the 2016-2024 period. Drawing on historical and discourse institutionalism, she argues that the Bank’s discourse (addressed at policy actors and the public) following David Cameron’s post-Brexit referendum resignation, Liz Truss’ mini-budget crisis and the deployment of quantitative easing, as well as its perceived neutrality have helped it foster stability in times of crisis. Yet it has also raised questions about the democratic legitimacy of this powerful yet technocratic and unelected institution.

Political debates: from culture wars to foreign policy

23“Culture war” issues have become increasingly vibrant in the British (and Western) political landscape. As such, by focusing on speeches delivered by Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, Raphaële Espiet-Kilty analyses the Conservatives’ use of culture war issues during the 2024 election campaign and leadership election. She seeks to assess the reasons behind such a focus and their impact on the party’s electoral fortunes. As Brexit led to polarisation and crystallised the salience of identity politics, the article argues that culture war issues and the fight against a “woke” political elite - a stable element of the Conservative ideology during the period under study - were weaponised by right-wing populist conservative politicians for political gain, fostering instability as a means to win votes and ultimately office. Yet this focus also helped the party to galvanise a stable core of Leave voters around shared traditional and “common sense” values of which the Conservative party presented itself as the defender. While culture war issues have not helped the Conservatives win the general election against Labour, they have continued to shape British public opinion and will likely continue to be used by Kemi Badenoch in an attempt to thwart the Reform surge.

24Maëlyn Marlière then focuses on one such culture war issue, the “trans” debate. The article argues that the issue, which came to the fore following public pronouncements by J.K. Rowling and the Conservative Government’s use of section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to veto the SNP’s Gender Recognition Bill, was used by both the Labour and Conservative parties in order to win votes. To do so, she analyses the gender critical (anti-trans) discourse used on two key dimensions of the debate: single-sex spaces and the safeguarding of transgender children, and shows that for both parties, this discourse was, somewhat surprisingly, rooted in progressive beliefs.

25Another issue was fairly invisible in the election campaign despite having proved a heavily disruptive force to British politics in the recent past: UK-EU relations. Despite having been little mentioned, it nevertheless shaped voting behaviour and continues to affect British foreign policy.

26In his contribution to the issue, Simon Usherwood deals with British European policy following the Brexit referendum and argues that the UK has come back to its long-standing defensive, reactive and managerial approach determined primarily by domestic concerns. While this is in itself a stable approach from both Conservative and Labour governments, it results in unstable policy choices which fail to consider structural or strategic requirements, with British politicians continuously failing to internalise the significance of European integration. This has led, amongst other things, to the Brexit referendum itself, as well as the Hard Brexit that followed. Usherwood thus argues that proactive interactions with the EU will need to be carefully managed by the Labour government in its attempt to “reset” the relationship and in the renegotiations that will take place in 2026 if it wants to achieve positive policy outcomes for the UK.

27Shedding further light on the importance of domestic aspects of the UK-EU relationship, Paolo Chiochetti then explores the evolution of Euroscepticism among Brexit voters before and after the referendum, focusing primarily on the 2019-2024 period. He shows that Eurosceptic voters emerged from Brexit victorious, weakened, but resilient. While their policy priority of “getting Brexit done” was achieved in 2019, the negative consequences of Brexit and Britain’s gradual demographic replacement have contributed to a decline in hard Euroscepticism and a move to moderate Europhilia. Yet, the Brexit divide continues to shape public opinion and voting behaviour and to undermine the stability of the British political system by contributing to rising support for the far-right, which might prove a continued destabilising force for British politics as a whole.

28Thibaud Harrois and Pauline Schnapper deal with a burning yet fairly secondary issue in the general election campaign, which has contributed to reshaping UK-EU relations, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They argue that the apparent continuity between the actions taken by the Conservative and Labour governments in support of Ukraine hide underlying difficulties that Keir Starmer will need to tackle. While British support for Ukraine has proven stable so far, the article investigates several domestic and international tensions such as voter fatigue, economic concerns, the rise of Reform UK and the return of Donald Trump to power that show that this apparent consensus rests on fragile conditions and might not prove as stable as it appears.

29To conclude the special issue, Sylvain Gaillaud broadens the analysis of foreign policy by dealing with a long-standing and once again salient topic in British political life: the UK’s “special relationship” with the US. He focuses on the year 2024, one of electoral uncertainties both in the UK and in the US, leading to a change in leadership in both countries which destabilised the bilateral relationship. As such, the article shows how the relationship has been tested by the Americans and how the British have worked to preserve it. While the “special relationship” appears to remain stable, and has so far granted the UK preferential treatment in Trump’s trade war, the US president’s disruptive diplomacy might damage the two countries’ cooperation as well as erode bilateral trust, which points out the danger of the UK being too dependent on the US security umbrella. Furthermore, the article shows the price of staying close to Washington is one the UK government is willing to pay.

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Notes

1 Leon Hurwitz, “Contemporary Approaches to Political Stability”, Comparative Politics 5:3, 1973, pp. 449-463. <https://doi.org/10.2307/421273>

2 Keith M. Dowding and Richard Kimber, “The Meaning and Use of ‘Political Stability’”, European Journal of Political Research 11:3, 1983, pp. 229-243. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.1983.tb00060.x>

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References

Electronic reference

Thibaud Harrois, Clémence Leveque and Pauline Schnapper, “Is the United Kingdom (Still) Unstable? The 2024 General Election and Beyond”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXX-3 | 2025, Online since 15 September 2025, connection on 16 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/13993; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14qk8

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About the authors

Thibaud Harrois

Dr Thibaud Harrois is a Senior Lecturer in British Politics at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). His research focuses on British foreign and security policy, the UK and European security, and the UK’s relationship with France and other EU member states in the post-Brexit context. His latest articles include ‘Ending Brexit? Towards a “normalisation” of the UK's role in European security (2017-2023)’, published in the Observatoire de la société britannique (n°31, 2024), and "Le Royaume-Uni et la sécurité du nord de l’Europe. Redéfinition du rôle national et implications régionales" in L'année des relations internationales 2025-2026 (2025).

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Clémence Leveque

Clémence Leveque is senior lecturer in British politics and society at the University of Toulon and a member of the BABEL research centre (EA 2649). She is a doctor from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the dynamics of cooperation and subversion within the Liberal Democrat party during the 2021 Greater London Authority Election and the role unwinnable elections can play in the reconstruction of political parties.

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Pauline Schnapper

Pauline Schnapper is Professor of British politics and society at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and head of the Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW EA4399). She has published extensively on British European and foreign policies, including La Politique au Royaume-Uni, coll. Repères, Paris, La Découverte, 2022 and “Reaching power through ambiguity? The Labour Party and Brexit 2021-2025”, British Politics, 2025.

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