The British General Election of 2017

There was not supposed to be a general election in 2017. In May 2015, David Cameron had formed the first Conservative majority government for 23 years, having won what he called ‘the sweetest victory of all’. Committed to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, his plan was to negotiate a reformed relationship with the EU, which he would then put before the country, where a campaign focusing heavily on the economic risks of leaving the EU would secure a relatively easy victory. The Conservatives would then govern for the rest of the Parliament, before he handed over to his successor, widely assumed to be the Chancellor, George Osborne. Instead, at 7 am on 24 June 2016 and with Britain having voted by 52% to 48% to leave the EU, Cameron remarked dryly to his advisors: ‘Well, that didn’t go according to plan.’ In his first party conference speech as leader back in 2006, he had said he wanted the Conservatives to stop ‘banging on’ about Europe, ‘while parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life’. There was therefore an irony in a referendum over Europe resulting in him announcing his resignation as Prime Minister at 8.23 am, when many parents were getting their kids to school. The third successive Conservative Prime Minister to have been fatally damaged by his party’s European divide, he had been Prime Minister of a majority Conservative administration for just over a year.

On 23 January 2013, in the London offices of Bloomberg, David Cameron announced that, if re-elected in the general election, he would negotiate a ‘new settlement’ for Britain inside the European Union before holding a referendum on EU membership. The political momentum for such a vote had been building within the Prime Minister’s party for some time. In October 2011, 81 Conservatives had defied a three-line whip to vote in favour of a referendum on EU membership. This followed the creation of nascent campaign group the People’s Pledge—openly backed by 86 sitting MPs, including those backbenchers who had forced the vote in the House of Commons—as well as a string of polling figures revealing support for a referendum. This parliamentary pressure was persistent and cumulative. In October 2012 the government suffered a Commons defeat over EU policy. In May 2014, even after Cameron had promised a referendum, more than 100 Conservative MPs backed an amendment regretting the absence of a referendum bill from the Queen’s Speech.

When the general election results came through in May 2015, David Cameron and his team were both elated and taken aback. He had been prepared for various outcomes, including defeat, but now found himself leading the first majority Conservative government since John Major in 1992. He was the first Conservative Prime Minister since 1955 to increase the party’s vote share in successive general elections, albeit by less than 1%.

There was no shortage of election inquests, both official and unofficial, into Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election. They included the Fabian Society’s The Mountain to Climb, the party’s official Beckett report in January 2016, an independent inquiry, Labour’s Future, chaired by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, and an internal and private report, ‘2015: What Happened?’ All acknowledged the need for the party to reach out to former Labour voters, but also to win over some Conservative and UKIP voters if it was to have any chance of gaining the seats it needed to win a majority next time.

Once considered a hallmark of the British political system, the concept of two-party politics was thought to have been consigned to history. The share of the popular vote captured by the two main parties had been in almost constant decline since the 1970s, falling as low at 65% in 2010. The 2015 contest had seen a very small reversal, with both the main parties seeing their vote share rising, but only very slightly, and with record-breaking performances from UKIP (especially in England and Wales), the SNP and the Greens, the 2015 contest provided plenty of evidence of a highly fragmented party system. It was the first election since 1832 in which different parties had topped the poll in all four parts of the UK. Yet the following two years proved difficult for the ‘other’ parties. In Scotland, as discussed below in Chapter 6, the SNP found it hard to maintain the dominance they had achieved just two years before, while elsewhere the smaller parties found themselves struggling to respond to a rapidly changing political environment.

In the period 2014–2017 from, and counting, the independence referendum, Scottish voters have been to the polls on six separate occasions. The Scottish political environment of the last few years has experienced dramatic change, turbulence and seismic shocks that have been more far-reaching than in any era since the 1970s. The period has witnessed the arrival of the SNP in office as first a minority, then majority government, followed by the 2014 independence referendum. Subsequent events in 2015–2017—of two UK elections and the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections (which the SNP won but in which they lost their overall majority)—have to be seen against this backdrop: of a politics still in flux on big questions such as independence and Scotland’s place in the UK.

Even by the standards of a normal election campaign, which are not for the lazy, the first few weeks of the 2017 campaign were especially hectic. All those involved speak of the frantic pace at the start of the campaign. The preparatory work that parties would normally undertake before an election over at least a year—drafting manifestoes, planning campaign events, allocating funding and selecting candidates—all had to be shoehorned into a fortnight or so.

Few general election manifestoes are remembered. Even fewer make much difference. Labour’s 1983 manifesto was famously described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’; few others have been anywhere near as memorable. Almost none have materially affected election campaigns. Yet the process of manifesto production is taken seriously by the parties, both as a chance to showcase their policies and—if elected—as giving a mandate for government. It is normally an extended process, taking place over months, sometimes years, with policies carefully trailed and tested, often involving extensive consultation with think tanks and campaigning groups. In 2017, by contrast, all the parties rushed to write their manifestoes in weeks. Even under normal circumstances, manifestoes are not usually great works of literature, and given the speed at which they were produced, this was especially true in 2017; yet these hastily produced and cobbled together documents mattered, in a way they rarely do and in a way few would have predicted at the start of the campaign.

The bombing in Manchester on 22 May 2017 was the worst terrorist attack in the UK since 2005. The country woke the next morning to shocking pictures of bloodied concert-goers being helped out of the Manchester Arena by members of the emergency services. The Prime Minister chaired an early morning meeting of COBR, the government’s emergency response committee. She then gave a statement outside Number 10, in which she described the attack as ‘among the worst terrorist incidents we have ever experienced in the United Kingdom’. She announced that she would be travelling to Manchester to meet with the Chief Constable and the newly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, as well as the emergency services.

For most voters, election day was warm (the warmest since 1997), if wet (with some of the heaviest rain since the election of February 1974, especially in Scotland). The usual reporting restrictions limited discussion of the election on conventional media to stilted accounts of polling stations opening and politicians casting their votes, although on social media—here as elsewhere driving a coach and horses through much of existing electoral law—there were claims of unusually long queues at some polling stations, along with a larger than normal presence of younger voters, especially in some university towns and cities. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, there were reports of newly registered students being turned away at Keele University despite having polling cards, until council staff were forced to produce up-to-date registers. However, claims of high turnout had frequently been made in the past, only to turn out to be exaggerated, and rumours about the high participation of young voters and students failed to dent private predictions in all the political parties that the election would result in a comfortable Conservative majority.

Having been spectacularly wrong about the 2015 general election—when they had predicted that Labour and the Conservatives were too close to call in terms of vote share, only for the latter to end up 7% ahead—the opinion pollsters knew they were on trial in 2017. Since the 2015 debacle, they had enjoyed some success with predictions for Corbyn’s leadership election in 2015 and 2016, Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoralty race, and in the devolved elections in Wales and Scotland. Their performance in the 2016 referendum, however, was more mixed. In the last month of the campaign, marginally more polls predicted a Leave outcome than Remain, although most of the final polls predicted a win for Remain.

Constituency campaigning has been transformed in recent elections. Many of the more traditional methods, such as volunteers knocking on doors and delivering leaflets, still take place, but increasingly there has been more direction and control from national party headquarters, more use of technology and more sophisticated targeting of individual voters. All three of these changes were in evidence in 2017 and probably to a greater degree than in recent elections, along with a larger spend than ever on digital messaging. But there were also widespread complaints about the inaccuracy of much targeting and the failure of central direction. The 2017 election was also notable for the number of candidates who complained of intimidation and abuse, often (though not solely) on social media.

If this was an election where the campaign made a difference, then the media—and especially broadcasters—played a critical role. On television, still the most influential medium for the majority of voters, broadcasters challenged the parties’ approach as politicians discovered that their robotic soundbites and stage-management could backfire. Like politicians, journalists found that social media was now a vital factor in helping shape what became an unexpectedly dynamic broadcast campaign. The result challenged the conventional wisdom of many Westminster journalists, and prompted new questions about the role, relevance and authority of the mainstream media during election campaigns.

A total of 3304 candidates stood in the 2017 general election, down from 3971 in 2015 and far fewer than the 4150—the highest number ever recorded—who stood in 2010. An average of 5.1 candidates stood per constituency in 2017; they represented 71 parties along with 187 independent candidates and the Speaker. Nearly half of these candidates (1568) lost their £500 deposit, failing to meet the 5% minimum vote share threshold, and the Treasury’s lost deposit fund was £784,000 better off after the election.

Calling a general election has traditionally been considered one of the key powers exercised by a prime minister. It is a politically consequential decision. Harold Wilson in 1970 and Ted Heath in 1974 both called elections earlier than needed—and both lost. Indeed, there were striking similarities between Theresa May in 2017 and Heath’s snap (‘Who Governs?’) general election in February 1974. Heath, also backed by opinion poll leads, had reluctantly called the election to give him a stronger hand to reinforce his statutory incomes policy against the coal miners’ industrial action. But his party was ill-prepared, he had been persuaded to call the election, the public mood was volatile and he lost. In 2017, May’s party had clear poll leads but was ill-prepared, the mood was volatile and the voters baulked at the invitation to back her.