2019 General Election

• In the 2019 General Election, Age was an important factor when it came to gender. Overall the voting patterns of men and women were very similar, except in the 18-to-24 group, where 28 % of men but only 15 % of women voted Conservative
• In the 2019 General Election, 56 % of those in the 18-to-24 age bracket voted Labour, compared to only 14% of those aged 70 and over
• In the 2019 General Election, A mixture of class and Brexit led to many seats in the so called ‘red wall’ falling to the Conservatives. The constituency of Bolsover, which had been held by Labour since its creation in 1950 and Dennis Skinner as its MP since 1970, is a good example of this seismic change. About 20% of its vote was lost in total
• 2019 General Election:

  AGE:

  • 56% of 18-24 year olds voted for Labour
  • 17% of 70+ year olds voted for labour
  • 21% of 18-25 year olds voted for Conservatives
  • 67% of 70+ year olds voted for conservatives
• 2019 General Election:SOCIAL STATUS:

  AB 32% voted labour 

  AB 42% voted conservatives

  C1 34% voted labour 

  C1 43% voted conservatives 

  C2 31% voted labour 

  C2 49% voted conservatives   (HIGHEST FOR CONS)

  DE 33% voted labour                  (HIGHEST FOR LABOUR)

  DE 47% voted conservative
• 2019 General Election:

  Gender

  • 31% of men voted Labour
  • 35% of women voted Labour
  • 46% of men voted Conservatives
  • 44% of women voted Conservatives
• turnout for the 2019 General Election was 67.3%
• 2019

  Facebook advertising

  At the start of December 2019, the Facebook Ad Library showed the Conservatives had 2500 live paid for adverts, whilst Labour only had 250, with the Conservatives getting their large majority. 

  At the same time, the Lib Dems had 3000 paid ads on Facebook, but it lost seats.
• 2019 Labour Manifesto - "It's time for real change"

  • Increase Health Budget by 4.3%
  • Hold a second referendum on Brexit deal
  • Raise minimum wage to £10 an hour for over 16 year olds
  • Stop age pension rises
  • Introduce a National Care Service
  • Bring Forward net-zero target
  • Build 150,000 council houses
• 2019 Labour Manifesto

  • Build 150,000 council and genuinely affordable homes a year by the end of the first term. 
  • Create one million green jobs.
  • Introduce a windfall tax on oil and gas companies.
  • Bring the ‘Big Six’ energy companies into public ownership.
  • Bring Royal Mail back into public ownership.
  • Re-nationalise railways
  • Introduce a living wage of £10 an hour.
  • Scrap Universal Credit.
  • Create a National Care Service
  • Create a National Education Service, with six years of free adult education and no university tuition fees.
  • Extend full voting rights to all UK residents
• 2019 Lib Dem Manifesto

  • Stop Brexit
  • 1p-income tax rise to spend on NHS + healthcare
  • Free Childcare
  • Generate 80% of electricity from renewables
  • Tax frequent flyers
  • Recruit 20,000 more teachers
  • Legalise Cannabis
  • Freeze train fares
  • Give zero-hour workers a 20% rise
  • Resettle 10,000 refugees a year
  • Tough borrowing rules and targeted tax rises
  • Build 300,000 new homes a year
• 2019 Conservative Manifesto

  • Increase the number of nurses by 50, 000
  • Get Brexit Done
  • No income tax, VAT or National Insurance rises
  • Pensions will rise by at least 2.5% per year
  • Noone will sell their home to pay for care
  • Reach net zero by 2050
  • Spend £6.3 bn on 2.2 million disadvantaged homes
  • Introduce a points-based immigration
  • Continue the roll out of universal credit
  • Create 250,000 extra childcare places
  • Continue freeze of student tuition fees of £9,250
  • new Manchester to Leeds rail line
  • Launch a democracy commission
• 2019 Green Party Manifesto

  • support Remain
  • increase NHS funding by at least £6bn a year
  • Provide an extra £4.5 bn a year to councils for free social care to over-65 year olds
  • Build 100,000 energy efficient council homes a year
  • Re-nationalising trains
  • end sale of Petrol/Diesel cars by 2030
  • end of war on drugs
  • half prison populations
• Ethnically diverse big cities with large working class populations and major industrial centres such as Greater Manchester and the North East tend to vote Labour. However, Labour’s Red Wall was significantly broken by the Conservatives. However, this might have been due to the single issue of Brexit.
• BAME voters continued to vote predominantly Labour, but it was around 9% down from 2017
• Overall, in 2019, the voting patterns of men and women were very similar, except in the 18-to-24 group, where 28% of men but only 15% of women voted Conservative.
• he 2019 GE saw a rise in partisan dealignment. This may have been a result of the Brexit debacle.
• The Conservatives ran a tightly disciplined campaign. All candidates were required to pledge loyalty to the prime minister’s Brexit plan. Most of the unreconciled rebels did not stand, although three (David Gauke, Dominic Grieve and Ann Milton) fought doomed campaigns as independents in their old constituencies
•  The gaffe enabled the Labour Party to focus attention on underfunding in the NHS but this had only a transient effect on the campaign. Johnson’s decision to hammer home one simple message – ‘get Brexit done’ and allow the country to move forward – contrasted sharply with Labour’s lack of clarity on the issue.
• Corbyn’s eventual declaration that he would remain neutral in a second referendum, in which the choices would be his own Brexit deal and an option to stay in the EU, did not inspire people on either side of the argument.
• In the final stages of the campaign, worried that it had pivoted too far towards the Remain position, Labour switched its focus to Leave-supporting seats in its northern heartlands, but without success
• The Labour leader was widely regarded as a negative factor for his party, with many candidates reportedly forced to listen to harsh criticism of him when canvassing. He retained his old ability to energise the party faithful in open-air addresses, but his alleged past links to terrorist groups, and his inability to generate conviction where national security issues were concerned, worked against him.
• Corbyn’s failure to deal with anti-Semitism on the Labour left, for which he was slow to apologise, was a continuous source of embarrassment for the party. His claim to have unearthed documents, indicating that the government was willing to use the NHS as a bargaining counter in trade talks with the US, caused only a temporary stir.
• In the final week of the campaign Shadow Health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth was recorded talking privately about his expectation of a ‘dire’ result under Corbyn.
• The Liberal Democrat campaign never really took off. Jo Swinson’s claim that she could be prime minister did not seem realistic for a party which had just 20 MPs at the start of the campaign. She ran an intensely personal campaign, even choosing to take the Liberal Democrat slot in a Cardiff BBC TV debate in which the Conservatives and Labour were not represented by their leaders. But Swinson’s ratings remained stubbornly low during the campaign
• Equally ill-judged was her pledge to revoke Article 50 if the Liberal Democrats formed a government, without holding a second referendum. Critics pointed out that this appeared to contradict basic democratic principles by disregarding the result of the 2016 vote
• • 21 Conservative rebels, including former Chancellor Philip Hammond and former Justice Secretary David Gauke, lost the Conservative whip when they voted against the government’s Brexit policy. Ten of them had the whip restored shortly before the dissolution of Parliament but this did not renew the government’s majority
• The prime minister secured his election by introducing an ‘Early Parliamentary General Election Bill’, which circumvented the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and required only a simple majority to pass. This became law on 31 October after MPs voted for it by 438 to 20 votes.
• • Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had hitherto blocked an early poll, now supported it. Arguably he had little choice once the SNP and Liberal Democrats had signalled their acceptance
• In February 2019 eight Labour MPs and three Conservatives formed a new centrist grouping known as the Independent Group and later as Change UK. They were united by their opposition to Brexit and, in the case of the ex-Labour MPs, by dislike of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and his failure to deal decisively with allegations of antiSemitism within the party
• • January 2019 of the Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage. The party campaigned for a ‘clean break Brexit’ – rejecting both Theresa May’s and Boris Johnson’s deals with the EU and calling for the country to adopt World Trade Organisation trading rules if a free trade agreement with the EU could not be secured. In the May European Parliament election, which used a highly proportional closed list system, it became the largest UK party in Brussels, with a total of 25 MEPs. 
• The collapse of the centre Opposition to the Conservatives was further limited by the unwillingness of the various pro-Remain parties sufficiently to subordinate their separate interests in the common cause. The Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru agreed an electoral pact, whereby one of the three would be given a free run, in just 60 seats
• •  Labour and the Liberal Democrats maintained a distance from each other, with Swinson insisting that Corbyn was not fit to be prime minister and refusing to participate in a coalition government.
•  Tactical voting to stop a ‘hard Brexit’ under the Conservatives was widely expected to affect the result but this did not prove to be the case.
• The pro-Remain Guardian recommended voting for named candidates in 50 marginal seats but in only 13 of these was a non Conservative candidate successful. Of these, nine were SNP gains. The newspaper attributed the failure of tactical voting to voters’ fears of a Corbyn government and the weakness of the Liberal Democrat campaign.
• pro-Brexit forces managed to co-operate more effectively. Within days of the campaign starting, Nigel Farage abandoned his initial strategy of running Brexit Party candidates in all seats in mainland Britain. Instead he decided not to contest Conservative-held seats, thus halving the number of candidates from his party. This was because he had come under pressure from many of his supporters who feared that, by splitting the Leave vote, he might put Brexit at risk of not happening at all. This was a turning point, which increased the chances of a Conservative victory
• The Conservatives focused on their pledge to ‘get Brexit done’, with Johnson repeating insistently that his deal was ‘oven-ready’.
• In order to attract voters who might otherwise have supported Labour, there were also promises of increased spending on the NHS, police and infrastructure.
• Thatcherite tax-cutting priorities were set aside in order to reassure voters that this was a ‘One Nation’ party which believed in public services. For example, an earlier proposal by Johnson, to raise the threshold at which middle-income earners pay 40 per cent income tax from £50,000 to £80,000, did not appear in the manifesto
• Labour, whose manifesto was the most radical in a generation. It comprised tax rises for those on higher incomes, extensive renationalisation of privatised services and ambitious plans for investment in public services, designed to end the ‘decade of austerity’.