Major loss of the Conservative party after 16 years of majority
By: Viola Shephard
On the fourth of July 2024, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party was handed an extreme defeat by its opposition, the Labour Party, and their new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The downfall of the Conservative Party is rooted in the incompetence of the previous Prime Ministers: Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. The main reason why the Conservative Party fell out of power was because of their previous prime ministers and ineffective governance.
Looking at the past candidates for prime minister, Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party pledged to minimize inflation, work on the economy, and reduce waiting times for the National Health Service (NHS). Keir Starmer and the Labour Party sought to reduce NHS waiting times, create more housing opportunities, and recruit more teachers. The country is divided up into constituencies, each with one seat in Parliament. The current party in power is the Labour Party, headed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The British election system differs from the American system in that there is always a certain party in power. They are in control of what is the Senate and the House of Representatives, which is combined and called the House of Commons. The House of Commons is one of two branches of Parliament; the other is the House of Lords, made up of people who have been appointed there, most often coming there from the House of Commons. This means that they also have executive leadership of the government through the Prime Minister.
What makes this past election so unique was both the size of the loss and the number of seats turned over. So, the question is, what made the British people lose trust in the Conservative party? The answer is that the Conservative Party has gone through five different prime ministers, but none seemed to stick the way that the party had hoped for. The Conservative Party has been in power in the United Kingdom since 2010, with David Cameron and then Theresa May.
The real downfall of the Conservative Party started with Boris Johnson and Partygate. Partygate was a series of parties that Boris Johnson held at the office during lockdown, while people were supposed to be distancing themselves from others due to the spread of Covid. He was promoting isolation while breaking the rules that had been set for the country. The prime minister is supposed to be an exemplar of a citizen, and he missed that mark by far. He also knew about multiple sexual misconduct accusations against one of the MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Conservative party. After these events, many people in his cabinet began to resign, showing that not only did the people of the country not have faith in him, but even the people in his own party didn’t believe in him. Johnson resigned shortly after, and the Conservative party brought in Elizabeth Truss, whose term as prime minister lasted only forty-five days, and was the shortest term that a prime minister has ever had. Not many people in the country had confidence in her or her performance. She was appointed by the Conservative party, not elected by the people. The finance work that she did made the pound significantly lose value, which wasn’t good for the British people. Rishi Sunak finished out the Conservatives’ majority term. He made a lot of progress reducing inflation that was plaguing the country, but he didn’t address many of the problems that the two prime ministers had left before him. The United Kingdom had hit a recession during his term and while they had came out of it, it was still a big issue on voters’ minds, and they were hoping for something new.
The Conservative party did very poorly in the election, with Labour having 412 seats to Conservatives’ 121. The Conservatives lost over 200 seats, including Elizabeth Truss’s in Southwest Norfolk. They had been in power for fourteen years and the British people had decided that their country needed something fresh and new. The Conservative party is also going through a leadership election, to try and salvage something out of the remains of what their party once was. The party must rebuild if it hopes to regain power in the future.
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