When will the next general election be held? | thearticle

As the dust settles on another conference season, speculation is growing about the date of the next General Election. By law, the Prime Minister could wait until 28th January 2025 before

summoning us to the polls, but some are now wondering if Rishi Sunak might try to capitalise on his new-found status as a “change-maker” in British politics and call an election much earlier

than that, and confound the expectations of the Labour leadership. He effectively has three options: go early (spring 2024); go long (autumn 2024); and go “up to the wire” (winter 2024).

So, what are the factors, often competing, that the PM will be weighing up when he considers when we should head to the polls? The first consideration is how the choice of date plays into

the public’s views of the Prime Minister’s character. On one view, running up to the last minute has always suggested a slightly desperate premier hanging on with teeth gritted and fingers

crossed. If circumstances (and particularly opinion polls) were favourable, calling a poll after only four years can suggest a relaxed, confident leader taking elections in their stride:

Tony Blair did it in both the elections he called as Prime Minister, in 2001 and 2005, and he won big in both. But the lessons from history are far from clear. In 2008, Labour’s Gordon Brown

received a poll “bounce” when he took over as party leader and PM and many urged him to capitalise on it by calling a general election, two years early. But Brown, ever cautious, dithered

and the starting gun was not fired; he waited and went long. It didn’t help and he lost the subsequent 2010 election. The Conservative premier Teresa May also found herself with a big poll

lead in 2017, with two years of her parliament left to run. She was no ditherer: she seized the moment, went early and called the election. But during the campaign her poll lead collapsed

and she lost her majority. Rishi Sunak will be receiving conflicting advice. Those who argue for the spring will be saying that this would have the added advantage of piling pressure onto

Labour, who have yet to put much flesh on the bones of their manifesto. But those who argue that he should go long will have concluded that there is no possibility of rehabilitating the

shambles of Boris Johnson’s premiership or the chaos of Liz Truss’s, despite those two ex-PMs’ slightly bizarre attempts to do so themselves. Instead, Sunak could try to put as much distance

as he can between him and them. The six months between spring and autumn will add a chunk of time to play into the public’s notoriously short political memory. Second, there are the

practicalities. Common decency has always held that it is wrong of a Prime Minister to force voters to go out on a cold, dark, wet winter’s evening, with the almost inevitable consequences

for turnout, unless circumstances were exceptional. Conditions in the autumn, while far from perfect, are better than mid-winter. The exception in all these calculations was the last General

Election: held on 12th December 2019 with three years of the parliament left to run. But common decency was hardly the defining characteristic of Boris Johnson’s premiership. You could also

(jokingly) say that another reason to hold an election in autumn 2024 is that it marks a “big anniversary” because it would be _fifty _years since the last autumn poll in October 1974. We

have just not done autumn elections in the modern era, preferring the spring/early summer as a warmer, drier and more conducive time of the year to make people leave their homes to carry out

their civic duty. The impact on turnout…The historical record of general election dates shows how much favour has been shown in recent years to late Spring/early Summer: of the ten

elections held between 1974 and 2017 all but one was held in either May or June and that was in 1992 when polling day was in April. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, however, and the

pattern of the month in which general elections were held in the immediate postwar years was very different. Between 1945 and 1979 only one election was called in May (1955) and one in June

(1970), while one was called at the end of March (1966). No fewer than four were held in October (1951, 1959, 1964 and 1974) and there were two February elections (1950 and 1974). The reason

for the difference between the thirty-odd years after the War and the last forty was turnout and the fears aroused by its decline. The highest ever turnout in a general election in the

modern era was 83.9% in 1950, the lowest was 59.4% in 2001. As turnout steadily fell between those two dates, concerns about the health of our democracy rose and every conceivable step was

taken to lift practical barriers to voting; the hours when polling stations were open were extended, it was made easier to obtain a postal or proxy vote and those cold, dark, wet, winter

evenings were avoided in favour of warm, bright, dry spring morns. Special circumstance played a large part in the two most recent October elections. In 1964, the Conservatives ran it up to

the wire, holding the election at almost the last possible moment on 15th October (the previous election having been held on 8th October 1959). The reason was that the Conservative leader,

Alec Douglas-Hume had only taken over from predecessor Harold Macmillan a year earlier in October 1963, and he had faced an uphill task to rebuild public confidence in his party after the

Profumo affair of March of that year. But it didn’t work and come polling day, he was narrowly defeated by Labour’s Harold Wilson. Wilson was also involved in the last October election, in

1974. In the February 1974 general election Wilson had won another narrow victory. He couldn’t quite scrape together a working majority and staggered on for a few months until he called

another election in October, after which he (just about) could. Isn’t having to make the General Election call a distraction for a PM who should be focusing on running the country? Wouldn’t

it be better to have a fixed term for parliament with election dates set in stone like local government? David Cameron thought so and as part of a suite of constitutional reforms, he

introduced the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011 which did just that. The general election that followed his 2010 victory was accordingly held in May 2015 — and Cameron won it. But after his

self-defenestration in 2016, his successors were not so keen on his constitutional niceties and work-arounds in the Act were used to call two quick-fire elections, one in 2017 and one in

2019. In fact, his successors showed precisely what they thought of Cameron’s constitutional reforms. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, after being effectively torn up by his successors, was

finally repealed in 2022, while other constitutional measures of the Coalition era were ditched with varying degrees of fanfare. Will Rishi Sunak run it up to the wire — 28th January 2025 —

as Alec Douglas-Hume did in 1964? Oddly, more recent experience might, on the face of it, make that option tempting. The only winter election of the modern era was the last one in December

2019; that left his party with a thumping 80-seat majority, its largest since the 1980s. But circumstances couldn’t be more different today. The optics of hanging-on until the last possible

moment are not likely to help an already dire polling position. What about the more conventional warm, bright spring option? Local elections are scheduled to take place on Thursday 2nd May

2024 anyway. In 2022, the then Conservative Chairman Oliver Dowden MP announced that “the challenge…of a two-year election campaign…starts this May”, suggesting a May 2024 General Election

was already in the planning at that time. However, the polls have been getting steadily worse for the Conservatives for the past two years: Labour had overtaken them before the end of 2021

and by the time Rishi Sunak took over as party leader in October 2022 the Conservatives were on 24% to Labour’s 51%. The situation did improve somewhat under Sunak’s leadership, but with

Labour currently on 44% to the Conservatives 27%, that is still landslide territory. If it is spring 2024, then the actual day is fairly, if not absolutely, certain: 2nd May, the day of the

council elections. But in both 1983 and 1987, Margaret Thatcher used the May local elections as a litmus test and, satisfied that the results had been favourable, called General Elections

immediately afterwards for June. She won them both. But the public is now conscious of the sheer cost of elections and the optics of such a stunt, so wasteful of public money, would not play

well for a premier wanting to show himself bearing down on the cost of living crisis. If it is to be autumn next year, the precise date is less easy to pin down. But consider this: the last

Thursday before the clocks go back is 24th October — any date later than that would play into the “common decency” argument of not forcing people to go out in the darker evenings. On the

other hand, it would require a late September dissolution of parliament, which would put a stop to the Conservative Party conference, currently scheduled for 29th September to 2nd October.

However, there are two reasons why the Conservatives might want to effectively pull the plug on the 2024 conference season. First, ruling parties never have much trouble appearing in the

news: they can just make an eye-catching announcement, while opposition parties struggle to get coverage, _except _during their conference and especially if that opposition party looks like

a government-in-waiting — as Labour currently does. Second, there is recent experience to consider. We have just seen a virtually deserted, deflated Conservative conference contrasting with

a vibrant, packed Labour one, which was where business, always wanting to be close to power, wanted to be. Conference season coverage played badly for the Conservatives. In 2019, the only

way Boris Johnson could extricate himself from the constitutional knots he and his party had tied themselves into was to drag people out on those dark winter nights with a December poll.

Sunak can go when he wants. He could hang on as long as possible in the hope of an economic uptick and the fading of political memories or he could do the decent thing and go while the

evenings are still light. It will be interesting to see if Sunak heeds the words of Khaleda Zia, the first female Prime Minister of Bangladesh: “It is impossible to practise parliamentary

politics without having…decency.” I’m keeping my calendar clear for Thursday 24th October 2024. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every

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