A NEW GOVERNMENT after 14 years of Conservative rule, the highest ever numbers of Liberal Democrat and Green MPs and the worst ever result for the Conservatives, all delivered because voters desperately wanted change and were willing to vote tactically to achieve it.

It is very clear that this really was the tactical voting election - 17% of voters, around five million people, voted tactically. Best for Britain reached tens of millions with our election campaign, our tactical voting website GetVoting.org received 6.15 million hits and 43% off all voters saw information about tactical voting during the election. Of course, there were tactical voters in every constituency across the country, not just in places where it made a difference to the outcome and not just in places where we targeted our efforts.

Our analysis of the results, detailed in this report, estimates that 91 Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs in England and Wales have tactical voting to thank for their elections. Without tactical voting, Liz Truss and former Conservative ministers Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt and Thérèse Coffey would all still be MPs. We changed minds, and changed politics as a result.

When Rishi Sunak stood in the rain to announce the election, the polls predicted that Labour were likely to win. But we knew it wasn’t enough for the last UK government to simply be defeated, the country needs the Conservatives out of power for at least a decade so the new government can repair the damage they have caused.

More than that, though, we had been tracking the rise of Reform UK’s vote share since the last election and we knew an intervention by Nigel Farage to stand down candidates to favour the Conservatives or by entering the election as a candidate himself could change the situation.

So we made sure we were prepared. This report is a record of how much work the Best for Britain team and our supporters put in to make sure of this election victory. We started straight after the pandemic, in January 2021, only a year after Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ election win, and we kept working right up to 10pm on 4th July 2024.

I am proud of Best for Britain’s part in making this happen, immensely proud of the passion and dedication of the Best for Britain team, and I want to take this opportunity to thank all our supporters, everyone who has worked with us, taken part in our campaigns and helped along the way. While our mission is not over by any means, we can all take a well-deserved moment to enjoy this success.

This report is about our impact at this election, but we did none of this just for the satisfaction of winning. We now have a Parliament with more pro-European MPs than ever and a new UK government set on ending the chaos of the past few years. Our greatest impact is yet to come as we look to work with the new UK government and new MPs across Parliament to fix the problems Britain faces after Brexit. Best for Britain, through our UK Trade and Business Commission and the Trade Unlocked national conference, has the solutions: 114 fixes to these problems. Tactical voting got us this far. Our next step is getting the new UK government to back the fixes to the problems Britain faces after Brexit.

Cary Mitchell
Director of Operations and Strategy