There is no official definition, but generally (in a UK context) a "landslide" is a party winning a big House of Commons majority – like the Tories in 1983 and 1987, or Labour in 1997. And by that standard, 2024 was a landslide – Labour won almost as many seats as 1997, and beat both of Thatcher's records.
What I think what complicates things: both Thatcher's and Blair's landslides were big majorities backed by a big percentage of the vote (> 40%). And since the two things go together, even though quasi-officially it is about the first not the second, it is understandable how some people take the second to be part of the definition as well. For 1983, 1987, 1997, it doesn't make a difference. But then suddenly in 2024 it does – Starmer won a big number of seats, but only 33.7% of the vote – only slightly more than Corbyn's 32.1% in 2019, and actually in absolute terms over 500,000 fewer votes. This is because turnout dropped significantly in 2024 compared to 2019.
> Me and the OP were disagreeing about where the Tories' voters went: Reform, or Labour.
Given the drop in turnout, I think quite a few Tory voters just decided to stay home.
> I argued they mostly went to Labour and my reasoning is that Labour are now the party that best represents socially conservative voters.
That's not numerically possible – the Tory vote dropped by 19.9 percentage points, while Labour only gained by 1.6 points and Lib Dems by 0.6 points. A small minority of Tory voters switched to Labour, but any more than that and Labour would have got a bigger vote share than they actually did. The Tory voters must have gone somewhere else – and given Reform got 14% of the vote, it is obvious very many of them went to Reform.
There is no official definition, but generally (in a UK context) a "landslide" is a party winning a big House of Commons majority – like the Tories in 1983 and 1987, or Labour in 1997. And by that standard, 2024 was a landslide – Labour won almost as many seats as 1997, and beat both of Thatcher's records.
What I think what complicates things: both Thatcher's and Blair's landslides were big majorities backed by a big percentage of the vote (> 40%). And since the two things go together, even though quasi-officially it is about the first not the second, it is understandable how some people take the second to be part of the definition as well. For 1983, 1987, 1997, it doesn't make a difference. But then suddenly in 2024 it does – Starmer won a big number of seats, but only 33.7% of the vote – only slightly more than Corbyn's 32.1% in 2019, and actually in absolute terms over 500,000 fewer votes. This is because turnout dropped significantly in 2024 compared to 2019.
> Me and the OP were disagreeing about where the Tories' voters went: Reform, or Labour.
Given the drop in turnout, I think quite a few Tory voters just decided to stay home.
> I argued they mostly went to Labour and my reasoning is that Labour are now the party that best represents socially conservative voters.
That's not numerically possible – the Tory vote dropped by 19.9 percentage points, while Labour only gained by 1.6 points and Lib Dems by 0.6 points. A small minority of Tory voters switched to Labour, but any more than that and Labour would have got a bigger vote share than they actually did. The Tory voters must have gone somewhere else – and given Reform got 14% of the vote, it is obvious very many of them went to Reform.