Despite predictions from pollsters and pundits alike that the May 2015 General Election would, like that of 2010, give rise to a hung parliament, the Conservative Party succeeded in securing 331 seats, giving them an overall working majority of 12 seats on the basis of a 36.9% share of the popular vote. Although Labour secured a marginal improvement in its own share of the vote compared with 2010 (30.4% as opposed to 29.0%), the rise of the Scottish National Party (which won 56 of the 59 seats contested in Scotland) and to a lesser extent, UKIP (which drew significant numbers of working-class voters away from Labour in a number of key seats), left them with fewer MPs than they had in 2010 (232 as opposed to 258). The Liberal Democrats, the Conservative's junior coalition partner from 2010-15, experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune gaining just 8 seats compared to the 57 they had won in 2010 (their share of the vote plummeting from 23.0% to 7.9%).

The result has enabled the Conservatives to implement their own policy agenda rather than having to secure a coalition agreement. Their manifesto provided clear indications that the party would continue with its ‘progressive’ approach to the welfare state. It contained pledges to improve the quality of schooling, introduce free child care of up to 30 hours per week for working parents of three- or four-year-old children, continued support for a properly funded NHS ‘free’ at the point of delivery, extending the ‘right to buy’ to housing association tenants and protecting the living standards of pensioners (Conservative Party, 2015). A helping hand would continue to be extended to those workingage adults outside the labour market, provided they were deemed to be making the requisite effort to return to economic independence.

In both their manifesto and during the election campaign the Conservatives made a concerted appeal to aspirational working-class and lower middle-class voters to desert Labour on the grounds that they, the Tories, were now better able to represent their material interests. Their approach mirrored the one employed by Fredrik Reinfeldt who led the Moderate Party to electoral success in Sweden in 2006 and 2010 by proclaiming that they, not the Social Democrats, were the party of the workers.