2024 is the fifth general election for single-issue vegan-led “Animal Welfare Party”. So how did they do?

This time around, they did slightly worse than 2019, polling an average 0.80% where they stood. They also went back to standing in four constituences, compared to six in 2019.

The snap nature of the election coming straight after the London Mayoral and Assembly election was one that was challenging to respond to, both in terms of candidate availability and resources.

AWP Leader Vanessa Hudson

To be fair, the governing Conservative party was also unprepared for the election, despite it being their leader who called it. And the AWP should be compared to other small single-issue parties, such as the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). WEP also stood in four seats, and on average polled slightly worse than AWP – 0.6% compared to AWP’s 0.8%. This is despite WEP’s much higher media profile.

I’ve included the other national elections – to the European Parliament – to show that AWP did better in those. The 2024 European Parliament elections happened in the first week of June and yielded two single issue pro-animal MEPs (from Germany and the Netherlands). But as you probably remember, the UK didn’t take part.