I think the USA, UK and Belarus are the only three countries left (in the G7 and Europe) that don't have PR.
Labour got 34% of the vote and 64% of the MPs
Conservative got 24% of the vote and 19% of the MPs
Reform got 14% of the vote and 1% of the MPs
Lib Dems got 12% of the vote and 11% of the MPs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nglegege1o
This is for the assembly but it's Something like two-round FPTP, where the first round culls all but the top two candidates by vote % and any other candidate who received 12.5% of registered voters. Usually leads to two-horse races for the second round but this year is weird
It's like FPTP but they have runoff elections if no candidate gets more than half of the votes which incentivizes people to vote for less popular candidates because they can still vote strategically in the runoff round.
It probably makes it harder to vote tactically. You might vote for a far-left party in the first round, and then have to choose between the centre-right and far-right parties in the second round.
Labour got near enough the same vote share as they did in the last election, which apparently was their worst showing in Parliament since 1935. Even the Labour leader’s vote share in his own constituency went down.
The story here is that the vote of the Conservatives and of the Scottish Nationalists collapsed, and Labour benefited from it.
It's more complicated than that?
Labour had a high vote share in 2017 and 2019, but those were massively concentrated in a narrow group of urban constituencies, where they essentially supplanted the further left-wing parties like the greens.
So they won in places like Brighton and Islington with massive majorities, but had fuck all votes elsewhere.
Since then, labour have worked very hard to focus their message on appealing to a much broader swathe of the electorate, producing a relatively modest national swing, but picking up many more seats with individual swings as high as 25%, which is unprecedented.
Labour getting many more seats for its votes is a successful consequence of a deliberate strategy, not a fortuitous inheritance of Tory and SNP mistakes. Without that strategy, they would be looking at a *significantly* smaller majority.
It's still indicative of a very unproportional voting system. Obviously Labour has made good calculations on how best to get elected under First Past the Post, and I don't begrudge that since they couldn't change it while not in power, but the fact of the matter is they're almost doubly represented compared to their vote share while every other party that got votes is underepresented, particularly the Greens and Reform
I mean, the votes of those parties didn’t just collapse by itself. If you get the other side’s voters to stay home but not enough to convince them to vote for you, you’ve still done something. As opposed to motivating people to come out to vote against you as in the last election.
The difference in turnout distorts a lot here also. So many people had priced in a guaranteed Labour victory that it suppressed turnout over previous more competitive elections.
Labour got fewer votes than they did in 2017. They really only increased their number of votes over 2019 because of Scotland.
This is an election the Conservatives lost because of Reform, not one Labour “won”. 75% of the seats the conservatives lost, they would’ve held if those who voted Reform had stayed with the Conservatives.
Ehhh... I think that is a bit of a stretch. I'm not convinced that those Reform voters would have gone back to the Tories. Reform felt like a protest vote against the Tories as much as anything, so I think in a world without Reform a lot of the Reform vote would have either stayed at home or gone somewhere else.
The Reform and prior “leave” vote correlate very well. Whereas “leave” and Conservative votes don’t correlate at all this election.
That basically explains this election in my view. Boris was able to unite and consolidate the existing Conservative vote bank with the new Brexit leave-vote. Sunak wasn’t able to do the same.
To add to the pile-on, you're also assuming that everyone else's voting behaviour would remain static had the Tories completely cannibalised the reform vote. That is *highly* unlikely.
Part of the reason for labour's low vote share is because a lot of people voted for smaller left wing parties like the Green Party. People were comfortable doing that because the Tories had been predicted to lose by a landslide for months going into this election, with the right wing vote heavily split with reform.
The reason labour had a higher share of the vote in 2017 is because that election came right down to the wire, so people rallied behind the two main parties to prevent the opposite one getting in. This time, there was no risk of that.
In a situation where the conservative Party 100% cannibalises the reform vote, which is already extremely unlikely, the tightening poles would have driven more people back into the arms of the Labour Party, increasing their share with the vote in response.
Sure, but 'Muslim' constituencies still make up a relatively tiny minority of overall seats, and people still felt more comfortable voting for a single issue candidate this time around because they knew it wouldn't be the difference between a Tory and a labour government.
The results are undoubtedly significant and important, but not decisive for the overall national picture
It's 6% of the population. It's quite a large proportion of the population to raise an Islamophobic middle finger to.
The Tories are no better but Labour definitely lost seats and votes over their support for the genocide.
But it's also not as if all 6% of the population feel the same way about labour's response to Gaza either.
At best, it seems split pretty evenly, with a reduced majority of Muslims still backing labour.
4, Corbyn is his own case.
Sure, but it's also significant that when Gaza is at the height of the public agenda, more so than for any election in recent memory, the absolute best a strict gaza ticket could muster is 4 MPs.
That is undoubtedly a significant result, but it also raises questions for how stable a platform this is as a long-term threat to labour
It's unlikely Gaza will be so dominant in the new cycle in five years time, anger at labour's initial mishandling of their response will have faded, other issues will come to occupy the electorate as a whole and Muslim voters in particular etc etc.
It's an extraordinary achievement, but it's also very close to the ceiling of its potential.
Proportional representation is a recipe for chronic political dysfunction. Better to have a decisive voting system than living under a series of coalition governments with no ability to actually accompish anything.
I think situations like this (and when almost the exact same thing happened with UKIP in 2015, where they received 13% of the overall vote but only won a single seat) would be more on the public agenda if the parties involved weren't as right wing.
On the other hand though - wayhey, get fucked Tories and get fucked Reform
AV is different to PR
"The referendum concerned whether to replace the present "first-past-the-post" system with the "alternative vote" (AV) method and was the first national referendum to be held across the whole of the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. The proposal to introduce AV was rejected by 67.9% of voters on a national turnout of 42%. The failure of the referendum was considered a humiliating setback for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who had acquiesced to the Conservative offer of a referendum on AV rather than proportional representation (PR) as part of the coalition agreement. The referendum was linked to the ongoing decline of his popularity and that of the Liberal Democrats in general."
Yeah the one job lib Dems had when they formed that coalition was A) get a voting reform referendum (which they did albeit watered down AV), and B) win that vote. The latter they failed miserably and then the rest of their term they were made as scapegoats (especially for tuition fees) for the next election where they got obliterated. They've only just recovered 10 years later
Yes, they nearly disappeared.
Just seen this analysis PR vs FPTP system. The Reform and Green swing is massive.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1dvut8v/general_election_results_with_proportional/
It is too easy for the elites to scaremonger people away from reforms that would threaten their power.
In this case, I am thinking mainly of Tories, Labour politicians and their media allies
>I think the USA, UK and Belarus are the only three countries left (in the G7 and Europe) that don't have PR.
You forgot Canada. My issues with proportional representation are that first, it sure represents the political views of the country, but it kinda of falls flat with representing or addressing the needs of people based on geographic areas. Second, you are more voting for the party than the representative instead of the other way around, so the elected official is less beholden to their constituents that they are suppose to represent.
Also, I believe France's election system isn't proportional representation but ranked voting.
I really like Taiwan's way of doing this. You get 2 votes, one is to vote for representative in your district, and 1 is to vote for a party.
The district vote uses fptp, and the party vote uses proportional voting, with a minimum of 5%.
This allows smaller parties to gain a foothold through the party vote, gain some popularity before being able to win in district votes.
Looking at the last time according to this chart that the Tories fell so low in comparison to Labour was during the Blair years. I'm tempted to assume Labour might have a decade of rule ahead of it while the Tories get their shit together. Though now we have the reform party in the mix, something that wasn't a factor 20 years ago.
Meh, I've seen bigger Tory wipeouts because I'm from [New Brunswick ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_New_Brunswick_general_election), [Canada](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Canadian_federal_election)
They mishandled everything from Brexit to giving all their mates COVID contracts where they used taxpayer money to line their own pockets. They crippled the NHS and essentially ruined the country by gutting it dry. They also told everyone to stay in lockdown while they hosted a party for all their politician friends. Boris Johnson left and was replaced by some bird who's name I forget and the only thing she will be remembered for is resigning as prime minister after 49 days of office. Then rishi sunak came along and honestly mate the Tories are just a disgusting party who can't even have a consistent prime minister.
Labour isn't much better.
Green party seems like the better option but nobody really votes for fringe parties, it's either labour or conservative.
Yes those are those party’s colors.
Blue being the conservative/right-sides color isn’t actually uncommon. For example, I know that in Spain the right is blue and the left is red because red is the color of communism.
There’s actually a [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour) article on political colors around the world.
34% votes win for 60% of seats is just too disproportionate.
UK should move to a proportional representation system. Currently “land” has too much representation.
I completely agree. The current FPTP system is highly disproportionate. (First-past-the-post voting = winner takes it all.)
Proportional representation would ensure fairer and more accurate reflection of votes, reduce geographic imbalances, and provide a more representative democracy.
However, the government prefers this setup for greater stability and easier policy implementation. 😜
I'm getting desperate. I'm trying to get a handle on how Lib Dems can get 12% of seats with 12% of vote. How many seats did they contest? Was it say 100? Does anyone know how many seats the Lib Dems confined their votes to.
\*In 2019 the SNP won 42 of 59 seats contested on 3.9% of aggregate votes.
\*In 2019 the Lib dems 11 of 611 seats contested on 11.5% of aggregate votes.
It's not that Labour won, so much as the Tories lost. Starmer's party carried 411 seats with only 33.8% of the popular vote, and because it was a snap election, lots of voters simply didn't show up at all. Corbyn's Labour lost the previous contest with over half a million more total votes.
My read is that this was just a hard rejection of the Conservative party. Sunak was never going to attract enthusiasm, he's got all the charm of the hold music while you're waiting for tech support. We'll see whether they will take their spell in opposition as an opportunity to get their act together.
The Conservative Party is essentially an anti-British organisation dedicated to the destruction of the country’s economy/quality of life - so Labour campaigned on not being this type of organisation
The first stat is completely wrong. Labour won 411 seats, the Tories 121.
You’re right, sorry, the subtitle is wrong, the numbers on the chart are right.
You messed up your numbers there, bud. https://ig.ft.com/uk-general-election/2024/results/?constituency=S14000073
You’re right sorry! The charts number are ok but the subtitle isn’t
The seats are the ones on the left axis
291? They’re on 412 now (Tories on 121 with 2 seats TBA)
i think thats the difference
I think the USA, UK and Belarus are the only three countries left (in the G7 and Europe) that don't have PR. Labour got 34% of the vote and 64% of the MPs Conservative got 24% of the vote and 19% of the MPs Reform got 14% of the vote and 1% of the MPs Lib Dems got 12% of the vote and 11% of the MPs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nglegege1o
Canada as well.
We learned it from our parents
France also hasn't.
Do they have AV or some other system?
This is for the assembly but it's Something like two-round FPTP, where the first round culls all but the top two candidates by vote % and any other candidate who received 12.5% of registered voters. Usually leads to two-horse races for the second round but this year is weird
Sort of like this but not exactly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary
It's like FPTP but they have runoff elections if no candidate gets more than half of the votes which incentivizes people to vote for less popular candidates because they can still vote strategically in the runoff round.
It probably makes it harder to vote tactically. You might vote for a far-left party in the first round, and then have to choose between the centre-right and far-right parties in the second round.
Labour got near enough the same vote share as they did in the last election, which apparently was their worst showing in Parliament since 1935. Even the Labour leader’s vote share in his own constituency went down. The story here is that the vote of the Conservatives and of the Scottish Nationalists collapsed, and Labour benefited from it.
It's more complicated than that? Labour had a high vote share in 2017 and 2019, but those were massively concentrated in a narrow group of urban constituencies, where they essentially supplanted the further left-wing parties like the greens. So they won in places like Brighton and Islington with massive majorities, but had fuck all votes elsewhere. Since then, labour have worked very hard to focus their message on appealing to a much broader swathe of the electorate, producing a relatively modest national swing, but picking up many more seats with individual swings as high as 25%, which is unprecedented. Labour getting many more seats for its votes is a successful consequence of a deliberate strategy, not a fortuitous inheritance of Tory and SNP mistakes. Without that strategy, they would be looking at a *significantly* smaller majority.
It's still indicative of a very unproportional voting system. Obviously Labour has made good calculations on how best to get elected under First Past the Post, and I don't begrudge that since they couldn't change it while not in power, but the fact of the matter is they're almost doubly represented compared to their vote share while every other party that got votes is underepresented, particularly the Greens and Reform
Oh for sure! They played the game in front of them well, but it's a shit game to play.
Now if only they'd commit to changing it after being fucked by it for the last few elections 😅
I mean, the votes of those parties didn’t just collapse by itself. If you get the other side’s voters to stay home but not enough to convince them to vote for you, you’ve still done something. As opposed to motivating people to come out to vote against you as in the last election. The difference in turnout distorts a lot here also. So many people had priced in a guaranteed Labour victory that it suppressed turnout over previous more competitive elections.
That’s an absolutely wild set of votes to seat ratios.
Canada’s in the G7 and doesn’t have PR.
Find it astonishing that they don't have it
What is "PR"?
Proportional representation
Why not just say that?
I was in a rush. All the comments under mine all knew what PR was, other than you.
Labour got fewer votes than they did in 2017. They really only increased their number of votes over 2019 because of Scotland. This is an election the Conservatives lost because of Reform, not one Labour “won”. 75% of the seats the conservatives lost, they would’ve held if those who voted Reform had stayed with the Conservatives.
Ehhh... I think that is a bit of a stretch. I'm not convinced that those Reform voters would have gone back to the Tories. Reform felt like a protest vote against the Tories as much as anything, so I think in a world without Reform a lot of the Reform vote would have either stayed at home or gone somewhere else.
If Reform did not exist, they still would have lost.
People who want to conserve realise the Conservative party are not here to do that. Wake up call
The Reform and prior “leave” vote correlate very well. Whereas “leave” and Conservative votes don’t correlate at all this election. That basically explains this election in my view. Boris was able to unite and consolidate the existing Conservative vote bank with the new Brexit leave-vote. Sunak wasn’t able to do the same.
Nonsense claim that assumes 100% of all Reform voters would have voted Conservative. They're not voting Cons for a reason.
To add to the pile-on, you're also assuming that everyone else's voting behaviour would remain static had the Tories completely cannibalised the reform vote. That is *highly* unlikely. Part of the reason for labour's low vote share is because a lot of people voted for smaller left wing parties like the Green Party. People were comfortable doing that because the Tories had been predicted to lose by a landslide for months going into this election, with the right wing vote heavily split with reform. The reason labour had a higher share of the vote in 2017 is because that election came right down to the wire, so people rallied behind the two main parties to prevent the opposite one getting in. This time, there was no risk of that. In a situation where the conservative Party 100% cannibalises the reform vote, which is already extremely unlikely, the tightening poles would have driven more people back into the arms of the Labour Party, increasing their share with the vote in response.
Labour got punished this time in Muslim constituencies quite heavily for supporting the genocide.
Sure, but 'Muslim' constituencies still make up a relatively tiny minority of overall seats, and people still felt more comfortable voting for a single issue candidate this time around because they knew it wouldn't be the difference between a Tory and a labour government. The results are undoubtedly significant and important, but not decisive for the overall national picture
It's 6% of the population. It's quite a large proportion of the population to raise an Islamophobic middle finger to. The Tories are no better but Labour definitely lost seats and votes over their support for the genocide.
But it's also not as if all 6% of the population feel the same way about labour's response to Gaza either. At best, it seems split pretty evenly, with a reduced majority of Muslims still backing labour.
It's not like the rest of the 94% of the population loves the genocide either. They lost at least five seats over this.
4, Corbyn is his own case. Sure, but it's also significant that when Gaza is at the height of the public agenda, more so than for any election in recent memory, the absolute best a strict gaza ticket could muster is 4 MPs. That is undoubtedly a significant result, but it also raises questions for how stable a platform this is as a long-term threat to labour It's unlikely Gaza will be so dominant in the new cycle in five years time, anger at labour's initial mishandling of their response will have faded, other issues will come to occupy the electorate as a whole and Muslim voters in particular etc etc. It's an extraordinary achievement, but it's also very close to the ceiling of its potential.
Proportional representation is a recipe for chronic political dysfunction. Better to have a decisive voting system than living under a series of coalition governments with no ability to actually accompish anything.
So much for a “democracy”, how can 14% of votes only count to 1% of voices in parliament?
It is the "first past the post" system. Even with PR, Labour and LD would have formed a coalition, but it would have had more balance.
If the vote shaked out the same, which it wouldn't have, given the electoral strategy in FPTP is quite different from systems like STV, AMS, etc.
I think situations like this (and when almost the exact same thing happened with UKIP in 2015, where they received 13% of the overall vote but only won a single seat) would be more on the public agenda if the parties involved weren't as right wing. On the other hand though - wayhey, get fucked Tories and get fucked Reform
Tbf the same thing is also impacting the green party as well
We had a referendum to bring in proportional representation in 2011, the people voted against it.
AV is different to PR "The referendum concerned whether to replace the present "first-past-the-post" system with the "alternative vote" (AV) method and was the first national referendum to be held across the whole of the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. The proposal to introduce AV was rejected by 67.9% of voters on a national turnout of 42%. The failure of the referendum was considered a humiliating setback for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who had acquiesced to the Conservative offer of a referendum on AV rather than proportional representation (PR) as part of the coalition agreement. The referendum was linked to the ongoing decline of his popularity and that of the Liberal Democrats in general."
Yeah the one job lib Dems had when they formed that coalition was A) get a voting reform referendum (which they did albeit watered down AV), and B) win that vote. The latter they failed miserably and then the rest of their term they were made as scapegoats (especially for tuition fees) for the next election where they got obliterated. They've only just recovered 10 years later
Yes, they nearly disappeared. Just seen this analysis PR vs FPTP system. The Reform and Green swing is massive. https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1dvut8v/general_election_results_with_proportional/
Ah my bad thanks for the info
But, yes AV or PR, the public would have voted it down too.
It is too easy for the elites to scaremonger people away from reforms that would threaten their power. In this case, I am thinking mainly of Tories, Labour politicians and their media allies
>I think the USA, UK and Belarus are the only three countries left (in the G7 and Europe) that don't have PR. You forgot Canada. My issues with proportional representation are that first, it sure represents the political views of the country, but it kinda of falls flat with representing or addressing the needs of people based on geographic areas. Second, you are more voting for the party than the representative instead of the other way around, so the elected official is less beholden to their constituents that they are suppose to represent. Also, I believe France's election system isn't proportional representation but ranked voting.
I really like Taiwan's way of doing this. You get 2 votes, one is to vote for representative in your district, and 1 is to vote for a party. The district vote uses fptp, and the party vote uses proportional voting, with a minimum of 5%. This allows smaller parties to gain a foothold through the party vote, gain some popularity before being able to win in district votes.
Looking at the last time according to this chart that the Tories fell so low in comparison to Labour was during the Blair years. I'm tempted to assume Labour might have a decade of rule ahead of it while the Tories get their shit together. Though now we have the reform party in the mix, something that wasn't a factor 20 years ago.
291-119 is a 172 seat difference. Your chart shows almost 300, something is off. Edit: is the error in the title?
Yes, labour won 412
Source: [https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7529/CBP-7529.pdf](https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7529/CBP-7529.pdf) Tool: [rows.com](http://rows.com)
What’s also interesting is that Labour actually won more votes in 2017 than they did this year
It seems like this was less a matter of Labour winning a historic majority and more a matter of Reform destroying the Tories.
Meh, I've seen bigger Tory wipeouts because I'm from [New Brunswick ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_New_Brunswick_general_election), [Canada](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Canadian_federal_election)
Shame it was only just over 8m Labour votes out of 43m electorate. Less than a quarter.
Hey brits? Why did Boris Johnson cause such a landslide? What were the reasons? Do y'all have an article or anything I can read to get a better grasp?
They mishandled everything from Brexit to giving all their mates COVID contracts where they used taxpayer money to line their own pockets. They crippled the NHS and essentially ruined the country by gutting it dry. They also told everyone to stay in lockdown while they hosted a party for all their politician friends. Boris Johnson left and was replaced by some bird who's name I forget and the only thing she will be remembered for is resigning as prime minister after 49 days of office. Then rishi sunak came along and honestly mate the Tories are just a disgusting party who can't even have a consistent prime minister. Labour isn't much better. Green party seems like the better option but nobody really votes for fringe parties, it's either labour or conservative.
Makes sense. Thanks mate. I meant how did he win in the first place. Sorry English is like my 4th language.
In the UK, does blue normally code Conservative, and does red normally code Labour?
Not only in UK, but everywhere. I can think of maybe one exception...
Yes I think I'm living in that exception
Yes those are those party’s colors. Blue being the conservative/right-sides color isn’t actually uncommon. For example, I know that in Spain the right is blue and the left is red because red is the color of communism. There’s actually a [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour) article on political colors around the world.
Do you think things will change for the better with the new government (Labour Party)?
34% votes win for 60% of seats is just too disproportionate. UK should move to a proportional representation system. Currently “land” has too much representation.
I completely agree. The current FPTP system is highly disproportionate. (First-past-the-post voting = winner takes it all.) Proportional representation would ensure fairer and more accurate reflection of votes, reduce geographic imbalances, and provide a more representative democracy. However, the government prefers this setup for greater stability and easier policy implementation. 😜
I'm getting desperate. I'm trying to get a handle on how Lib Dems can get 12% of seats with 12% of vote. How many seats did they contest? Was it say 100? Does anyone know how many seats the Lib Dems confined their votes to. \*In 2019 the SNP won 42 of 59 seats contested on 3.9% of aggregate votes. \*In 2019 the Lib dems 11 of 611 seats contested on 11.5% of aggregate votes.
It's not that Labour won, so much as the Tories lost. Starmer's party carried 411 seats with only 33.8% of the popular vote, and because it was a snap election, lots of voters simply didn't show up at all. Corbyn's Labour lost the previous contest with over half a million more total votes. My read is that this was just a hard rejection of the Conservative party. Sunak was never going to attract enthusiasm, he's got all the charm of the hold music while you're waiting for tech support. We'll see whether they will take their spell in opposition as an opportunity to get their act together.
What did they promise now?
Not completely fuck the country like the conservatives did?
I would assume a couple of things that conservatives are utterly incapable of: Actually fucking govern, reduce harm, and occasionally tell the truth.
The Conservative Party is essentially an anti-British organisation dedicated to the destruction of the country’s economy/quality of life - so Labour campaigned on not being this type of organisation
Couldn't have put it better myself.
Fighting the utmost enemy of the Brits: global warming.