A Fractured 2024 Election

At last, there's been another general election and some people are happier than others. That's to be expected, however. The person who won in my constituency will hopefully serve the constituency, and I wonder whether anything substantial will change in my local area.

Everyone seemed to like Labour - nearly everyone, that is...as this graph shows, they're not the most popular party/coalition to enter government.

 

The reason for the sudden peak in 2010 in vote share is because I combined the Conservatives and Lib Dems vote share - they did enter into a coalition, after all. 

At first glance it's obvious that winning parties almost never end up with a majority of the vote share - there are many parties and people will often side with the Comservatives or Labour, but there isn't a large overlap between the two groups. Personally I think this election is great evidence that there needs to be voting reform because how could someone agree that Labour can have the biggest majority for over half a century and yet pick up hardly any votes?

What's also notable is that the change in vote share won by the winning parties since the previous election often coincides with a similar change in the proportion of seats won. Exceptions include 1959, 1983 and 2017 (and maybe 2015 if you're looking at pure Tory votes). Yet none have seemingly been more drastic than 2024 - Labour won 10% fewer votes proportionally than the Tories in 2019 and have ended up with 7% more seats. Labour themselves doubled their seats with a marginal increase on their results in 2019, often dubbed as their worst election since 1935.

They've recorded the biggest proportion of seats won since 1997 when Tony Blair won in that massive landslide - Blair won six more seats, but there were nine more total seats at the time. But Labour this time round also recorded the smallest percentage of votes for a winning party since 2005, also under Blair - except Blair had about 9% fewer seats won.

Many have quipped that Labour didn't win the elections due to their campaign - rather, it was the Tories' failure to do well. They have after all won 20% fewer votes as well as winning just 18% of all seats in Parliament. Here's a pie chart of all the results for the seven biggest parties (648 seats out of 650) first by vote share and then by seat share:

 

 

Clearly Labour are quite popular.

There must be various explanations as to why such an insignificant vote share translated into a massive landslide - and I think the main one is parties such as UKIP and Reform UK. This election was the biggest success for the Faragist parties yet - the man himself won a seat - and Reform UK won about 15% of all votes. Here's another graph:

The graph is fairly confusing, so I'll try to simplify it with this sentence: the Conservatives and Reform UK overall won more votes than Labour, but won three times fewer seats. Indeed, UKIP and then Reform have been growing in vote share, but have few seats to show for it. The election may look like a swing towards left-wing politics, but it's easy to forget 2/5 of the country are still unwilling to support it. Maybe that will increase come the next election.

This is why I don't agree with the First Past the Post system (one vote for everyone, person with most votes wins) - you end up with vastly unrealistic results which aren't all particularly democratic. 20% of votes went to Reform UK and the Greens, and only 1.2% have gone to both, for example. Ultimately, it's because general elections are local - Labour won the most constituencies , so the results are somewhat reasonable. However, it also means that only a third of the country are truly happy (unless many opted to vote tactically and are also happy), and if we assumed many voted Labour to get rid of the Tories, even that may not be true. 

Maybe I'm wrong and don't know what I'm saying. However, there were similar debates in 2015 which also saw the Conservatives have a low vote share and win a majority, with UKIP seeing little representation. Maybe I could also put an alternative voting system forward, in which case I'd argue proportional representation looks good - however, I really do like constituencies and I'm not sure how you could combine the two. Maybe this is the best voting system possible and maybe this post was meaninglessly political. I did promise I'd limit how much I write about politics too, so I hope this was a compromise.

To recap:

• Labour have a massive majority despite not having as many votes
• Don't underestimate parties like Reform UK
• First Past the Post has flaws
• I don't know if I'm right or wrong

If you're tired of politics, here's a random blogpost to enjoy.

The data used for 2024 is from the BBC results:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/results

Data for the previous general elections is from Wikipedia, which is fairly reliable for stats like these.

I will upload screenshots of the spreadsheet I used to my new blog -b eventually.