Election travesty - not much of a mandate

Amidst all the hype and euphoria the Labour Party should reflect seriously on the fact that its electoral triumph is hollow. The result is a travesty of democracy.

Consider the following:

The distribution of seats in the new Parliament in no way reflects the choices of the electorate. Labour won nearly two thirds of the seats on barely a third of the votes, whereas Reform and the Greens each got less than 1% of the seats on vote shares of 14% and 7% respectively. See Table 1 appended for a full comparison of seats and vote share.

 

Labour’s “landslide” vote share (33.8%) was only 1.6 percentage points more than it achieved in the 2019 election and was actually less than in 2017 (both under Jeremy Corbyn). It was also lower than Gordon Brown got in 2010 and Neil Kinnock in 1992. See the chart below and Table 2 appended.

Similarly, the LibDems’ spectacular increase from 8 seats won in 2019 to 72 seats in 2024 was based on a vote share increasing only slightly from 11.5% to 12.2%. So any talk of a “Liberal surge” is also rubbish.

The main reason for both Labour’s and the LibDems’ apparent success was of course the split of the right wing vote between the Conservatives and Reform. Together these two parties actually got more votes than the Labour Party (though this is not to suggest that Reform voters would necessarily choose the Conservatives as their second choice – or vice versa).

A secondary reason was the collapse of the SNP vote in Scotland – largely explained by that Party’s current legal and financial problems and the indifferent record of the Scottish Government. Thus, the Labour Party recovered 36 of the 40 Scottish seats it lost in 2015 in the aftermath of the independence referendum.

Labour’s apparent success also conceals some major problems. Their policy on Israel/Palestine and on Kashmir has lost them the support of a large proportion of the South Asian communities that they had previously taken for granted. In north west London and in Slough it was arguably their condemnation of Indian government policy on Kashmir that led to the dramatic drop in the Indian vote (e.g. 25.2% swing* in Slough). Similarly, the muslim communities in east London, Leicester, Birmingham and the post-industrial towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire voted heavily for independent pro-Palestinian candidates, resulting in Labour losing Leicester South (on a swing of 35.2%), Birmingham Perry Barr (34.8%) and Blackburn (33.2%), and failing to win Dewsbury and Batley (38.6%). There were also near misses in Birmingham Yardley (28.1% swing) and Bradford West (30.8%). In London, even Keir Starmer’s vote share fell by 17.3% in Holborn and St Pancras, and Wes Streeting was within 528 votes of defeat on a swing of 26.5% in Ilford North.

Labour’s NEC also scored some spectacular own goals by banning or deselecting popular local candidates because they were deemed too pro-Palestinian or left wing. Thus they emphatically and deservedly lost Islington North to Jeremy Corbyn and failed to unseat Ian Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green (where the Labour vote was evenly split between the official, imposed candidate and the deselected candidate, who stood as an independent).

Conclusions

As the election result does not fairly represent the choices of the voters, the new Government cannot plausibly claim that it has a mandate to implement the Labour manifesto - such as it was.

The glaring disparity between the popular vote and the distribution of Parliamentary seats makes an overwhelming case for electoral reform. Yet will the 412 Labour MPs - knowing that under a proportional system about half of them would lose their seats - vote to ditch “first past the post” (FPTP)? A cynic might say that the question answers itself.

We shall probably have to wait another four or five years (if we are spared) before the issue of electoral reform can even be seriously considered.

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* Where constituency boundaries have changed these swing calculations are based on notional, modelled figures for 2019

Table 1:  Percentage vote share 1945 – 2024
	Conservative	Labour	Liberal/SDP/LibDem	Nationalists	Others (inc. UKIP and Reform)
1945	39.8	48.3	9.1	0.2	2.5
1950	43.5	46.1	9.1	0.1	1.2
1951	48	48.8	2.5	0.1	0.6
1955	49.7	46.4	2.7	0.2	0.9
1959	49.4	43.8	5.9	0.4	0.6
1964	43.4	44.1	11.2	0.5	0.8
1966	41.9	47.9	8.5	0.7	0.9
1970	46.4	43	7.5	1.3	1.8
1974 Feb	37.8	37.1	19.3	2.6	3.2
1974 Oct	35.8	39.2	18.3	3.5	3.2
1979	43.9	37	13.8	2	3.3
1983	42.4	27.6	25.4	1.5	3.1
1987	42.3	30.8	22.6	1.7	2.6
1992	41.9	34.4	17.8	2.3	3.5
1997	30.7	43.2	16.8	2.5	6.8
2001	31.7	40.7	18.3	2.5	6.8
2005	32.4	35.2	22	2.2	8.2
2010	36.1	29	23	2.2	9.6
2015	36.9	30.4	7.9	5.3	19.4
2017	42.5	40	7.4	3.5	6.8
2019	43.6	32.2	11.5	4.4	8.3
2024	23.7	33.8	12.2	3.2	27.0

"Others" includes 12.6% for UKIP in 2015 and 14.3% for Reform in 2024

Table 2:  Seats and vote share (Great Britain) 2024

Party	No. of votes	Vote share (%)	No. of seats won	% of seats won	Votes per seat
Conservative	6,827,112	24.4	121	19.1	56,422
Labour	9,731,363	34.7	412	65.2	23,620
LibDem	3,519,163	12.6	72	11.4	48,877
Reform	4,106,661	14.7	5	0.8	821,332
Green	1,943,258	6.9	4	0.6	485,815
Others	1,899,158	6.8	18	2.8	105,509
Total GB	28,026,715	100.0	632	100.0