The 2024 UK election result is surprising and is dis-proportional.
Labour took a massive majority government with only 34 percent of the votes.
They took 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
With its 34 percent of valid votes cast, it was due only 221.
About two thirds of the voters who voted will be ruled by a government that they did not vote for.
This result is is a big advance for Labour compared to its 2019 result. It is not like Labour is that popular ...
Labour in fact took fewer votes than it did in 2019. if its rise is due to having a higher percentge of the vote - its supporters did stay strong while Conservatives' support plummeted very low - but Labour's percentage only rose 2 percent from 32 to 34 percent. so that is no real justification for the doubling of its seats.
Hard as it is to believe, Labour got fewer votes this election than it received in 2019.
Conservatives Labour total valid votes
2019 14 M 10M 32M
2024 6.8M 9.7M 29M (approx.)
Fewer people voted in 2024 compared to 2019
fewer voted for Labour
much fewer voted Conservative.
And that is how Labour won its "landslide victory".
Parties other than Labour and Conservative received 25 percent of valid votes in 2019; in 2024 they received 42 percent of valid votes.
it looks like UK citizens are voting as if they already have Proportional Representation (or 2 in five of lthem really dispise both large parties!)
In 2019 "third parties", with 25 percent of votes, elected 80 MPs (they were due as a whole about 165 MPs)
in 2024 with 40 percent of votes they elected 120. (they were due as a whole about 260 MPs).
In 2024, "third parties" as a whole were due more seats than Labour but elected 300 fewer MPs than Labour.
Fair result... i don't think so.
Can "third parties" do anything about it?
Doubtful... not if they have only a fifth of MPs in the HofC.
But Labour can't expect this kind of luck to continue...
2019 Labour was due 208 seats but got 202.
2024 Labour was due 221 seats but got 411.
Likely Labour will get about its due share of seats next time once again.
This kind of insecurity will likely be seen in the government's behaviour. Every slight shift of sentiment may lose Labour ten or so seats.
MPs who were elected with only a minority of votes cast in their district - and there must be many of them - will not be happy with any contentious issue that might lose them the slim sliver of votes that gave them their powerful and lucrative positions.
We should expect a hamstrung government that will indulge in great amounts of patronage and logrolling as the scantily-elected members try to shore up their slim support. A shift of perhaps a few hundred votes in a district where 45,000 votes are cast may be enough to lose the MP his or her cushy post.
Yes, Labour could afford to lose a hunded seats and still be majority government but those same hundred MPs are a sizable section of the Labour caucus.
And there is no saying which hundred Labour would lose out in a re-election bid if the Labour government does courageous or contentious programs and initiatives.
Even cabinet ministers may look vulnerable at the riding level.
And cabinet ministers and MPs do not want to lose their seats, and do not want to have to worry about that happening.
All courageous things, all reforms that spend government money to help some, are contentious.
All initiatives to address climate change or to redistribute wealth are contentious.
This over-large majority government may turn out to be a bad thing for Labour.
==
CNN provided a graphic of seats as they were declared and the percentage of party support as votes were counted.
Already on election night CNN expected a disproportional election result
Here's how CNN excuses the expected disproportional election result:
"Under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, people in 650 constituencies across the nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have voted to select their Member of Parliament (MP) to represent the area. Votes will be counted late into the Thursday night and into Friday morning.
A party needs 326 seats to form a government, which Labour is projected to clear by 170 seats, giving it a commanding majority in the next parliament.
Because of its electoral system, Britain can see large discrepancies between the share of seats won by a party and its share of the popular vote.
If support for one party – or antipathy towards another – is spread fairly evenly across the country, it does not need to win a large share of the popular vote to win a huge majority of seats in parliament."
CNN is too generous -
it is, in fact, accurate to say if support for one party – or antipathy towards another – is fairly strong and is spread fairly evenly over only two thirds of the country, the party does not need to win a large share of the popular vote to win a huge majority of seats in parliament."
A candidate with a third of votes cast in a ridings can win a seat, due to the three or four or five candidates who receive subtantial votes in ridings in UK and Canada today.
17 percent of votes cast, a third of votes in each of a majority of ridings (51 percent of districts), is enough for a simple majority of seats.
22 percent of voters cast, a third of votes in each of about two thirds of the ridings, is enough for two thirds of the House.
25 percent of the valid votes would be enough to take 3/4ths of seats.
The rule that if support for one party – or antipathy towards another – is spread fairly evenly across the country, it can win a huge majority of seats in parliament without a large share of the popular vote does not actually apply to all.
A party with ten percent of the votes whose votes are spread fairly evenly across the country will not get even one seat.
A party whose support is spread fairly evenly across the country must have about 35 percent of the vote to win a large majority of seats. Such an amount of votes is likely the largest total for any one party, so one might call it a large share of the popular vote, unless by large share you strictly mean majority of votes.
Very seldom does one party take a majority of votes any more in U.K. or in Canada or in New Zealand or in many other places.
The last time the government party in UK was elected with majority of votes was in 1935.
Only 34 percent of votes cast was enough to elect Labour in 2005, with 357 seats.
Only 36 percent of votes cast was enough to elect minority government of Conservatives in 2010, with 307 seats.
Only 37 percent of votes cast was enough to elect majority government for Conservatives in 2015, with 331 seats.
That is the kind of minority rule that we can expect under FPTP, and the 2024 election is just another in the same mould.
===
While only about 25 percent is theoretically enough to win huge majority, if a party's vote is concentrated ina single riding, a very small percentage of overall votes cast is enough to win a seat.
so about 15,000 votes out of 32M votes cast in 2019 UK
example: Manchester Gorton had 45,000 votes cast -- one could take the seat with 15,000 votes as things usually go.
15,000 votes per district times 450 (3/4ths of ridings) = 6.7M (about 21 percent of 32M votes cast) is enough to take 3/4ths of seats in the HofC if vote split is fortunate and looking only at small districts or districts where voter turnout is low.
I guess it is the idea a party needs to have support spread fairly evenly across the country to win a huge majority that rubs me --
-- to take two thirds of the seats, you just need to have all your votes in just two thirds of the districts! The other ridings don't matter to you at all.
Two thirds of seats may not seem like a huge majority but actually it is - the government outvotes the opposition 2 to 1.
Almost half the government could be absent and the opposition would still be outvoted.
but yes in Alberta, under FPTP, it is not unusual for government members to have a 3 to 1 ratio to opposition members.
From 1990 to 2010, Alberta Conservatives never took less than 75 percent of the seats, sometimes with as little as 53 percent of the vote.
That is the kind of thing that FPTP can produce -- doesn't that make you happy?
And now in UK, the shoe is on other foot -
Labour won big time, and it is the Conservatives that find themselves being heavily punished when they hope to take seats...
===================================================
When we hold an election, we expect different vote totals to give different results
and we expect same voter support to get same number of seats.
But we don't expect a party that gets more votes to be turfed out of power
but that happened to Alberta NDP in 2019
but AB NDP had smaller portion of votes at least.
UK election 2024 is case where Labour, with fewer votes and about the same portion of valid votes as in 2019 (33 percent, give or take 1 percent), got twice the seats as it had received in 2019.
Surely that is strong evidence of need for PR...
=====
Labour did not take more votes to win this time
Oddly enough, the PR share of seats that were due Labour in 2019 as per link below is same as its PR share of seats in 2024.
How the 2019 election results could have looked with proportional representation – Electoral Reform Society – ERS (electoral-reform.org.uk)
Labour share of votes in 2019 was 32 percent so pretty much same as in 2024 "landslide election."
in both elections, Labour's PR share of seats is 221.
(Labour's PR share of seats in 2019 should have actually been 208 but ERS awarded them 221 under PR (MMP), just as in 2014 it is awarding Labour 236 seats, 15 more than its proportional due share of seats..
ERS must be assuming an electoral threshold that blocks out some small parties.
with 650 members elefed to HofC, the effective threshold would besomething like .2 percent. Not many parties got less than that.
so to free up 15 seats for Labour (236-221), perhaps 2 or 3 percent of votes would be found ineffective. These might belong to Social Democratic and Labour Party with .6 percent of the valid votes and those parties even less popular. But that would be an arbitrary decision and not inherent in MMP.
SD&LP would be eligible for perhsp 3 MPs if not barred by a threshold.)
The Labour government elected in 2024 is unstable in power and could easily lose its position next time, causing policy lurch even if voters vote the same.
I expressed fear that the Labour's over-rep in 2024 could lead to policy lurch in future, but now see that this prediction has actually already proven true over the last two elections in the past.
I had said:
One of the problems of this dis-Proportional result is even if votes stayed the same, just some slight accident of electoralism could result in Labour getting only 221 seats or even less.
Labour's large majority government is an accidental result and likely will not be repeated. Next time Labour will be thrust out of government unless it gets more votes next time or has similar lucky break (not likely).
Thus policy lurch and government change with no relation to voters' sentiment is almost certain.
But now I see that that already happened -- fewer voters voted Labour in 2024 compared to 2019 but FPTP produced a large Labour government,
while in 2019 Labour was opposition to a Conservative government.
Sure the Conservative government was not popular but Labour's win was strictly accidental and is dis-proportional.
What happened on July 4, 2024:
with almost the same proportion of votes cast as in 2019,
Labour went from 202 seats to 420 seats.
With no large change in voter behaviour between 2019 and 2024 as far as votes cast for Labour
there was no pro-Labour swing,
in fact in 2024 Labour received fewer votes than in 2019
But despite this constancy,
Labour got more than twice the seats in 2024 than it did in 2019.
==========================================
Electoral Reform Society (UK) is saying under MMP, Labour would get 236 seats.
I don't know how they figured their result
They're giving Labour 236 seats when its vote share (34 percent) in 650 seats is only 221 seats.
maybe some overhang in some regions?
or application of an electoral threshold? (as discussed above)e
===============================================
Electoral Reform Society (UK) notes that the 2024 disproportional result was due to voters voting as if they already had PR. They did not vote strageically but voted, it seems, for aexactly who they wanted elected.
It just happend that third parties - Liberal Democrats, Reform, Green and five smaller parties - were thinly spread and got plurality in few districts so won few seats relative to their vote share. This gave Labour a massive seat windfall.
The percentage of votes cast that went to the two front-running parties was only 57 percent.
The "third parties" got 43 percent of the vote. Candidates of those parties did get plurality in some places and won some seats but not to the same extent as their vote share.
If we lump them together, we see they got 43 percent of the vote. They won 118 seats (most of that was won by Liberal Democrats) when they were due 280.
"This election saw the combined Labour and Conservative vote share slump to its lowest level on 57.4%. The second lowest combined vote share for the two parties was in 2010 when they received 65.1%."
In Canada by comparison, in last election (held in 2021) the two main parties got a combined 67 percent of the votes cast, leaving 33 percent, a third of votes cast, to the "third parties."
In 2019 the two leading parties got an almost identical 67 percent.
in 2015 it was 71 percent, leaving 29 percent to third parties.
This phenomena where "third parties" were left with about a third of the vote was seen back in 1921. Third parties appeared in substantial mass that year. In that election "third parties" got 30 percent of the vote. Most of that went to the Progressive Party and the affiliated United Farmers of Alberta with a combined 22 percent of the vote. The Progressive/UFA won 60 seats - they were due 51.
(The next election they lost strength - winning 24 seats when their combined vote share of 9 percent should have given them 22. The Farmer vote was concentrated in Alberta and Sask so Prog/UFA got benefit of concentration.
Once Social Credit supplanted the UFA as the focus of farmer votes in Alberta, third parties were again less voe vote for and again were super under-represented.
1935 election the two main parties took 75 percent of the vote and 218 of the 245 seats in in the HofC, leaving just 27 seats to third parties who were due 61 seats.
And that has been pattern almsot always ever since.
The Progressives and UFA were concentrated (on the Prairies and in farming districts) so got a larger share of the seats than its vote share.
Generally third parties are under-represented or not represented at all.
That is true for the NDP. Almost always it has been under-represented in the HofC.
In 2008 it won 18 percent of the vote but only 37 seats - it was due 55.
In 2015 it won 20 percent of the vote but only 44 seats - it was due 68.
In 2021 it won 18 percent of the vote but only 24 seats - it was due 61.
Jack Layton is credited with leading the NDP to unparallelled success in 2011 but that was partly just a fluke produced by our shaky eleciton system.
"In the 2011 election, Layton led the NDP to the most successful result in the party's history, winning 103 seats—enough for the party to form the Official Opposition for the first time." (Wiki Jack Layton)
but in 2011 the NDP won 31 percent of the vote and 103 seats. It was due 94 seats that year.
The 2011 over-representation of the NDP is not even close to being adequate compensation for all those other elections when the NDP has been under-represented.
========================
It seems only commonsense that voters will assume that they can vote for whom they truly want elected and it seems then commonsense to have a voting system that will take votes as cast and allocate seats in due proportion to how votes are cast.
PR is what we want, and what voters deserve.
=====================================
Comments