SWS Compass News 2024
The General Election has delivered an emphatic result, with Labour taking 411 seats, and the Conservatives losing a staggering 244, to leave them with 121, their smallest representation for over 100 years. This rump of Tories includes Jeremy Hunt, newly elected as MP for Godalming and Ash. His majority was slashed and he won by less than 900 votes as many Labour and Green supporters voted tactically to try to defeat him. Tactical voting was widespread across the country and helped in delivering the dramatic downturn in Tory fortunes.
The concern is that the turnout for this election was the lowest since 2001, and the trend has been steadily downwards since the 1990s. Our pernicious FPTP system delivered the most disproportionate result in our history. The remarkable fact is that Labour swept to power, claiming 63% of the seats in the House of Commons on 34% of the vote. This is only 2% more vote share than under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, when they won only half as many seats! In terms of actual numbers of votes, Starmer received 560,396 fewer than Corbyn had done.
Usually the smaller parties suffer most from FPTP, but in this case the Lib Dems did stunningly well. Their vote increased by less than 1%, but the number of MPs has rocketed from 11 to 72! The real story was the collapse of the Tory vote, which fell from nearly 14 million to less than 7 million. This represents a 20% drop in the vote share, but a 38% drop in MPs.
The 7 million votes that moved away from the Conservatives were distributed between a number of parties. More than 4 million of those went to Reform. It seems likely that another couple of million went to Labour, as Starmer had carefully manouevred his party to attract these very votes. The rest probably went to the Lib Dems.
The Green party exceeded their expectations and gained all four of their target seats, more than doubling their vote share. However, a fully proportional system would deliver them 44 seats to reflect the 6.8% vote share they received. Of course, if our system were fully proportional then voting patterns would undoubtedly change as their would be little need to vote tactically.