There is a problem with the electoral system in the UK.
– 9.7 million votes for Labour gives you 412 MPs
– 4.1 million votes for Reform UK gives you 5 MPs
Labour was strategic in their campaigns and won many constituencies. Conservatives and Reform had bad tactics and only landed few MPs despite having millions of votes.
Millions of voters will feel disenfranchised with the current system and next election I suspect will be very close.
by luthertt
21 comments
>Millions of voters will feel disenfranchised with the current system and next election I suspect will be very close.
Or Reform voters were making a protest vote, knowing full well their local Reform candidate wouldn’t win the seat. I’m not defending the electoral system. Just saying that I don’t think we should necessarily read this result as a real base of support for Reform. At this stage, it’s just another Farage vehicle.
Was simply the conservatives lost, Reform not existing is an interesting thought.
Would we have conservative again or a larger labour victory or even the rise of someone else.
Any reform voters out there want to share their second choice ?
We absolutely need to have PR.
If you lot all want to shag the flag and enshrine the monarchy then fine that’s majority rule and I’m happy with that.
I’m not happy as a left wing voter with Starmer or nothing. As he is actually a tool..makers son.
It’s undemocratic our system
Fptp exists so one of the two establishment parties can get into power. Labour are just the Tory replacement bus service.
We live in a fig leaf of democratic representation that neither Tory or labour will ever change.
Just demonstrates how ridiculous FPTP is.
Labour didn’t win, the Conservatives lost. Labour’s share of the vote has hardly changed over the last few elections and the number of votes has declined (even with a growing population), yet suddenly they have a massive majority.
Corbyn in 2019 got more votes than Starmer. Labour in 2024 despite having a very large majority has the single smallest vote share of any winning party in British history (33.8%). There are so many issues with this election and apart from 2015 this is probably one of the most disproportionate results.
It’s showing such a large fracturing in even the safest of seats, Labour even lost a couple to independents, it’s overall a really bad sign for British democracy on top of super low turnout despite the importance of this election unlike the unimportant 2001 election which was the only one in modern history that was lower. FPTP needs to go.
It’s a landslide if the Winner ends up with this many seats. Getting sick and tired of the very sore losers pretending they gave a shit about FPTP/Prop-rep now they’ve been disadvantaged by something the population had a referendum on (remember them?) and settled that issue.
Labour won by being smart, the Tories lost by being shit, and Reform can fuck off back to the margins with their Putin Money/Agenda.
Let’s be honest , most voters do not truly understand how the political system works and just put a cross in a box for the party they “believe” in.
This year for me was a closely comparable to the coalition year 2010. Why? Because the party that leaned furtherest to the centre won the most seats in the parliament.
The right wing believers have just stuck a middle finger to the conservatives through shearer lack of trust and went reform as it is most aligned to their political believes.
A bit like 2014 with UKIP locals – very very similar numbers millions for them not really many seats what happened next? 2016 cons back in first order of business – Brexit vote (give the people what they want) well this went down lack a cup of cold sick really.
Conclusion, Brexit believers still believe they can make Brexit work (ha!) and simply they don’t trust the tories to do this in the right way so what to do? They go reform and continue to live in their deluded bubble that by working without other major players on the international stage it is going to help reduce immigration and build a better Britain. It just simply won’t.
However, across the channel things seem to be swaying way more towards the right so EU could have some new challenges on its hand but it won’t be broken, at least not yet anyway!
This is dumb – ftpt isn’t perfect but it works – it is individual races for who you want to represent your area – reform lost all of those…if you gave them more MPs for coming second / third, they still wouldn’t have places that wanted to have them as representatives…they have peaked as a flash in the pan…they maxed out what they could have as support in this country and it’s not enough. They want to scrap employment law that keep you safe and make it easier to be fired without reason so it’s probably good for their working class supporters that they will never get anywhere further. It’s a policy on their website under the economy ‘for business’ section- their voters need to know that reform are 100% against them…
Yeah the British public should probably not be voting for those people anyway.
How people can not see their authoritarian dream for this country (such as their leader supporting trump to be elected in America when he has clearly stated his intention is to be a dictator)
The system may be broken but keeping those people away from power is NOT a bad thing unless you want to see what it was like living in WW2 Germany because that is where “reform” will take you.
I don’t understand the hate for the FTPT voting. I completely agree that you should vote LOCALLY and who wins the most votes locally wins their seat to represent the majority of their constituents. I’m very left wing, but I absolutely hate starmer, however I fully believe in my local labour MP to do what’s right for the constituents. My previous Tory MP was absolutely fucking useless and has done nothing for us for the past 14 years.
Lets not pretend that all those Reform votes came directly from the Tories, a lot of them were Labour voters too.
Using my expert analysis from my politics reddit PhD. My assessment is as follows:
– Labour moves to the Centre absorbing Centre/Centre-Right/Centre-Left voters.
– Labour also loses its Lefter leaning voters to Greens/Libs/Corbynesc etc
– Labour loses working class voters to Reform.
– Cons loses Right Wing voters to Reform and Centre to Labour/Libs.
So its actually a Labour gain from the Convervatives but both parties lost voters to Reform and the Lib Dems. Some deliberately where Labour didn’t contest Lib/Con seats.
Anyways… that’s my view.
It’s still a massive landslide, but it’s a fragile one, to Labour but this just shows you how you can’t actually really predict the outcome of a FPTP Election with more than three parties running.
Under FPTP, the more candidates you field the lower the overall percent is needed to win an election if everything split equally. A five way contest could have the winner receiving as little as 21% of the overall vote, leaving 79% percent with a result they didn’t want.
Labour positioned themselves well, and pretty much sat back and let the Tories implode, and Reform take the votes in England. This has left Labour with a wee bit of a problem however, a massive majority on a lower voter share tells us they’ve benefitted from the Tory vote fracturing in England. The Lib Dem’s have experienced the same. Both parties are holding a lot of seats that they wouldn’t have got near had it not been for Reform splitting the vote.
So Labour win legitimately because they get to take advantage of the split but the question is, how do they stop the house of cards falling? They have to prove themselves but it also depends on how Reform behave and how the Tories move forward.
The Tories could actually sink into obscurity at the next GE if Reform gain more traction. Reform could be in a position to grab some of those Lab or LD seats where they came second but also split out the rest of Tories leaving them decimated. Reform could also implode, Farage is going to be under scrutiny and he can’t rock up and be racist, inflammatory then slink away again until the next election this time. We’re watching.
So yes, it’s a landslide, a good one, a big one but it’s fragile from the way it happened. It’s not like 1997 where we were still very much a two party system and folk were just switching to Labour, the vote got divided up to end up with this really odd, uneven result. In 2010, Cameron got a higher voter share 36% but couldn’t get a majority because the vote wasn’t dividing to sneak them into seats where they sat in second place and could have done with a bit of electoral division.
You don’t win in the UK by having a vote share, it could be better to win 10k votes in right places, while sacrificing milion
Winning by the smallest amount of votes is the vote efficiency, and the east efficient wad reform, they needed like a million of votes for each seat
For all the ill of FPTP. Its merits are it gives governments the power to function. Other systems which are more representative can spend weeks or months negotiating who is governing. Then collapse and have to have another election.
It also keeps out the head banging-yahoo parties, which nobody but men with height complexes vote for.
FPTP isn’t perfect, but rather a functional middle ground party, that several factions getting nothing done. That rout takes us back to the 1700’s.
“Millions of voters will feel disenfranchised” is how every UK election works. I always lived in strong Conservative voting constituencies but vote centre/centre left, so my vote has been pointless for the past two decades. I was lucky my current local area had a slight swing to Labour because the right vote was split.
My main worry is that around 14% of British voters are voting for someone described by teachers and schoolmates as a fascist and an antisemite, who runs a political corporation rather than a party, who would take the UK down a very dark path. Political education is sorely lacking in this country.
“Conservatives and Reform had bad tactics and only landed few MPs despite having millions of votes.”
Utter rubbish. Both parties chose their tactics purposefully.
Cons stood in every constituency. They were the encumbent in many of them for a start, but they are also the second of the two major parties with thousands of members. They have to, and can, stand everywhere.
Ref knew, just like every single person in the country has for months, that Labour were winning most of the seats. If Ref ran, if they didn’t, they had support everywhere and the major opposition had lost support everywhere. Reform could’ve concentrated on a small amount of seats like the Greens etc did, and got 4 seats, or appeared on every ballot and got 4 seats. By throwing up every wierdo and whackadoodle into every seat they got some votes, everywhere, got their vote count up, got their ‘mandate’. Ultimately, there’s Cons who’ll never vote Lab, and they weren’t voting Con, so there’s votes up for grabs.
Ultimately, if you get 20,000 votes in two constituencies, and fuck all everywhere else, you’ll get two seats with 40,000 votes. If you get 1000 votes in 200 constituencies you’ll get zero seats with 200,000 votes.
Thats how numbers work.
The same thing happened with UKIP a few years back, and whilst I didn’t support them, the system was obviously not fit for purpose then too.
Anyone who voted for anyone except Labour (in this vote) would have been very misguided if they thought there would be any different outcome. Emphasis on predicted outcome, *”protest”* votes not included.
I also hate the way it was so predictable that Labour and the media would be banging on about a massive achievement by Labour, or Starmer, when the fact is they won by default, won because FPTP and ultimately won only because the Tories made it so so easy, almost like the Tories wanted to lose. Self destruction. Yay, well done Labour, you already have done so well in this “challenge”
Nobody has won anything, now that the Tories have “been defeated,” please can we stop pretending there is anything great about Labour and stop pretending that they were anything great last time?
Thanks
Sorry
Rant/
No, it is not. The UK electoral system is the better one out there. It directly elects its representative, giving him/her power and independence when it comes to voting or other parliamentary matters. Under PR, you’ll have a bunch of MPs elected by the Party Headquarters. They are not answerable to the public that elects them but to the Party officials that make the List. PR it is not as democratic as the British public believes. As someone who has experienced both systems, FPTP is the better one.
I expected much more people to vote labour considering how badly conservatives ran the campaign and how badly the party is dependant on its’ right-wingers.
Well let’s see if they make right conclusions out of it.
I hope labour leaders would also make right conclusions and keep to their promises, as if not- they are certainly out of power in the next elections.
I’m no FPTP fan, but it is the system and Labour played to it.
I find it a bit odd peoples quickness to simply transpose a FPTP result onto a proportional system. It seems quite clear to me that the British people and different parties, very much understand how the system works and focus their energy or apathy accordingly.
It would be a stretch to say Labour would be able to get as many seats under something more proportional, but you could make an argument they would get more votes, and how many is almost impossible to say.