Labour wins big, but Britain’s electoral system is creaking | General Election 2024

The story of the 2024 election is that voters turned away from a deeply unpopular ruling party. Which party they turned to and how that interacted with the electoral system is a more complex story that may take time to fully understand.

Voter turnout

Turnout is often misunderstood. Nevertheless, 2024 was undoubtedly a low-turnout election.

After 648 results, it reached 60%, just above the low point of the 2001 election. There may be several factors behind this. New voter ID rules may have made a small difference; the story of Labour winning a majority, especially in the final weeks of the campaign when the Conservatives introduced the term supermajority, may have made voters feel that their vote was of little consequence; there may have been a widespread disillusionment with the idea that politics can make a positive difference to people's lives. When the British Election Study data is available, it will be impossible to know who, if anyone, benefited from the low turnout.

Graphic election system

The relationship between the number of seats won by each party and their share of the vote was more uneven than ever before. The Liberal Democrats won 71 seats (at the time of writing) with 12.2% of the vote, the Reform UK Party won four seats with 14.3% of the vote, and Labour won an overwhelming majority, winning more than 200 seats in terms of vote share, which was almost the same as in 2019.

Why is this more striking than recent elections? The Liberal Democrats ran a very focused campaign. They focused on the seats where they came second to the Conservatives in 2019. That means the party's vote is concentrated in those seats and it's very effective. At the same time, Labour has made voting much more efficient. It's much more effective to get enough votes in each seat, as Labour did last night, than to stack up for a majority with the same total vote. That's called voting efficiency, and Labour has done it perfectly this time.

Of course, a smaller majority at a similar but more efficient turnout rate could be more vulnerable in future elections. That is yet to be seen. But the net effect could be to create many more seats that would be considered marginal in 2028-29.

ChartNew Political Map

The 2019 election was dominated by talk of Labour losing to the Conservatives and the red wall seats from the North East to the Midlands. In 2024, the focus shifted to the blue wall seats that the Liberal Democrats were trying to wrest from the Conservatives.

The Blue Wall is not a well-founded analytical construct, but there is now a clear geographic heartland of Liberal Democrat voting, stretching mainly from the south-west to Oxfordshire in the east, combining areas where the party was strong in 2005 and 2010 with areas with relatively high proportions of wealthy voters who voted in 2016.

They will challenge the Liberal Democrats in the next parliament on how to position themselves in relation to the other parties. The Conservatives can make this easier by moving further into the Reform Britain area, so the Liberal Democrats can continue to present themselves as a moderate alternative to Tory voters. But if the Tory election inquiry realises the danger to the party's left, it will be harder for the Liberal Democrats to hold on to all these seats.

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Labour won the most seats in England, Scotland and Wales, uniting voters from Battersea to Basset Row. Large coalitions of voters are inherently harder to hold together. The new Labour coalition is not as large as the 2019 one, but it is more geographically and socially diverse. Many of the most left-wing voters voted Green nationally, particularly in urban areas with high levels of graduates. This could be a challenge for Labour, and as many will point out, Labour was challenged by Reform UK in many of the areas where Ukip came second in 2015.

Just as the Conservatives found themselves in a tight spot between the Liberal Democrats and the Reform Party last night, Labour could find itself in a tight spot between the Greens and the Reform Party in the coming days.

split

Labour and the Conservatives have recorded their lowest combined party vote since 1945. This is the combined effect of the Liberal Democrats’ recovery, the Reform UK vote, the Greens’ rise, and the unusually high turnout of a wide range of independent voters. This division has been a feature of British electoral politics for at least two decades, but in previous elections, the overall impact has been obscured by the less successful performance of other parts of the party. This is why the electoral system creaks. As more parties gain a decent share of the vote, they can be very unlikely to win a constituency (Liz Truss lost her constituency to Terry Jermey with 26.7% of the vote). And it is why future elections can be much harder to predict.

Whatever happens in the next Congress, it will be important to understand the different partisan competitions taking place across different regions and demographic groups, in case we ever have to go through this again.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/05/labour-wins-big-uk-electoral-system-creaking The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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