The UK General Election 2024 took place earlier than most people thought it would, but now it is over and the dust has settled it’s time to take a close look at the results.
We all know that Labour romped home with a massive majority, picking up an additional 214 seats, and the Tories lost over 250 seats, including those of several high-profile cabinet ministers.
So that gives Labour not only a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, but a mandate to, in Kier Starmer’s words, “change the country beyond recognition”. That sounds ominous. The country’s already “beyond recognition” compared to what it was just 50 years ago, and not in a good way.
It’s in even more of a shambles, and a most dangerous situation, thanks not least to incompetent and treacherous Labour administrations since 1945. So it’s difficult to conceive just how it could be changed “beyond recognition”, unless he means actually making it a better, more civilised country, something Labour is incapable of doing.
From reading the output of the mainstream media one could be forgiven for thinking that Labour had received millions more votes than in 2019 and had the support of at least a decent majority of voters in the country.
The “loveless landslide”
In fact, Labour received about 544,000 fewer votes than in 2019, when they were commonly regarded as having been soundly rejected by the voters. It’s true their share of the vote rose slightly (33.83 per cent as opposed to 32.08 per cent), but only because the turn-out was the next lowest since 1945, at less than 60 per cent.
So only 20 per cent (0.6 x 0.3383) of eligible voters voted Labour. And how many did so just to teach the Tories a lesson we shall never know. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their policies, let alone a mandate to bring in substantial changes to anything. Nigel Farage has dubbed it a “loveless landslide”, which you may think is an apt description.
The mechanics of the voting system, the “first past the post” (FPTP), have often in the past produced surprising results, at odds with the general feeling in the country. This was even more pronounced than ever before in this election.
For example, Reform UK had the third largest share of the votes, at 4.103 million. That was 14.28 per cent. Yet they won only five seats in the Commons. The LibDems, however, won 71 seats, but with only 3.501 million votes (12.18 per cent) – over 600,000 fewer than Reform.
The DUP won the same number of seats – five – with only 172,000 votes. Sein Fein won two more than Reform with less than 211,000 votes.
The Greens won four seats with a total vote of well under half of those won by Reform.
But the most telling statistic is that the combined vote of Labour and Conservative amounted to only 16.55 million (57.57 per cent of the total votes cast and just 34.54 per cent of eligible voters). Yet, between them they won 533 of the 650 seats available. That’s eighty two per cent.
It’s safe to say that FPTP is here to stay for a long while. No matter how unfair it is, it’s still “democratic”. But there is an alternative.
Time for Proportional Representation?
Let’s take a look at what the result would have looked like if we had a system of Proportional Representation (PR) in place.
Labour would still have the largest number of Commons seats, but it would hardly be a “landslide”. In fact they would be a minority government, with just 219 seats – not much more than half their actual number. Everyone else, except the minority parties that polled only a few hundred thousand votes, would have considerably more seats than they do now.
Everyone else, that is, except the LibDems, who would have 79 seats – only eight more than they actually won this time round. The LibDems have campaigned for PR in the past, when they held just a handful of Commons seats. Somehow I doubt that they will be quite so keen on it now.
It’s clear that the two main parties are more than happy with FPTP. Even though it keeps them out of office for years at a time, it does deliver to them for the rest of the time the ability to govern for up to five years in a way that does not have the support of the majority in the country. They have a majority in the House of Commons, and that is what counts. We thereby have a “stable” system of government.
The only thing that could upset the status quo here would be if one of the minority parties – Reform UK (or whatever it will be called by then) or the Greens, for example – managed to become the second largest party in the House of Commons and able, somehow, to create a constitutional crisis over the issue. But by that time it’s possible that FPTP would actually benefit the parties that it now penalises. So who knows what may happen?
Comparisons with the 2019 General Election
It’s always interesting to compare the results of a General Election with the previous General Election. The turnout was only 59.9 per cent, compared with 67.3 per cent in 2019, and 68.9 per cent in 2017. Labour increased its percentage of the vote by only 1.73 per cent, yet won 209 more seats – nearly a third of the total seats in the Commons. The Conservatives haemorrhaged votes, losing 7.142 million – more votes than they actually won, and more than half the number they won in their 2019 “landslide”. Their percentage of the vote almost halved – down to 23.74 per cent from 43.6.
We all know why the Conservatives did so badly. It wasn’t just because of their complete failure to stem the tide of immigration, both legal and illegal. It was also because of the chaos that came to be associated with their style of government. By that I mean the charade we witnessed when Boris Johnson resigned as Prime Minister, and the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss.
Then there’s also the hypocrisy of the Johnson administration in imposing lockdowns on the general population, supposedly to stem the Covid 19 pandemic, while at the same time attending wild parties themselves, where they could forget about masks, social distancing, and all the other constraints the rest of us had to abide by or risk prosecution.
And overshadowing everything else was the Brexit betrayal, covered in this blog in some detail. It became clear that all the Tories cared about here was that they could, by promising to abide by the Referendum result, steal Labour votes, particularly in the “red wall” of Labour’s traditional strongholds in the north.
Once that was done they could let the EU stifle our struggle for independence, and party on. Now it seems likely that Starmer, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it, will take us back into the EU, or at least sign up to a series of “protocols”, “agreements” and the like that will, by stealth and over time, result in our being subjugated all over again to the diktats of the European Commission.
In Part 2 of this series we will take a look at the Immigrant vote and the Negative vote, and discuss the way ahead.
