In a Reuters report about the power transition in the UK, this passage struck me:
Despite Starmer’s convincing victory, polls suggested there was little enthusiasm for Starmer or his party. Thanks to the quirk of Britain’s first-past-the-post system and a low turnout, Labour’s triumph was achieved with fewer votes than it secured in 2017 and 2019 – the latter its worst result in terms of seats won for 84 years.
An Economist report (“How shallow was Labour’s victory in the British election?“) provides more insight:
The labour party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, scored a resounding victory in Britain’s general election on July 4th. Its majority is the largest won by any government since 1997. The party flipped seats in all corners of Britain, defeating Conservative candidates in constituencies that had been blue since the 19th century.
Yet this was not a popular triumph. In absolute numbers, the party attracted fewer ballots than it did under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. Labour’s share of the vote, at 34%, is the lowest level for a governing party since at least the first world war (see chart 1). Instead of inspiring the masses, Sir Keir spearheaded a fearsomely efficient election-winning machine: it won 42 seats in Parliament for every 1m ballots cast, higher than any other major party in the past century. As a result, some argue that this was a shallow victory, even a hollow one. That goes too far.
It is true that Labour’s victory was as much the Conservatives’ defeat. The Conservative vote collapsed by 20 percentage points, the largest decline by any governing party in British political history. Voters abandoned the party in all directions—not just for Labour but for the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Green Party. (Plenty also stayed at home: fewer than three-fifths of eligible voters turned out to vote, the second-lowest turnout in the past century).
Yet the implication of voting for other parties—ie, a victory for Sir Keir—was clear before the election. The Conservatives themselves hammered home the message that a vote for Reform uk or the Liberal Democrats would result in a Labour “supermajority”. Voters plainly thought this was no bad thing. The Conservatives lived by first past the post, now they had to die by it.
England has been using first-past-the-post systems for centuries and exported to many of its former colonies, including the United States and Canada. It’s what we’re used to. But it’s not exactly democratic.
The election was clearly—and justly—a rejection of the Tories after years of poor governance. While the outcome was a Labour landslide, winning 412 of the 650 seats in the Commons (63.4%), they only received 33.8% of the votes.
CNN has this graphic:
CNN notes,
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 toward 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. Labour secured its landslide victory even as it won just about a third of the popular vote.
It works the other way, too. Here’s a different representation of the data from The Guardian:
Note how wildly the allocation of seats differs from the voting. Reform UK actually received considerably more votes than the Liberal Democrats, yet received only 5 seats to LP’s 72. Indeed, Sinn Féin, which received fewer votes than the delta between RUK and LP, got more seats than LP.
To be sure, this is a function of single-member districts as well as FPTP. But, unlike the US House, people are only nominally voting for their individual representative. Indeed, MPs are not required to live in their constituency and it’s quite common for senior members of a party to run for “safe” seats to which they have no personal connection. Voting for the Commons is more about selecting a Prime Minister than about one’s local MP.
