British Labour’s election victory looks very unconvincing when we dig into the data

The UK General Election was held on Thursday, July 4, 2024 and the British Labour Party stormed home winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons to take a huge simple majority of 174 seats. The awful Tories were cleaned out well and truly and only managed 121 seats a loss overall of 251 seats. The Liberal Democrats improved their seat holding by 64 to end up with 72 (a rather dramatic reversal after they were shunned for siding with the Tories in past Parliaments). So for those who hate the Conservatives this was, on the face of it a huge win, surely. Not quite. In fact, despite the simple statistics above, Labour only gained a 1.7 per cent swing despite 14 years of shocking Tory rule, while the Tories endured a swing of 19.9 percentage points. In fact, the result highlighted the failed electoral system used in Britain – first past the post – when there are more than 2 parties involved, not to mention the demonstration of national apathy as captured by the 59.9 per cent turnout in the voluntary system, which was down by 7.4 percentage points on the last election. In other words, British Labour, despite all the hubris from the leadership actually performed pretty badly gaining 33.7 per cent of the 59.9 per cent who bothered to vote. And, into the bargain, their total vote dropped from 10,269,051 to 9,708,716. When considered in terms of the total registered voters then Labour was preferred by only 20.4 per cent. From the perspective of an outsider, these numbers are simply stunning and do not resonate with any reasonable concepts of representative government. The joker in the pack was, of course, the entry into the election of Reform UK, which effectively split the conservative vote and in this sort of electoral system grossly distorts the overall outcome. I conclude that British Labour can hardly claim to be in a safe position and less peope wanted them to govern than when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

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