Labour's triumph, such as it was, was to maintain its coalition in a way that generated extremely efficient seat conversion. Which is a certain kind of triumph! But different from a crushing surge of votes that the seat counts would suggest.
Its kind of a weird one in that i think they grabbed more of the center from cons and SNP, but gave up some ground on the left but they ended up with a more efficient vote (greens/other, some shadow cabinet ministers got got etc.)
So you're telling me that Labor got more votes under Corbyn as a share and an absolute number than under Starmer?
W/o digging into minoritarian electoral rule here, I wonder if the fundamental reality that more PEOPLE turned out for Corbyn will ever be reflected in the British political wisdom?
or they'll just say "wow corbyn was a disaster, we should do starmerism forever" until they got voted out by a similarly disaffected populace next time?
I think it’s a bit more complicated than “Corbyn got more votes so he’s a stronger electoral path” but there is no question that Labour’s success this time was largely driven by factors outside its control (Reform drawing so many votes and the timing of this election after 14 years of Tory rule).
Also the absolute level of votes was influenced by turnout, which was itself influenced by the perception that the election’s result was a forgone conclusion.
Not sure that entirely follows. People and parties voted tactically against Corbyn/for Tories, tactically for Starmer/against Tories. That's probably not an accident on Starmer's part.
2017 and 2019 were also probably the exceptions in terms of Reform pulling votes, looking at UKIP votes too. Also targeting lots of seats vs safe seats is within labours control.
Similarly with timing, Tories called two early elections against Corbyn, presumably partially because they thought they could win. Then held on for almost a full term because they didn't.
Oh yea, 'entirely' being literal. Reform taking Tory votes wasn't 100% out of Starmer's control. Corbyn arguably united the right against himself, Starmer probably intentionally split it.
How much of the decline in participation is due to people knowing the outcome was a foregone conclusion? It's hard to infer the Labour support when people were confident it would be a wipeout so they may not have felt a pressing need to go to the polls.
when overturning a big majority like this, you'd put your limited resources deeper into Tory territory too, and to promote unfamiliar candidates. Meaning you'd spend less time getting the vote out in your safer seats. So you'd think there were easy wins in terms of vote count.
Labour’s share of the vote barely changes but they double their number of seats. FPTP is a wildly undemocratic way to run elections.
(Yes, this is today’s “hill I will die on”.)
FPTP in a parliamentary system has a few graces. In particular, it’s sensitive to small changes in voting patterns like this, meaning you can truly “kick the bums out” when they’re past their best before date.
But the fact remains that Labour have a huge parliamentary majority from a minority of the vote, making a massive parliamentary gain from the most paltry increase in actual votes and 66% of the didn’t vote for them. It’s not made less awful because the conservatives lost popularity.
Yup. It’s a good mechanism for accountability, if not representation.
But game out how the current vote share would look in an MMP system. Labour + LD doesn’t get you to 50%, so it’s either a minority government or a coalition with some small fry pulled from the “other” category.
Yes, a minority government or coalition government with independents or a third small party is what *should* happen. There is reason coalition governments are so frequent around the world in countries that use more democratic voting systems. It’s not in itself a bad thing.
I weight perfect representation a bit lower, and weight accountability a bit higher.
I think the process of mapping voter preferences to party platforms is a messy process anyway, so even if the government is representative of votes cast, it's still an imperfect representation of voter prefs.
I'll see your "FPTP is terrible" and add my flavour of "the /physical layout/ of the house of commons needs to change at the same time to support a fairer government" (my preference would be to move it out of London but I'd settle for rearranging the seating)
