Britain’s general election was its least representative ever
IT CAN SOUND like so much bleating from bad losers. Some members of the Conservative Party, which has dominated elections since the 19th century by mastering Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, do not much like being on the other end of a drubbing. Labour’s majority is a “mile wide and an inch deep”, grumbled Boris Johnson, a former prime minister. Other Tories gripe that there isn’t “any enthusiasm” for the party that just routed them in the general election on July 4th. The implication is that voters have handed Sir Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, a huge majority by accident.
On one level, this is nonsense. The rules of the game are clear. The aim, in FPTP, is to come first in as many constituencies as possible; votes for losing candidates do not count. Labour’s critics on the left, who carp that the party won more votes nationally under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, similarly struggle to grasp this basic fact.
Still, even by the standards of FPTP systems, this result was extraordinary. Labour won 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote; it garnered 42 seats for every 1m votes it received. The Liberal Democrats were similarly ruthless, taking 72 seats with just 12% of the vote. But what did Reform UK get for its 4.1m votes, almost 600,000 more than the Lib Dems? Five seats. Some 58% of voters backed a candidate who did not win; the average across post-war elections has been 47%.
By any measure, this was the least proportional result in British electoral history. According to the Gallagher index, which looks at the difference between vote share and seat share for each party, it comfortably beat previous records (see chart). Dylan Difford, a political scientist, calculates that the 2024 election was the least representative in an advanced Western democracy since the second world war, with the sole exception of the French legislative election of 1993.
The next election is unlikely to be quite as distorted. This result was driven by some unusual factors, most obviously the strength of the anti-Tory tide. One reason that so many people felt they could vote for Reform UK and the Greens may have been that they were comfortable with the idea of Labour being swept to power.
Yet the longer-term trend is clear: Britain’s electoral system is creaking as party loyalties fragment. In the 1950s the two main parties regularly won more than nine in ten votes. Since then, barring the odd election, their combined share has been in decline. This time smaller parties took a record 42% of the vote. Britain has become a de facto multi-party system.
One of the main advantages of a FPTP voting system is that it is meant to produce stable majority governments. But if party fragmentation is here to stay, as looks likely, Britain’s electoral system will exaggerate the volatility of voters by producing outsized changes in parties’ seat share, says Jess Garland of the Electoral Reform Society, a campaigning think-tank. Rather than stability, that may result in increasingly unpredictable outcomes. Politicians will also find it hard to persuade voters that they are being listened to if the voting system means that more and more of them are being ignored.
Is electoral reform likely? The public roundly rejected change when it was last offered, in a referendum in 2011 on whether to adopt the alternative-vote system. But since then support for proportional representation has increased from around a quarter of Britons to more than half. Other countries, faced with similar pressures, have changed voting systems: New Zealand, one of a handful of other countries that have used FPTP voting, switched to a proportional system in the 1990s. Britain’s bevy of smaller parties will now cheerlead for change of this sort.
None of this will matter much for as long as both Labour and the Tories oppose it. Sir Keir implied that he was keen on electoral reform when he campaigned for the Labour leadership in 2020. Strangely enough, his view has changed (just as Sir Tony Blair’s did after winning a similar landslide in 1997). But most Labour Party members have long been in favour. And it is less hard to imagine Labour or Tory politicians judging that they might be better off under a different system. In the short term, electoral reform is not on the cards. In the long run, it may be inevitable. ■
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