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Yep you're right. Can we now call British opinion centre-left? I have no idea.
Another interesting comparison:
Last election (2019) Greens + Labour got 34,9% (that's -6,1% compared to now).
Brexit party + conservatives got 45,2% (that's +7,2% compared to now).
Funny how such pretty small shifts have such gigantic consequences in Britain. And that's without even factoring in the large amount of tactical voting due to FPTP.
>And that's without even factoring in the large amount of tactical voting due to FPTP.
Actually, you see tactical voting at play all over the shop and that's why it makes limited sense to actually look at popular vote numbers.
Because if I'm leaning Labour, but I'm in a constituency where it's between Tories and Reform to get the top spot, I'll most likely be voting Tories. Similarly, if I'm leaning Tories but it's between SNP and Labour, I'll probably vote Labour. And so on, and obviously not everybody will be making the same tactical voting choice under these circumstances.
Really need to add Lib Dems to that tally for the centre left, in many regards their policies are left of Labour and there was quite a bit of tactical vote transfer between the two parties.
The parties are all neoliberal. People forget what real leftism is. Neither labor nor the greens really advertise for the reversal of privatization. So they all serve the private capital.
Guess who were the people voting no in 2011 when there were some ideas of changing it :D
To be fair it wasn't even close, but at least a few parts had 50%+ yes.
The first-past-the-post electoral system in the UK has benefitted the right for many decades if not more than a century. Now that the rightwing vote is split for the first time and the more left/centrist party benefits, of course, the media will now post graphs illustrating how unfair this is.
I'm sure we'll now see all sorts of easily digestible visual explanations of why it needs to change that were conspicuously absent for the century or so the same phenomenon has benefitted the right.
At least it looks like you're starting to move away from a de facto 2 party system (2.5 with the lib dems) - the first step towards better representation is probably a lot of voters angry the party they voted for got 10% of the vote and 1% of the seats. And following this you'd eventually need to stop considering a "hung parliament" a negative thing, they're perfectly normal in countries with healthy parliamentarism.
Don't hold your breath.
Labour has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform UK elections into a proportional system, and they'll squander it completely to hold short-term power instead. They might make sweeping policy reforms while in government, but they'll be completely undone by the next right wing government, starting the cycle anew.
The UK electorate will never be emancipated if they can help it.
They really should be looking at this vote share and considering how fragile it looks and how easily it could collapse next time and leave them in opposition again, but yeah they won’t.
That's the thing. The collapse of the Tories in this election shows how volatile things are that Labour cannot bank on a big majority holding over for future elections like it did in the 2000s. They either have to deliver massively for everyone everywhere, which is impossible in just five years imo, or they need to bring in PR. Otherwise we can probably expect a similarly insane swing at the next election from another small change in the vote.
With PR they could probably easily get a Labour-Libdem-Green majority, even if the major parties lose some votes to smaller ones.
Nevertheless even if Labour loses next time, so long as the system remains the UK probably remains in a Labour-Tory two party system and they'll either be the government or *the* opposition.
Can Labour even do that? Maybe a Brit can clarify, but I was under the impression that major changes like that basically have to be in the manifesto for them to be considered legitimate and have the people's mandate, otherwise the House of Lords will likely just stop it.
The HoL can't actually block bills, only send them back for reconsideration. Then the Commons can pass them again and that's it.
Britain also has no specific limits on what is required for major changes like that. Technically Starmer could abolish the monarchy day one and nothing would be stopping him.
To be confident in it going through, yes. Also, I think people forget that there is no consensus in the UK even amongst pro-PR people on which system to move to, and a top down decision on that would probably result in another AV referendum result.
Iirc, Labour basically said they don't want to make that a top down decision (which in fairness, was what the Libdems tried when they chose AV to be the flag bearer for electoral reform). The problem is, a lot of the English are still wary of electoral reform, and even amongst people who want electoral reform, no one agrees on the alternative, if it should be AMS or STV or Regional List, etc, and so trying to push a referendum now would probably still fail.
I wouldn't bet on it. A "winner takes all" electoral system always naturally trends towards two-party dominance as people try to find the least-worst candidate who is most likely to get elected rather than pick the one they actually want.
People don't want to feel like their vote has been wasted on a candidate who has no chance of winning.
Every voting systems has advantages and disadvantages. The UK government, due to its lack of party coalitions tends to be more stable and prodctive than proportional systems, for example.
Yeah it shouldn't be flawed towards both political sides, only yours political side should have the opportunity to exploit a system for decades, right? Always the same bullshits when the conservatives lose.
Can you guess which parties were against proportional representation? There was a referendum on this in 2011 - which to all intents and purposes was a trail run of misinformation for a certain referendum that came later.
One of the excuses is that PR delivers what the UK calls a "hung parliament" and is claimed that this is much more unstable than a PR elected government. Extensive evidence suggests otherwise.
The Tories ran on the slogan "One person, one vote" which is exactly what FPTP isn't. Actually if you go look at the parties which were for and against, UKIP were for for AV, Labour had no position and the Tories against.
As much of Reform are Tories, they can't complain - they had their chance at electoral reform in the past and don't campaign on it now.
BTW, the Senedd in Wales and the Scottish Parliament use PR.
I am at a loss on what im seeing and op title,
And again im at a loss on why reform has no seats even with 14% of the votes while labour doubled theirs.
Yes , it’s a bad system. Normally less erratic (normally) than proportional systems , but way less representative. The last decade or so has not been a great advert for its supposed stability though.
So we just ignore the people‘s will when we don’t like what those musky peasants wanna vote for? Sounds a lot like monarchy/dictatorship for me, but you do you.
It reflects the *plurality's* will, not the people's, not even the majority's.
This is the main issue with it. For example, the first constituency called last night, Labour won with just shy of 50% of the vote.
So that constituency has a Labour MP. But 50% of the constituents never voted for her, which means that half of that constituency has no representation in parliament.
So it's a very unrepresentative system. Very much "tyranny of the minority" in real terms, like the US system.
I mean, it was the people's will to exit the EU by a very slim margin. If the parliament was actually proportionate, that wouldn't have happened because they required a 2/3 majority. But FPTP fucked the entire UK on that front
No, but the government was elected on a FPTP basis, if they weren't and it was proportional representation, they wouldn't have been able to pass Brexit through parliament
It produces strong governments and prevents coalitions and fractioning of parliament. It is a terrible system for reflecting what the people actually think, but has advantages in that it prevents the kind of chaos you're seeing in Germany and France.
Edit: to elaborate on what I mean: I’m not speaking about the perceived or real quality of government action. What FPTP avoids is a fractioning of parliament into potentially dozens of special interest groups that tends to produce governments paralysed by infighting and watered-down and contradictory compromise politics. That either system can produce bad governance for many other reasons is obvious. FPTP also risks lower popular acceptance rates because so many votes end up unrepresented.
It would actually be quite dissastrous for us yes. I can not imagine how far would Russia get to by now if there was actually not atleast one strong country with decisive political system in it that actually can do more than pathetic reactionary politics decade later than needed.
>It produces strong governments and prevents coalitions and fractioning of parliament.
That's an incredibly shortsighted view of it. The reality is that it creates parties within parties, and the entire country is held hostage to internal rivalries. All of the political chaos in the UK is the result of a civil war within the Conservative party.
Yet when US needs to do something it does it. And it does it fast. It was seen towards reaction with Russia for example but even with covid. You can think whatever you want about the policies and agree/disagree but reality is that yes they happen fast and they are actually not fragile.
Germany had 4 heads of government within the last 40 years. So as many as the UK in the last 5. But you also would have voted for Cameron to stave off chaos with Ed Miliband.
>but has advantages in that it prevents the kind of chaos
A yes, the US and the UK have been famous for avoiding any political chaos in the last decade thanks to their voting system.
This is not what he means. What he means is that policies are put into motion by the ruling party. You maay disagree with them or agree with them but things just happen. There is no endless debate and status quo to be kept until all sides are appeased/bribed. There is no last minute reactionary politics that comes decade too late.
Thats what the 5% rule is for. Only Parties who gain more than 5% of the total vote will Join the Bundestag and therefore have the possibility of forming a government. So in your Case, it would be five Parties. Sounds oretty okay, dont you think?
It's not *that* bad. It means we have a centre left party with a solid majority who can get things done for five years. Under PR we'd have a labour/libdem alliance with a thin majority against a conservative/reform coalition.
Much more political energy would be spent managing coalitions and party discipline and less would be spent on legislation.
FPTP encourages centrism as any party that wants to win seats (as opposed to vote share) has to have broad appeal.
It avoids all the drama currently underway in Italy, France and Germany. The effect of extremist minor parties is to shift the policies of major parties, not the politics of government.
However, if the major parties can't continue to maintain broad appeal, and more and more of the vote goes to minor parties, then the system starts to break down and becomes too unrepresentative.
Also, FPTP was designed when political opinion often aligned with geography - an industrial town, a market town, a coastal area etc. would vote according to the jobs and lifestyles that were broadly shared. That's less and less true in modern Britain.
France is a terrible counter example, their system is made to favour centre parties as well. The first round allows you to pick the party you favour, the second has you pick the least bad out of the usually two options. It's just that people are voting massively against the centre now because they've been in power for the last decade.
Since 1958 (so for the whole 5th republic), centrists parties have had a majority twice in the parliament in France (absolute in 2017 and relative in 2022); otherwise, they have at best been in coalition with a relative to absolute majority right wing party (Gaullists and inheritors) or in the opposition (baring a few center-left parties) in a left wing dominated parliament (either absolute majority socialists, or relative majority socialist allied with communists and greens)
I respectfully disagree. For starters the coalition would likely be Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP, giving them a very sizeable majority. Secondly, every European country has PR and manages coalitions. Under FPTP you either have to manage a coalition in your own party or a formal coalition. The UK has also had a coalition under FPTP.
Thirdly, PR encourages less extreme government because your coalition partners will not tolerate it. That why populists far poorly when they get into government in PR countries because they can't shoot migrants and this upsets their base.
So as I said, I disagree. FPTP provides a strong government (sometimes) that has the power to do what few people want. Nothing more.
>It's not *that* bad. It means we have a centre left party with a solid majority who can get things done for five years. Under PR we'd have a labour/libdem alliance with a thin majority against a conservative/reform coalition
No, it really is *that* bad. Under PR you'd have a government that needs to make compromises at all times, running a centrist course in practice by necessity, representing a broad cross-section of voters. Compromise is *good* for the functioning of society.
>Much more political energy would be spent managing coalitions and party discipline and less would be spent on legislation.
The past decade of civil war within both the Conservative party and the Labour party wants a word with you. The Conservatives just went through ***five*** different PM's because their internal factions couldn't stop fighting each other.
>FPTP encourages centrism as any party that wants to win seats (as opposed to vote share) has to have broad appeal.
It doesn't. It's the exact opposite. FPTP lets extremists keep everyone hostage by threatening to split the vote. That's exactly what old UKIP and now Reform did. Parties under FPTP do not need broad appeal; they need to split the opposition and keep election participation low. Both strategies are more effective under FPTP than actual campaigning.
>However, if the major parties can't continue to maintain broad appeal, and more and more of the vote goes to minor parties, then the system starts to break down and becomes too unrepresentative.
That's the idea. That's exactly why the system was set up this way in the first place, by the English upper class who wanted to make absolutely certain that no one could take their power from them. It is ***unrepresentative by design***. Always has been.
>Also, FPTP was designed when political opinion often aligned with geography - an industrial town, a market town, a coastal area etc. would vote according to the jobs and lifestyles that were broadly shared. That's less and less true in modern Britain.
Eh, no. FPTP was set up with rich land owners in mind, who'd be the only ones with the means to even run for office. What you're bringing up is a popular fantasy of local identity that was never a consideration in how UK elections are set up but which keeps the peasants divided and occupied while their betters pillage the country.
I have to disagree with you how many UK constituents have been disenfranchised like up to 70% on a 4 party horse race the 1st past the post only got 30%
Imagine we shifted to AV or similar here though - you'd just end up with a ton of people voting conservative again which would have resulted in a win for Sunak, arguably one of the least popular British PMs (and leader of an astonishingly unpopular government) of all time.
I'd argue a lot of former conservative voters knew this was going to happen when they shifted allegiances to Reform. The Conservatives majored on the message that a vote for Reform us a vote for Labour. Everybody understands how FPTP works yet we are still here. Struggle to believe how that doesn't represent the will of the people: a large minority genuinely pro Labour, about the same amount again just didn't want the Tories to continue.
Extrapolating that out to saying they actually wanted a Reform win is a stretch in my opinion - the number of people who actually believe that Farage would make a good leader is far less than 15%. The only way to get a true vision of what the UK would look like under PR is to have a PR election.
Wait until you see their constitution. You’ll never meet a country so happy to be ruled so openly by geriatric aristocrats. Like for fuck sake, they have a House of Lords from their pure blood families that are just allowed to tell the country how to live.
Edit. Downvotes are mad considering what I’ve said is correct. Also, the UK had no constitution
It gets even more confusing when you realise the House of Lords pushed back against some of the worst policies put forward by the last Government.
I went from “fuck the HoL” to “thank goodness for the HoL”. A group comprised largely of geriatric aristocrats highlighted how devoid of morals/competence/scruples the last government was.
They're supposed to hold the government to account and ask questions to make them reconsider,
> [A high-profile example under the Labour government occurred in 2006, when the House of Lords repeatedly voted against compulsory ID cards. The government chose to delay the implementation of ID cards until after the 2010 election. That election resulted in a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, which went on to scrap ID cards.](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/explainers/what-does-house-lords-do)
Obviously that example is kinda rubbish now, considering the conservative government brought in voter ID themselves later on. But it was an unpopular idea and the House of Lords at the time prevented it from coming through.
Sometimes I like the idea of a group of people who don't have to be loyal to any one party and who might actually, as a result, have more of a heart because they don't have to win over any insane racists to stay relevant. But on the other hand I also don't like unelected, especially when it's a group of fancy families who typically don't relate to us lessers and our plights.
Honestly if they gave everyone a free ID card at 16 and allowed renewals for free for low income people and it was only once 10 years like other ID, nothing. I don't have a problem with it. I dislike that we only have driving licenses (some people are disqualified) or passports (stupid book I don't want to carry, expensive).
Why? You are voting for someone to represent where you live at the national government
What is problematic there.
If town A candidate got 75% of the vote in Town A should they not get to represent their area because nationally they did not achieve enough to be proportional?
The problem is when the winner gets about 40% of the vote in Town A with the rest split between the other parties. You end up with a winner who most people didn't vote for.
Its still the candidate the most people agreed upon though, thus they are eligible to represent the will of the most people out of all the candidates. (Not that politicians actually represent the will but w/e).
From my limited understanding MPs have regions they represent and if every region has 40% party A, 30% party B and 30% party C then parliament will be entirely made from party A despite 60% voting for different parties.
So seats are not based on:
-Nb of votes obtained per party
-population density in each regions
But are based on a flat nb of seats attributed to the running majority of each regions?
I started reading the wiki and im not better off than before i started :)
It’s simple. The country is divided into districts called constituencies, each has about 70k voters. The person who gets the largest number of votes in each constituency becomes the MP for that constituency — it could be 70%, it could be 25%, as long as nobody else gets more.
It’s also the same as US congressional elections, and parliamentary elections in places like Canada.
It’s like the French parliament if there was only the first round and the highest vote getter just got in.
There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so Britain is divided into 650 different constituencies. In each constituency whoever gets the most votes wins that seat outright - that's what's called a first past the post system, the winner takes all regardless of how much they won by. There's no second round or anything so candidates can win with less than 50% as long as they got more votes than any other individual candidate. This means a party doesn't need an actual majority of votes to win, they only need a plurality in a majority of constituencies.
So while Labour got 34% of the total number of votes in the whole country, they ended up being the party that got the most votes in 64% of these 650 constituencies. Meanwhile smaller parties like Reform or the Greens got a lot more votes than seats won because there are only very few places where their candidates ended up being the most popular of all.
Edit: I see you're French so imagine if instead of going into a second round your legislative elections had been done last Sunday. You would then have the National Rally win 297 seats (51%) because they were first party in those districts, even with only 33% of the total vote.
Difficult to speculate about since a different system would change people's voting patterns. For the same reasons my French FPTP example wouldn't actually be like that if they did have FPTP because parties would be organised differently and people wouldn't vote the same way.
Personally I think a more viable system if you really want to have one-member constituencies is some type of immediate run-off voting like they do in Australia though, two-round elections seem to me like an easy way to get voter fatigue and low turnout in one or both rounds.
I think they are somewhat based on population density but the system don't care about number of votes. What is good about the system is making MPs tied to a region which they got elected in and makes politicians more accountable in my opinion. The downside is proportionally the nation as whole is not represented.
There's 650 seats. Each seat has its own winner takes all election for a seat in parliament. There is no national vote. Parliament then assembles and votes in a Prime Minister from their ranks who forms a government to fill the executive cabinet.
What this means is if a party has their votes spread out across 650 seats, they could get millions of votes but not actually reach a threshold to win any of them. That's what happens with reform, basically.
Similarly a party can get very few votes on a national scale but if they're highly concentrated in particular areas they could win all the seats in those areas. That's how regional parties like Plaid Cymru or the SNP can get more seats than parties with 10-20x their votes nationally.
I'll explain it by using a very small country with 3 seats, one seat for each constituent, each with 11 people voting in each constituent. First constituent has 6 votes for party A and 5 votes for party B, making party A being their representative. Second constituent also has 6 votes for party A and 5 for party B, so party A also their representative. The third constituent has all 11 votes for party B, with them obviously being the representative.
In the end, party A are the ones who will lead the country, as they have the majority of seats, even though party B had more votes in total, with 21 votes, with party A only having 12.
For the UK, we just scale those two up, the amount of seats, and amount of voters in each constituent. Some of the constituents will have more voters than others, but they have boundaries set where they should be within 5% of 73,393 voters (with a few exceptions).
Reform has 4 seats and about 4 million votes, plaid cymru also has 4 seats with 200 thousand votes and the greens also have 4 seats but 1.9 million votes. It’s the fptp system, 1 vote doesn’t have the same weight/power depending on where you live. It’s very unfair and favours big parties. That’s why the only 2 possibilities for prime ministers and government are labour and conservatives.
how does the electorate define how a candidate is "better" than another if not according to votes? because according to votes 14% of Uk population defined the rightwingers as "better" than the other,
If votes obtained by a party does not give proportional seats => how does it work was my initial question
Because they were not better in each seat that they won? Just meh popularity throughout the country. Should we give consolation seats to losers? Or should a region be represented by someone who did not win? That also sounds stupid.
In essence there is no national vote. Each electoral district votes their own representative to send to parliament.
The way the system works it disregards the national view entirely. In essence the UK parliament works more like in various bichamberal systems where the upper house represents regions, not people. Each MP is tied to a specific region/district where they won their majority.
That said, one could still validate it more with a different voting system than first past the post by e.g. by forcing an absolute majority via runoffs or ranked voting.
In the individual constituencies.
If a candidate can't win the majority in their riding, they don't deserve the seat, correct?
So it doesn't matter if the reform candidate got 15,000 vote if the Labour Candidate got more.
Percentage share doesn't mean anything in the UK system as you are voting for your local candidate to represent your area and whoever gets the majority wins.
The US system is similarly flawed aswell making it incredibly difficult for anyone outside of the two largest parties to get any power.
Faux democracies where parties get much larger or smaller representation than their actual support amongst the voters.
Ha, who says we don’t mind it? There is massive discontentment over it here, but we have no choice because it works in favour of the two main parties.
The Lib Dems briefly had a chance to change things during the coalition - they opted for AV rather than PR then did a piss poor job of explaining it to people and the referendum sunk without a trace.
People do hate it. Issue is it either works really well for you or really well against you, except the people it works well for are the only ones with the power to change it. Why would Labour want to actively want to reduce their own power so significantly?
For me I like that Reform only get 4 seats, it keeps fringe extreme parties out there. It's not fair but it works for me.
To get rid of it will require the most selfless suicidal act of the government in power, which isn't likely to happen.
Or perhaps not; UK and Irish general elections have pretty similar turnouts under two completely different electoral systems. It doesn't feel like FPTP vs PR would make much difference to turnout.
to improve representation of people's interests.
The UK system is based on tradition where representatives needed to be send somewhere far away to do their jobs. Communities were tied knit by necessity.
In the modern world people are more national/global, hence are not necessarily tied to their local community but still want their voice heard.
That is why plenty of parliamentary democracies have a different approach that balances the local majorities with the national representation.
So the 14% of Reform MPs can just be Nigel's friends with no concerns about local distribution?
If they want the seats, they have to beat the leading candidate.
Yeah except now 14% of votes have been thrown in the trash. MMP has a party vote and a candidate vote. This way both your candidate can get in if they get enough votes and a party that gets 14% of the party vote will still get roughly 14% representation.
They haven't been thrown in the trash - they lost, that's the result.
If a bill is opposed by 45% of the parliament, does 45% of the opposition's ideas get included in the final bill?
The Parties don't mind this because they benefit from it one way or another. Labour inevitably will not fix much and Tories will come back and sweep the field in the next election with barely 35% of the votes.
The people however should not tolerate this extremely dysfunctional system which barely reflects people's will, yet no one in the UK (and Australia and Canada, and some others) seems to mind that a party can win 2/3 of the seats with only 1/3 of the votes. I find that bewildering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallagher_index#Countries
This represents very weak mandate which fuels instability.
I understand that the parties don't mind this. (We have a similar disproportionate system in my small country as well.)
Question is, what can a voter do, other than voting here or there?
That's fair, but a larger share of votes went from conservatives to reform than it did to those parties, I think.
Compared to last election:
12% shift to reform (if we compare to Brexit party vote share from last election).
Only 6,8% to labour/libdem/green.
So there's a lot of sour conservatives that want more populist government than there's critical conservatives that went left/centre instead.
Sure, but your original point seemed to imply the country voted for the right overall - that's not actually true, the country voted left of Tories + Reform overall, by quite a big margin.
If you're going to apply the logic of spread-out vote to the right, you need to apply it to the left too, otherwise it's comparing apples to oranges.
The Lib Dems and Greens have always split the more left leaning votes while the Tories have often been the only right wing party with any popularity/credibility. So we could just as easily say that Labour + Lib Dem + Green = 53% of votes and this a rather stonking left leaning mandate.
This is just Tories getting a big gulp of their own medicine. Good riddance.
But yes our political system is a mess and needs changing. I voted for AV back in 2011, it's a shame that our country wasn't ready for any form of proportional representation. Personally I'm just going to enjoy things working out for the best this time around.
Just in case we needed any more proof that FPTP is a terrible system.
As it stands:
- labour has 410 seats with 9.6 million votes
- libdems have 71 seats with 3.4 million votes
- snp 9 seats with 685 thousand votes
- reform 4 seats with 4 million votes
- greens 4 seats with 1.9 million votes
- plaid cymru 4 seats with 194 thousand votes
Make it make sense. And some people still think FPTP is a good and fair system.
[source here](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jul/04/uk-general-election-results-2024-live-in-full)
As usual with fptp systems there's an overwhelming parliamentary majority based on roughly one third of the roughly 60% of the electorate that even bothered to show up to vote.
Don't get me wrong, Keir Starmer seems like a much better option than any of the parade of clowns the conservatives have moved through the position of PM over the last decade, but the basis for his election remains flawed in my opinion.
I can see SOME merit of FPTP conceptually, maybe when elections were much more localised like 100 years ago, but reality is that it’s ridiculous today. Country wide vote share should be as close to seats share as possible.
First past the post is a terribly undemocratic system and shouldnt exist anymore in this day and age.
I mean i am personally glad that reforms 14 percent of the vote leads to fuck all representation, but thats not how democracy should work.
Hey OP, so you only group the ones on the right but not the ones on the left?
If you add Labor + Liberal Democrats + Greens.. what’s the percentage you get?
It’s quite bigger than Conservatives + Reform, isn’t it sir?
The Uk and France have quite terrible electoral systems. I don't understand how in this day and age you can justify not having a single-turn proportional system.
It's good the conservatives have lost, as since Thatcher, they have been turning the Uk into a third world corpocracy, selling the UK to the indecently wealthy and the private interests, but still, in a representative democracy, the parliament should be composed exactly of what people voted for, otherwise it isn't representative.
I would prefer a system where you vote for two parties, your first option being in priority but if they fail to reach the support needed to gain any seats then your vote would go to your second pick, if you have one.
It would take slightly longer to count as any vote cast on parties that dont gain seats will need to be recounted and readjusted but It would help smaller parties that people might choose to not vote for because it might be a wasted vote and therefore would strengthen the democracy as people would dare to vote for parties that align closest to them rather than vote out of tactics for parties that are in their eyes the least bad.
Results should obviously also be proportional, no fptp or electoral system.
why not a simple system where you have 15% of the seats if you hit 15% of votes.
If you have 1% you still have 1 seat. Make it 1000 seats so 1% still get 10 seats.
England and UK is taking the very route France did. Right-wing centrists coming to power (Macron) and enforcing policies that empower the right and popular with them and then go to left-wing voters and use fear-mongering of what would happen if far-right came to power to get votes.
But Greens did a lot better than many expected them to and so did Independents, it does give small glimmer of hope that over time more and more left-wing voters will switch over from Labour There's also the "get the Torries out at all cost" voters who simply voted Labour for that purpose. There very likely will be more switching for left-wing voters by the next general election when they see Starmerism is very similar to the Torries.
Remember when conservatives needed to form a coalition with the LibDems and one of the terms was that they would remove FPTP, and then they completely reneged on it when they no longer needed them. Hahaha
Tbf, the right wing vote split. A lot of older people voted for Reform than young people. The split meant that Labour had the plurality so ironically Reform helped Labour by pulling Tory voters to them. Some seats were very close and there had to be tactical voting on both sides but the ones to the left did better than the ones of the right in that regard.
The UK also has no written constitution so the parliament could theoretically pass whatever law they like and the courts can't do anything about it.
Edit: comments are locked, so I will reply to the comment below here. u/pox123456
That's the point. They can pass whatever law they like with a simple majority whereas in other countries you need a super majority. And even constitutional amendments may be subjectcto judicial review and struck down. That's the case in Germany, for example.
LibDems have decided that if the others don't want proportional representation, then they're just going to start it already at least for their own party
Labour will portray this as extreme win, but I think that they did not gain trust of voters. Corbyn managed to gain very similar amount of votes in 2019 against Boris, who was as his peak before brexit. Starmer barely managed to gain votes, while Torries were literally destroying themselves. I am quite certain that Corbyn (or any Labour leader) would achieve a landslide. This is not 1997 Tony Blair booming shift to Labour votes.
Hopefully he sees the writing on the wall and backs PR just out of pure self interest, would really rather not have a reformed Tory party win a landslide majority on 40% of the vote next time and stay in power for another 10+ years thanks. Defeating them with a left/centrist coalition is possible under PR and probably would’ve happened here, defeating a unified Tory party under FPTP probably isn’t
Can someone explain to me how the Conservatives could possibly have convinced 1 in 4 of British voters to vote for them given how indescribably calamitous they've been for the last few years?
After years and years of this shitshow, 38% voted again Tories and Reform.
4/10 British voters wanted more of the same or even worse Brexit-related lunacy. Insane!
Context for my European friends: This is not a shift to the left. When polled only about 5-10% voted for Labour based on their policy. 45-50% (By far the largest portion) voted to "Kick the Tories out"
Vote percentage is 34%. Conservatives on 24% and Reform on 14%. The UK is still trending to the Centre/ Centre Right (Mainly due to immigration concerns), Labours election and Reforms rise is a result of Conservative failure to actually govern as Conservatives. Their attempts to appease the far left has resulted in their destruction tonight.
Frankly, if Reform weren't putting up the dregs of the political landscape for election then they might have been able to make more inroads with seats. Their party is full of populists and borderline racists, and this shows in the number of seats they have returned. They only have a bumper vote share by their standards because they stood loads of candidates in areas where it's easy to rake in a few thousand votes by standing on a plinth and shouting 'Common sense! No to wokery! Stop the boats!" It's easy to make gains in those areas, but it's not easy to win the seats outright. That's why so many of their votes are disproportionately represented here; they are protest votes.
The Liberal Democrats tend to win seats in areas that are more politically discerning and who have a history of making politicians work for their votes. They've been doing this for a lifetime and are very good at it. It would be carnage if any old populist party could turn up, shout a load of nonsense, take 80 seats and upend the political order.
So what? They got 38% together which is nowhere near the 50% needed to form a government in a representative parliamentary system either. And that's assuming they would even be able to agree on the politics in the first place.
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Green + Labour beat Conservative + Reform by 3 percentage points.
Labour + Lib dem + Greens have a majority (53%), in a country without first past the post, they'd probably form the government coalition.
Yep you're right. Can we now call British opinion centre-left? I have no idea. Another interesting comparison: Last election (2019) Greens + Labour got 34,9% (that's -6,1% compared to now). Brexit party + conservatives got 45,2% (that's +7,2% compared to now). Funny how such pretty small shifts have such gigantic consequences in Britain. And that's without even factoring in the large amount of tactical voting due to FPTP.
>And that's without even factoring in the large amount of tactical voting due to FPTP. Actually, you see tactical voting at play all over the shop and that's why it makes limited sense to actually look at popular vote numbers. Because if I'm leaning Labour, but I'm in a constituency where it's between Tories and Reform to get the top spot, I'll most likely be voting Tories. Similarly, if I'm leaning Tories but it's between SNP and Labour, I'll probably vote Labour. And so on, and obviously not everybody will be making the same tactical voting choice under these circumstances.
If you vote blank, how does that factor in?
As an enabler to the biggest candidate
I mean, Labour + Greens + SNP + Sinn Féin + Plaid still beats the Tories + Reform UK + DUP.
Really need to add Lib Dems to that tally for the centre left, in many regards their policies are left of Labour and there was quite a bit of tactical vote transfer between the two parties.
The parties are all neoliberal. People forget what real leftism is. Neither labor nor the greens really advertise for the reversal of privatization. So they all serve the private capital.
not all leftist parties are communist thou ;)
Lib Dems are definitely more on the Labour side than the Conservative side too, so you could add them into the equation too.
Very healthy electoral system!
Guess who were the people voting no in 2011 when there were some ideas of changing it :D To be fair it wasn't even close, but at least a few parts had 50%+ yes.
The first-past-the-post electoral system in the UK has benefitted the right for many decades if not more than a century. Now that the rightwing vote is split for the first time and the more left/centrist party benefits, of course, the media will now post graphs illustrating how unfair this is. I'm sure we'll now see all sorts of easily digestible visual explanations of why it needs to change that were conspicuously absent for the century or so the same phenomenon has benefitted the right.
AV≠PR. The Tories might have done somewhat better under AV, but only if Reform voters cared enough about them to put them as their second vote.
At least it looks like you're starting to move away from a de facto 2 party system (2.5 with the lib dems) - the first step towards better representation is probably a lot of voters angry the party they voted for got 10% of the vote and 1% of the seats. And following this you'd eventually need to stop considering a "hung parliament" a negative thing, they're perfectly normal in countries with healthy parliamentarism.
Don't hold your breath. Labour has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform UK elections into a proportional system, and they'll squander it completely to hold short-term power instead. They might make sweeping policy reforms while in government, but they'll be completely undone by the next right wing government, starting the cycle anew. The UK electorate will never be emancipated if they can help it.
They really should be looking at this vote share and considering how fragile it looks and how easily it could collapse next time and leave them in opposition again, but yeah they won’t.
That's the thing. The collapse of the Tories in this election shows how volatile things are that Labour cannot bank on a big majority holding over for future elections like it did in the 2000s. They either have to deliver massively for everyone everywhere, which is impossible in just five years imo, or they need to bring in PR. Otherwise we can probably expect a similarly insane swing at the next election from another small change in the vote.
With PR they could probably easily get a Labour-Libdem-Green majority, even if the major parties lose some votes to smaller ones. Nevertheless even if Labour loses next time, so long as the system remains the UK probably remains in a Labour-Tory two party system and they'll either be the government or *the* opposition.
Can Labour even do that? Maybe a Brit can clarify, but I was under the impression that major changes like that basically have to be in the manifesto for them to be considered legitimate and have the people's mandate, otherwise the House of Lords will likely just stop it.
The HoL can't actually block bills, only send them back for reconsideration. Then the Commons can pass them again and that's it. Britain also has no specific limits on what is required for major changes like that. Technically Starmer could abolish the monarchy day one and nothing would be stopping him.
To be confident in it going through, yes. Also, I think people forget that there is no consensus in the UK even amongst pro-PR people on which system to move to, and a top down decision on that would probably result in another AV referendum result.
UK Labour will maintain what ever system to help it
Iirc, Labour basically said they don't want to make that a top down decision (which in fairness, was what the Libdems tried when they chose AV to be the flag bearer for electoral reform). The problem is, a lot of the English are still wary of electoral reform, and even amongst people who want electoral reform, no one agrees on the alternative, if it should be AMS or STV or Regional List, etc, and so trying to push a referendum now would probably still fail.
I wouldn't bet on it. A "winner takes all" electoral system always naturally trends towards two-party dominance as people try to find the least-worst candidate who is most likely to get elected rather than pick the one they actually want. People don't want to feel like their vote has been wasted on a candidate who has no chance of winning.
Every voting systems has advantages and disadvantages. The UK government, due to its lack of party coalitions tends to be more stable and prodctive than proportional systems, for example.
"Stable and productive" is honestly not the words i would use to describe Britain in the last 8 years...
Yeah it shouldn't be flawed towards both political sides, only yours political side should have the opportunity to exploit a system for decades, right? Always the same bullshits when the conservatives lose.
Unironically yes.
Can you guess which parties were against proportional representation? There was a referendum on this in 2011 - which to all intents and purposes was a trail run of misinformation for a certain referendum that came later. One of the excuses is that PR delivers what the UK calls a "hung parliament" and is claimed that this is much more unstable than a PR elected government. Extensive evidence suggests otherwise. The Tories ran on the slogan "One person, one vote" which is exactly what FPTP isn't. Actually if you go look at the parties which were for and against, UKIP were for for AV, Labour had no position and the Tories against. As much of Reform are Tories, they can't complain - they had their chance at electoral reform in the past and don't campaign on it now. BTW, the Senedd in Wales and the Scottish Parliament use PR.
That referendum was for AV, and not PR. AV was not a decent solution.
AV is a form of PR. Agreed that AV is probably the worse PR system there is.
Which is primarily the reason it was the version offered.
I am at a loss on what im seeing and op title, And again im at a loss on why reform has no seats even with 14% of the votes while labour doubled theirs.
It's a consequence of First Past The Post voting. Win lots of small races by a tiny margin and end up with a huge victory overall.
Holy shit what a bad system
Yes , it’s a bad system. Normally less erratic (normally) than proportional systems , but way less representative. The last decade or so has not been a great advert for its supposed stability though.
It's bad only if you want your election results to reflect the people's will. Great system when the people's will is fucking dumb.
I don't see how the system is working great in the US
So we just ignore the people‘s will when we don’t like what those musky peasants wanna vote for? Sounds a lot like monarchy/dictatorship for me, but you do you.
Well tbf it’s literally a monarchy for unrelated reasons
The country is a monarchy dumbass
Constitutional monarchy* Important distinction for those who don't understand the difference between Constitutional and Absolute monarchies
Still a monarchy, the difference is miniscule
Quite a large difference between a monarchy where the monarch runs the country with little checks vs the gov does
Swap the crown to funneling bilions in to politician pockets and it stays roughly the same and peasants get some more drama to witness
I never said I support the system as a whole. I only support it when it favors my ideology. Dictatorship is great when it's my guy in power.
It reflects the *plurality's* will, not the people's, not even the majority's. This is the main issue with it. For example, the first constituency called last night, Labour won with just shy of 50% of the vote. So that constituency has a Labour MP. But 50% of the constituents never voted for her, which means that half of that constituency has no representation in parliament. So it's a very unrepresentative system. Very much "tyranny of the minority" in real terms, like the US system.
I mean, it was the people's will to exit the EU by a very slim margin. If the parliament was actually proportionate, that wouldn't have happened because they required a 2/3 majority. But FPTP fucked the entire UK on that front
The Brexit referendum did not involve FPTP.
No, but the government was elected on a FPTP basis, if they weren't and it was proportional representation, they wouldn't have been able to pass Brexit through parliament
It produces strong governments and prevents coalitions and fractioning of parliament. It is a terrible system for reflecting what the people actually think, but has advantages in that it prevents the kind of chaos you're seeing in Germany and France. Edit: to elaborate on what I mean: I’m not speaking about the perceived or real quality of government action. What FPTP avoids is a fractioning of parliament into potentially dozens of special interest groups that tends to produce governments paralysed by infighting and watered-down and contradictory compromise politics. That either system can produce bad governance for many other reasons is obvious. FPTP also risks lower popular acceptance rates because so many votes end up unrepresented.
France also has FPTP (but with two rounds)
The UK and the US have had their fair share of chaos the last decade I would say
Right. The UK and the US really dodged a bullet there. Imagine their political system being as chaotic as Germany's. Unimaginable!
🤣🤣🤣
It would actually be quite dissastrous for us yes. I can not imagine how far would Russia get to by now if there was actually not atleast one strong country with decisive political system in it that actually can do more than pathetic reactionary politics decade later than needed.
>It produces strong governments and prevents coalitions and fractioning of parliament. That's an incredibly shortsighted view of it. The reality is that it creates parties within parties, and the entire country is held hostage to internal rivalries. All of the political chaos in the UK is the result of a civil war within the Conservative party.
Yet when US needs to do something it does it. And it does it fast. It was seen towards reaction with Russia for example but even with covid. You can think whatever you want about the policies and agree/disagree but reality is that yes they happen fast and they are actually not fragile.
Germany had 4 heads of government within the last 40 years. So as many as the UK in the last 5. But you also would have voted for Cameron to stave off chaos with Ed Miliband.
> has advantages in that it prevents the kind of chaos So what is it we have witnessed the last 14 years?
Stability with Cameron instead of Chaos with Ed Miliband of course!
>but has advantages in that it prevents the kind of chaos A yes, the US and the UK have been famous for avoiding any political chaos in the last decade thanks to their voting system.
This is not what he means. What he means is that policies are put into motion by the ruling party. You maay disagree with them or agree with them but things just happen. There is no endless debate and status quo to be kept until all sides are appeased/bribed. There is no last minute reactionary politics that comes decade too late.
> it prevents the kind of chaos Huh? Have you been living under a rock? The UK has been a complete mess and chaos for the past 10 years
Thats what the 5% rule is for. Only Parties who gain more than 5% of the total vote will Join the Bundestag and therefore have the possibility of forming a government. So in your Case, it would be five Parties. Sounds oretty okay, dont you think?
> Prevents the kind of chaos you‘re seeing in Germany What chaos?
Like uh... Suddenly and against literally all reason deciding to quit the EU?
That, ironically, was decided by proportional representation :p.
Yes but the law says that 2/3rd of parliament had to agree to Brexit, which is not at all representative of popular opinion on Brexit at the timd
Ah yes the utter chaos in Germany and France compared to the stability in the UK
France is hybrid-FPTP but with two rounds. It's not proportional.
You are right and speak the voice of reason, so obviously a lot of people will be provoked by this.
It's not *that* bad. It means we have a centre left party with a solid majority who can get things done for five years. Under PR we'd have a labour/libdem alliance with a thin majority against a conservative/reform coalition. Much more political energy would be spent managing coalitions and party discipline and less would be spent on legislation. FPTP encourages centrism as any party that wants to win seats (as opposed to vote share) has to have broad appeal. It avoids all the drama currently underway in Italy, France and Germany. The effect of extremist minor parties is to shift the policies of major parties, not the politics of government. However, if the major parties can't continue to maintain broad appeal, and more and more of the vote goes to minor parties, then the system starts to break down and becomes too unrepresentative. Also, FPTP was designed when political opinion often aligned with geography - an industrial town, a market town, a coastal area etc. would vote according to the jobs and lifestyles that were broadly shared. That's less and less true in modern Britain.
France is a terrible counter example, their system is made to favour centre parties as well. The first round allows you to pick the party you favour, the second has you pick the least bad out of the usually two options. It's just that people are voting massively against the centre now because they've been in power for the last decade.
Since 1958 (so for the whole 5th republic), centrists parties have had a majority twice in the parliament in France (absolute in 2017 and relative in 2022); otherwise, they have at best been in coalition with a relative to absolute majority right wing party (Gaullists and inheritors) or in the opposition (baring a few center-left parties) in a left wing dominated parliament (either absolute majority socialists, or relative majority socialist allied with communists and greens)
I respectfully disagree. For starters the coalition would likely be Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP, giving them a very sizeable majority. Secondly, every European country has PR and manages coalitions. Under FPTP you either have to manage a coalition in your own party or a formal coalition. The UK has also had a coalition under FPTP. Thirdly, PR encourages less extreme government because your coalition partners will not tolerate it. That why populists far poorly when they get into government in PR countries because they can't shoot migrants and this upsets their base. So as I said, I disagree. FPTP provides a strong government (sometimes) that has the power to do what few people want. Nothing more.
>It's not *that* bad. It means we have a centre left party with a solid majority who can get things done for five years. Under PR we'd have a labour/libdem alliance with a thin majority against a conservative/reform coalition No, it really is *that* bad. Under PR you'd have a government that needs to make compromises at all times, running a centrist course in practice by necessity, representing a broad cross-section of voters. Compromise is *good* for the functioning of society. >Much more political energy would be spent managing coalitions and party discipline and less would be spent on legislation. The past decade of civil war within both the Conservative party and the Labour party wants a word with you. The Conservatives just went through ***five*** different PM's because their internal factions couldn't stop fighting each other. >FPTP encourages centrism as any party that wants to win seats (as opposed to vote share) has to have broad appeal. It doesn't. It's the exact opposite. FPTP lets extremists keep everyone hostage by threatening to split the vote. That's exactly what old UKIP and now Reform did. Parties under FPTP do not need broad appeal; they need to split the opposition and keep election participation low. Both strategies are more effective under FPTP than actual campaigning. >However, if the major parties can't continue to maintain broad appeal, and more and more of the vote goes to minor parties, then the system starts to break down and becomes too unrepresentative. That's the idea. That's exactly why the system was set up this way in the first place, by the English upper class who wanted to make absolutely certain that no one could take their power from them. It is ***unrepresentative by design***. Always has been. >Also, FPTP was designed when political opinion often aligned with geography - an industrial town, a market town, a coastal area etc. would vote according to the jobs and lifestyles that were broadly shared. That's less and less true in modern Britain. Eh, no. FPTP was set up with rich land owners in mind, who'd be the only ones with the means to even run for office. What you're bringing up is a popular fantasy of local identity that was never a consideration in how UK elections are set up but which keeps the peasants divided and occupied while their betters pillage the country.
I have to disagree with you how many UK constituents have been disenfranchised like up to 70% on a 4 party horse race the 1st past the post only got 30%
As an Australian I find it disgusting
On the other hand it filters quite well this pro russian shit that reform uk is.
Imagine we shifted to AV or similar here though - you'd just end up with a ton of people voting conservative again which would have resulted in a win for Sunak, arguably one of the least popular British PMs (and leader of an astonishingly unpopular government) of all time. I'd argue a lot of former conservative voters knew this was going to happen when they shifted allegiances to Reform. The Conservatives majored on the message that a vote for Reform us a vote for Labour. Everybody understands how FPTP works yet we are still here. Struggle to believe how that doesn't represent the will of the people: a large minority genuinely pro Labour, about the same amount again just didn't want the Tories to continue. Extrapolating that out to saying they actually wanted a Reform win is a stretch in my opinion - the number of people who actually believe that Farage would make a good leader is far less than 15%. The only way to get a true vision of what the UK would look like under PR is to have a PR election.
Wait until you see their constitution. You’ll never meet a country so happy to be ruled so openly by geriatric aristocrats. Like for fuck sake, they have a House of Lords from their pure blood families that are just allowed to tell the country how to live. Edit. Downvotes are mad considering what I’ve said is correct. Also, the UK had no constitution
It gets even more confusing when you realise the House of Lords pushed back against some of the worst policies put forward by the last Government. I went from “fuck the HoL” to “thank goodness for the HoL”. A group comprised largely of geriatric aristocrats highlighted how devoid of morals/competence/scruples the last government was.
They're supposed to hold the government to account and ask questions to make them reconsider, > [A high-profile example under the Labour government occurred in 2006, when the House of Lords repeatedly voted against compulsory ID cards. The government chose to delay the implementation of ID cards until after the 2010 election. That election resulted in a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, which went on to scrap ID cards.](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/explainers/what-does-house-lords-do) Obviously that example is kinda rubbish now, considering the conservative government brought in voter ID themselves later on. But it was an unpopular idea and the House of Lords at the time prevented it from coming through. Sometimes I like the idea of a group of people who don't have to be loyal to any one party and who might actually, as a result, have more of a heart because they don't have to win over any insane racists to stay relevant. But on the other hand I also don't like unelected, especially when it's a group of fancy families who typically don't relate to us lessers and our plights.
What is so wrong about ID cards?
Honestly if they gave everyone a free ID card at 16 and allowed renewals for free for low income people and it was only once 10 years like other ID, nothing. I don't have a problem with it. I dislike that we only have driving licenses (some people are disqualified) or passports (stupid book I don't want to carry, expensive).
Reform fixes this.
Why? You are voting for someone to represent where you live at the national government What is problematic there. If town A candidate got 75% of the vote in Town A should they not get to represent their area because nationally they did not achieve enough to be proportional?
The problem is when the winner gets about 40% of the vote in Town A with the rest split between the other parties. You end up with a winner who most people didn't vote for.
Its still the candidate the most people agreed upon though, thus they are eligible to represent the will of the most people out of all the candidates. (Not that politicians actually represent the will but w/e).
Look at how Germany is doing this. And learn.
Or come in third in lots of places.
From my limited understanding MPs have regions they represent and if every region has 40% party A, 30% party B and 30% party C then parliament will be entirely made from party A despite 60% voting for different parties.
So seats are not based on: -Nb of votes obtained per party -population density in each regions But are based on a flat nb of seats attributed to the running majority of each regions? I started reading the wiki and im not better off than before i started :)
It’s simple. The country is divided into districts called constituencies, each has about 70k voters. The person who gets the largest number of votes in each constituency becomes the MP for that constituency — it could be 70%, it could be 25%, as long as nobody else gets more. It’s also the same as US congressional elections, and parliamentary elections in places like Canada. It’s like the French parliament if there was only the first round and the highest vote getter just got in.
There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so Britain is divided into 650 different constituencies. In each constituency whoever gets the most votes wins that seat outright - that's what's called a first past the post system, the winner takes all regardless of how much they won by. There's no second round or anything so candidates can win with less than 50% as long as they got more votes than any other individual candidate. This means a party doesn't need an actual majority of votes to win, they only need a plurality in a majority of constituencies. So while Labour got 34% of the total number of votes in the whole country, they ended up being the party that got the most votes in 64% of these 650 constituencies. Meanwhile smaller parties like Reform or the Greens got a lot more votes than seats won because there are only very few places where their candidates ended up being the most popular of all. Edit: I see you're French so imagine if instead of going into a second round your legislative elections had been done last Sunday. You would then have the National Rally win 297 seats (51%) because they were first party in those districts, even with only 33% of the total vote.
I do wonder how the UK election would be if it had a second round like France.
Difficult to speculate about since a different system would change people's voting patterns. For the same reasons my French FPTP example wouldn't actually be like that if they did have FPTP because parties would be organised differently and people wouldn't vote the same way. Personally I think a more viable system if you really want to have one-member constituencies is some type of immediate run-off voting like they do in Australia though, two-round elections seem to me like an easy way to get voter fatigue and low turnout in one or both rounds.
Australia has compulsory voting so that would explain the turnout. One also can't vote by mail in France so that also lowers turnout.
I think they are somewhat based on population density but the system don't care about number of votes. What is good about the system is making MPs tied to a region which they got elected in and makes politicians more accountable in my opinion. The downside is proportionally the nation as whole is not represented.
There's 650 seats. Each seat has its own winner takes all election for a seat in parliament. There is no national vote. Parliament then assembles and votes in a Prime Minister from their ranks who forms a government to fill the executive cabinet. What this means is if a party has their votes spread out across 650 seats, they could get millions of votes but not actually reach a threshold to win any of them. That's what happens with reform, basically. Similarly a party can get very few votes on a national scale but if they're highly concentrated in particular areas they could win all the seats in those areas. That's how regional parties like Plaid Cymru or the SNP can get more seats than parties with 10-20x their votes nationally.
I'll explain it by using a very small country with 3 seats, one seat for each constituent, each with 11 people voting in each constituent. First constituent has 6 votes for party A and 5 votes for party B, making party A being their representative. Second constituent also has 6 votes for party A and 5 for party B, so party A also their representative. The third constituent has all 11 votes for party B, with them obviously being the representative. In the end, party A are the ones who will lead the country, as they have the majority of seats, even though party B had more votes in total, with 21 votes, with party A only having 12. For the UK, we just scale those two up, the amount of seats, and amount of voters in each constituent. Some of the constituents will have more voters than others, but they have boundaries set where they should be within 5% of 73,393 voters (with a few exceptions).
Reform has 4 seats and about 4 million votes, plaid cymru also has 4 seats with 200 thousand votes and the greens also have 4 seats but 1.9 million votes. It’s the fptp system, 1 vote doesn’t have the same weight/power depending on where you live. It’s very unfair and favours big parties. That’s why the only 2 possibilities for prime ministers and government are labour and conservatives.
Okay i get it a bit better now. [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting) thanks!
It's not that different from France.
Their vote share is spread out and not concentrated in specific constituencies.
Because it's not proportional. If they want seats, they need to run better candidates.
how does the electorate define how a candidate is "better" than another if not according to votes? because according to votes 14% of Uk population defined the rightwingers as "better" than the other, If votes obtained by a party does not give proportional seats => how does it work was my initial question
Because they were not better in each seat that they won? Just meh popularity throughout the country. Should we give consolation seats to losers? Or should a region be represented by someone who did not win? That also sounds stupid.
In essence there is no national vote. Each electoral district votes their own representative to send to parliament. The way the system works it disregards the national view entirely. In essence the UK parliament works more like in various bichamberal systems where the upper house represents regions, not people. Each MP is tied to a specific region/district where they won their majority. That said, one could still validate it more with a different voting system than first past the post by e.g. by forcing an absolute majority via runoffs or ranked voting.
In the individual constituencies. If a candidate can't win the majority in their riding, they don't deserve the seat, correct? So it doesn't matter if the reform candidate got 15,000 vote if the Labour Candidate got more.
It's amazing that no one seems to mind disproportion of this magnitude. And it's not just the UK. Canada and Australia are like this too.
Percentage share doesn't mean anything in the UK system as you are voting for your local candidate to represent your area and whoever gets the majority wins.
Whoever gets the plurality wins, not the majority. That’s the whole point of the post, you don’t need majority to get majority.
I think a lot of people do, particularly young people that are super pessimistic about voting at all (in my experience with my British friends).
The US system is similarly flawed aswell making it incredibly difficult for anyone outside of the two largest parties to get any power. Faux democracies where parties get much larger or smaller representation than their actual support amongst the voters.
Ha, who says we don’t mind it? There is massive discontentment over it here, but we have no choice because it works in favour of the two main parties. The Lib Dems briefly had a chance to change things during the coalition - they opted for AV rather than PR then did a piss poor job of explaining it to people and the referendum sunk without a trace.
People do hate it. Issue is it either works really well for you or really well against you, except the people it works well for are the only ones with the power to change it. Why would Labour want to actively want to reduce their own power so significantly? For me I like that Reform only get 4 seats, it keeps fringe extreme parties out there. It's not fair but it works for me. To get rid of it will require the most selfless suicidal act of the government in power, which isn't likely to happen.
Half of the population didn't show up, so I guess a lot of people have given up on politics. Perhaps because of this hilariously bad system.
Or perhaps not; UK and Irish general elections have pretty similar turnouts under two completely different electoral systems. It doesn't feel like FPTP vs PR would make much difference to turnout.
Why should shitty candidates get seats just because of a charismatic leader or party?
to improve representation of people's interests. The UK system is based on tradition where representatives needed to be send somewhere far away to do their jobs. Communities were tied knit by necessity. In the modern world people are more national/global, hence are not necessarily tied to their local community but still want their voice heard. That is why plenty of parliamentary democracies have a different approach that balances the local majorities with the national representation.
So the 14% of Reform MPs can just be Nigel's friends with no concerns about local distribution? If they want the seats, they have to beat the leading candidate.
Don't vote for the party that will bring in shitty candidates?
They didn't. That's why reform only has 4 seats.
Yeah except now 14% of votes have been thrown in the trash. MMP has a party vote and a candidate vote. This way both your candidate can get in if they get enough votes and a party that gets 14% of the party vote will still get roughly 14% representation.
They haven't been thrown in the trash - they lost, that's the result. If a bill is opposed by 45% of the parliament, does 45% of the opposition's ideas get included in the final bill?
That is a silly comparison make. A party with 34% of votes shouldn't be able to make laws against the will of an opposition with 66% of votes.
Why not? They can get 34% of the laws. It's the will of the people, no?
If only the parties knew the election system before the results, they could have coordinated. Take a gamble, accept the loss...
The Parties don't mind this because they benefit from it one way or another. Labour inevitably will not fix much and Tories will come back and sweep the field in the next election with barely 35% of the votes. The people however should not tolerate this extremely dysfunctional system which barely reflects people's will, yet no one in the UK (and Australia and Canada, and some others) seems to mind that a party can win 2/3 of the seats with only 1/3 of the votes. I find that bewildering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallagher_index#Countries This represents very weak mandate which fuels instability.
I understand that the parties don't mind this. (We have a similar disproportionate system in my small country as well.) Question is, what can a voter do, other than voting here or there?
On the other hand, Labour plus either Liberal Democrats or Green parties would form an even larger bloc.
Chef's kiss.
That's fair, but a larger share of votes went from conservatives to reform than it did to those parties, I think. Compared to last election: 12% shift to reform (if we compare to Brexit party vote share from last election). Only 6,8% to labour/libdem/green. So there's a lot of sour conservatives that want more populist government than there's critical conservatives that went left/centre instead.
Sure, but your original point seemed to imply the country voted for the right overall - that's not actually true, the country voted left of Tories + Reform overall, by quite a big margin. If you're going to apply the logic of spread-out vote to the right, you need to apply it to the left too, otherwise it's comparing apples to oranges.
The Lib Dems and Greens have always split the more left leaning votes while the Tories have often been the only right wing party with any popularity/credibility. So we could just as easily say that Labour + Lib Dem + Green = 53% of votes and this a rather stonking left leaning mandate. This is just Tories getting a big gulp of their own medicine. Good riddance. But yes our political system is a mess and needs changing. I voted for AV back in 2011, it's a shame that our country wasn't ready for any form of proportional representation. Personally I'm just going to enjoy things working out for the best this time around.
Just in case we needed any more proof that FPTP is a terrible system. As it stands: - labour has 410 seats with 9.6 million votes - libdems have 71 seats with 3.4 million votes - snp 9 seats with 685 thousand votes - reform 4 seats with 4 million votes - greens 4 seats with 1.9 million votes - plaid cymru 4 seats with 194 thousand votes Make it make sense. And some people still think FPTP is a good and fair system. [source here](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jul/04/uk-general-election-results-2024-live-in-full)
|Party|Seats|Votes (in milllions)|Votes per seat (in thousands)| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Labour|411|9.676|23.5| |Conservatives|119|6.772|56.9| |Reform|4|4.076|1019.0| |LibDems|71|3.490|49.1| |Greens|4|1.935|483.6| |SNP|9|0.685|76.2| |PC|4|0.195|48.7|
As usual with fptp systems there's an overwhelming parliamentary majority based on roughly one third of the roughly 60% of the electorate that even bothered to show up to vote. Don't get me wrong, Keir Starmer seems like a much better option than any of the parade of clowns the conservatives have moved through the position of PM over the last decade, but the basis for his election remains flawed in my opinion.
Fptp is a shitty system but neither big party has any incentive to change it
As always with the UK electoral system it’s important to remember that tactical voting distorts this
I can see SOME merit of FPTP conceptually, maybe when elections were much more localised like 100 years ago, but reality is that it’s ridiculous today. Country wide vote share should be as close to seats share as possible.
First past the post is a terribly undemocratic system and shouldnt exist anymore in this day and age. I mean i am personally glad that reforms 14 percent of the vote leads to fuck all representation, but thats not how democracy should work.
Yes, me too. Delighted they only got a few seats, but I can see it's unfair.
While that is true, I’m glad Reform didn’t get 14% of the seats
looking at the comments thats kinda the point of fptp
FPTP sucks, it rewards losers in big parties, but they will never change it, otherwise the big parties wouldn't exist.
Damn is it really that hard to have a normal elections system?
Hey OP, so you only group the ones on the right but not the ones on the left? If you add Labor + Liberal Democrats + Greens.. what’s the percentage you get? It’s quite bigger than Conservatives + Reform, isn’t it sir?
The Uk and France have quite terrible electoral systems. I don't understand how in this day and age you can justify not having a single-turn proportional system. It's good the conservatives have lost, as since Thatcher, they have been turning the Uk into a third world corpocracy, selling the UK to the indecently wealthy and the private interests, but still, in a representative democracy, the parliament should be composed exactly of what people voted for, otherwise it isn't representative.
I would prefer a system where you vote for two parties, your first option being in priority but if they fail to reach the support needed to gain any seats then your vote would go to your second pick, if you have one. It would take slightly longer to count as any vote cast on parties that dont gain seats will need to be recounted and readjusted but It would help smaller parties that people might choose to not vote for because it might be a wasted vote and therefore would strengthen the democracy as people would dare to vote for parties that align closest to them rather than vote out of tactics for parties that are in their eyes the least bad. Results should obviously also be proportional, no fptp or electoral system.
why not a simple system where you have 15% of the seats if you hit 15% of votes. If you have 1% you still have 1 seat. Make it 1000 seats so 1% still get 10 seats.
Because people like having local representation
Starmer is following everything the Torries did. Just a mildly better Boris Johnson.
The rightward shift of Labour is indeed worrying, a country without a left-wing party isn't one I would like to live in.
England and UK is taking the very route France did. Right-wing centrists coming to power (Macron) and enforcing policies that empower the right and popular with them and then go to left-wing voters and use fear-mongering of what would happen if far-right came to power to get votes. But Greens did a lot better than many expected them to and so did Independents, it does give small glimmer of hope that over time more and more left-wing voters will switch over from Labour There's also the "get the Torries out at all cost" voters who simply voted Labour for that purpose. There very likely will be more switching for left-wing voters by the next general election when they see Starmerism is very similar to the Torries.
Remember when conservatives needed to form a coalition with the LibDems and one of the terms was that they would remove FPTP, and then they completely reneged on it when they no longer needed them. Hahaha
Terms were for referendum about FPTP. The referendum was quite resounding victory for FPTP unfortunately.
Hungary, is that you?
Yeah, whatever perspective suits. But seriously the FPTP election system is ridiculous.
Tbf, the right wing vote split. A lot of older people voted for Reform than young people. The split meant that Labour had the plurality so ironically Reform helped Labour by pulling Tory voters to them. Some seats were very close and there had to be tactical voting on both sides but the ones to the left did better than the ones of the right in that regard.
And? Labour + Greens beat Cons + Reform. Why are we adding two parties together?
FPTP is a very strange system, how can 34% of the votes have such a strong absolute majority?
Can this even be considered a democracy? A third of the votes and total power.
The UK also has no written constitution so the parliament could theoretically pass whatever law they like and the courts can't do anything about it. Edit: comments are locked, so I will reply to the comment below here. u/pox123456 That's the point. They can pass whatever law they like with a simple majority whereas in other countries you need a super majority. And even constitutional amendments may be subjectcto judicial review and struck down. That's the case in Germany, for example.
Complete nonsense, especially because even if they had written constitution, they could rewrite it into a toilet paper with 2/3 majority.
US uses the same system. Except Georgia where runoffs happen when no one gets a majority
LibDems have decided that if the others don't want proportional representation, then they're just going to start it already at least for their own party
They should have held firm to reforming the electoral system the last time they got in power through coalition.
They really should scrap the Lords and replace that with a proportional representative system
Dear Conservatives, you are doing Gerrymandering wrong
Labour will portray this as extreme win, but I think that they did not gain trust of voters. Corbyn managed to gain very similar amount of votes in 2019 against Boris, who was as his peak before brexit. Starmer barely managed to gain votes, while Torries were literally destroying themselves. I am quite certain that Corbyn (or any Labour leader) would achieve a landslide. This is not 1997 Tony Blair booming shift to Labour votes.
This is how the first past the post electoral system works. You will see something similar in every past UK election.
What first past the post system looks like how many seats did Labour win with over 50% disenfranchised
Would it be fair to say that reform essentially split the conservative vote ?
Hopefully he sees the writing on the wall and backs PR just out of pure self interest, would really rather not have a reformed Tory party win a landslide majority on 40% of the vote next time and stay in power for another 10+ years thanks. Defeating them with a left/centrist coalition is possible under PR and probably would’ve happened here, defeating a unified Tory party under FPTP probably isn’t
Can someone explain to me how the Conservatives could possibly have convinced 1 in 4 of British voters to vote for them given how indescribably calamitous they've been for the last few years?
For some who is not familiar with what these parties represent, what does this mean for the UK, tldr will be fine aswell
After years and years of this shitshow, 38% voted again Tories and Reform. 4/10 British voters wanted more of the same or even worse Brexit-related lunacy. Insane!
Context for my European friends: This is not a shift to the left. When polled only about 5-10% voted for Labour based on their policy. 45-50% (By far the largest portion) voted to "Kick the Tories out" Vote percentage is 34%. Conservatives on 24% and Reform on 14%. The UK is still trending to the Centre/ Centre Right (Mainly due to immigration concerns), Labours election and Reforms rise is a result of Conservative failure to actually govern as Conservatives. Their attempts to appease the far left has resulted in their destruction tonight.
Whether the Tories get the message or not remains to be seen.
Damn 64% So they can basically do whatever they want That's dangerous in a democracy
Frankly, if Reform weren't putting up the dregs of the political landscape for election then they might have been able to make more inroads with seats. Their party is full of populists and borderline racists, and this shows in the number of seats they have returned. They only have a bumper vote share by their standards because they stood loads of candidates in areas where it's easy to rake in a few thousand votes by standing on a plinth and shouting 'Common sense! No to wokery! Stop the boats!" It's easy to make gains in those areas, but it's not easy to win the seats outright. That's why so many of their votes are disproportionately represented here; they are protest votes. The Liberal Democrats tend to win seats in areas that are more politically discerning and who have a history of making politicians work for their votes. They've been doing this for a lifetime and are very good at it. It would be carnage if any old populist party could turn up, shout a load of nonsense, take 80 seats and upend the political order.
Even though as a Reform voter I got shafted I still prefer FPTP to the alternatives.
GB countering the conservative wave in europe. At least there are SOME good news.
So what? They got 38% together which is nowhere near the 50% needed to form a government in a representative parliamentary system either. And that's assuming they would even be able to agree on the politics in the first place.
Uk has an electoral system? 🫥 sorry, but it feels like a bad system!
Even our election system is more fair than this bullshit and that says something.
This is typical loser logic.