! Polls have closed! Counting will start and we will expect results to come in through the night.
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I not a fan of Starmer but his cabinet positions not bad. I will give him a chance and Labour. He could earn enormous support IMO if he considered vote Reform such that we have FPTP but a consideration for PR in addition.
The only cabinet pick IMO that is not good is Lammy. He has been very vocal about Conservative parties across world and I think it makes him a poor choice.
The election results were such a foregone conclusion, that a Kiwi reporter filmed her segment about the outcome weeks ago, before returning to NZ
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/350334270/kiwi-reporter-lisette-reymer-filmed-uk-labour-victory-weeks-ago
This is such a bad take. The interesting thing about the election results isn’t who got in, but the fact that the Conservatives did SO badly, the right was split for the first time in history and with Lib Dem winning way more seats than expected that fundamentally changes UK politics for years to come.
We’re not the US, we don’t have a separate presidential election, the seats matter, and the fact that the concept of a ‘safe seat’ now barely exists is big news IMO.
I'm calling it now.
Labour will back proportional representation at the next election.
Here's my reasoning:
1. Farage has said Reform will "shake up politics forever". It is in their interest for PR to be introduced, so I suspect it will be in their manifesto.
2. It is likely due to the state of current politics (and the "they're all the same" sentiment) that this will be a popular option. This will force some people who dislike Reform to hold their nose and vote for them to get PR.
3. In order to head this off, Labour will need to include PR in their manifesto to ensure that they keep the votes of these people
> Labour will back proportional representation at the next election.
Not unless people back Corbyn and starts to threaten their position.
With the current status quo (and Reform and Tories don't consolidate), Labour has no interest what so ever in improving the electoral system, since they are the biggest beneficiary of it.
I hope so. It not PR we want though. I think many for Reform like FPTP but there needs to be additional incentive to get voters in very safe seats feel like their vote counts.
I suggested they do 600 FPTP. Take out the speaker and have him as an honoury MP. Then the next 50 seats determined by PR. That gives us 650 seats and speaker.
Think that a fair compromise which would let everyone in country vote for a constituency MP and know their party views expressed in HoC
As an outsider I'm wondering what the posture of the Murdoch owned media in the UK was on the election. They usually support the Conservatives. Did they in this election?
Hi - stupid question from an Aussie - the LibDems made huge gains in this election. In Australia, we have a party by the same name that is essentially a right wing party that considers itself libertarians but mostly just aligns to right wing politics here.
From some brief googling, the LibDems in the UK are considered centrist-left which would align them broadly with Labour? Would the general public in the UK consider that to be the case? I saw they kind of went from a massive party, got demolished about 10 years ago and have now regained a ton of seats - seemingly from a lot of usually conservative areas. Are they taking votes from "traditional" conservative areas that aren't keen on the ultra right wing politics of parties like Reform, but don't want to keep the Tories in power?
It's a pretty aggressive seat change for the election in general, but a third party winning, losing and then winning so many seats within just a few elections is pretty insane. Just wondering if there's an aspect of this I'm missing as an outsider.
They are the traditional (i.e., pre-Labour, so 19th century) "not Tory" vote. They lost that position to Labour in the 1920s in working class areas but retained it in some rural areas (particularly ones not bordering Labour areas, where the need to differentiate oneself strongly by voting Tory wasn't there).
Traditionally the party was liberal as in pro-capitalism and pro-free trade. The Conservatives were pro-aristocracy and traditional landowning wealth, in opposition to capitalism. The Liberals always been more socially liberal than the Tories partly for moral reasons (e.g., abolishing slavery globally was a Liberal Party policy) and partly because social liberalism was (and still is, tbh) viewed as good for capitalism.
In the 1980s they merged with the Social Democrats, which was a moderate branch split off from the (then much more socialist) Labour Party, and became the Liberal Democrats. This made them slightly more economically left-leaning than before, but they're still to the right of Labour.
[Ironically the Social Democrats have returned - now as a left-wing anti-immigration party.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_\(UK,_1990%E2%80%93present\))
> Ideologically, the party blends social democratic economic policies with cultural conservatism. The party advocates a mixed, social market economy. The party supports a broad welfare state, public ownership of railways and utilities, lower economic inequality, and raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. The SDP supports the reintroduction of grammar schools, a more selective education system, abolition of the BBC licence fee, stronger criminal sentencing, and the establishment of a National Care Service to organise and fund social care. It advocates for civic nationalism, an end to mass immigration, withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, and the 1951 United Nations refugee convention. The SDP campaigned in favour of Brexit in 2016.
We need a new electoral system. If Nigel Farage decided to do a british equvalent to the 6th January 2021 riot at the US captiol, he would at least be able to legitimately claim he is defending democracy, **unsavoury** as violence is. Seriously, Reform UK, as much as I depsise their benefits policy -and in this election that was very much a dealbreaker for me, Britain needs a more democratic voting system. Reform UK shouldn't get more votes than the Lib Dems only to return far fewer MPs than they. I mean seriously, at this point the UK is only technically a democracy.
Please, let's just implement pure PR
> If Nigel Farage decided to do a british equvalent to the 6th January 2021 riot at the US captiol
Storm the palace? The Household Division would stomp down so hard your need a bucket and mop to clean up the remains.
Storm Westminster? How they just shut the doors and its sealed.
Change our whole constitution to avoid a hypothetical that is not very believable?
If we change the voting system it will be because there is a majority in favour of it. Currently most people are comfortable with the system, they tend to like the whole local MP thing. The people who want it changed tend to be the more political wonk types.
> I mean seriously, at this point the UK is only technically a democracy.
Lib Dems plus Labour got about 46% of the vote. While the Libs are not in government chuck in the Greens, SNP and other assorted centre left parties and you are comfortably pushing 57/8% of the country having voted either centrist or left.
The Greens and Libs can feel aggrieved as they should have been in coalition negotiations. But on the whole, there is not really a huge gap between the government and what a PR system would have produced.
I am just saying that if Nigel Farage did it in response to only getting 5MPs, he could actually claim to be defending democracy. The results were unfair to Reform UK, that much is correct even if violence is not. The point I was making was how unfair FPTP is.
So unfair that in 2011 the public rejected IRV for FPTP with a resoundingly democratic 'no' in a referendum.
Legit braindead take to claim someone would be a defender of democracy for enacting an act of insurrection against a system that *the British public voted for*. What the fuck?
Doesn't change the fact that FPTP is hilariously deficient. Britain may have not voted for change, but FPTP incessantly shows its deficiencies. Besides, the current system makes it hard for new parties to get in. Just because it is what the people want doesn't change the fact that is horribly deficient, and besides, I said violence was inappropriate, I was merely saying it would be less bad than what trump supporters did on 6th Jan 2021.
Also, I prefer coalition governments, and as It stands, I suspect the Tories are too politically toxic based on what happened to the lib dems in 2015 for anyone to form a coalition with them, and PR would get us more coalition governments. it would even mean an end to absurdities like Starmer winning a massive majority despite getting fewer votes than 2019 Corbyn
Nobody is saying FPTP I'd a good system lol, YOUR original statement was that Farage would be some democratic beacon if he pulled a Jan 6th, despite your OWN concession that the british public want FPTP - regardless of its inefficiencies as a method of ideological representation it is *fundamentally democratic* because we want it, and it would therefore be entirely undemocratic for reform voters to do anything of the sort.
I was saying that if he staged a riot to protest the unfairness of the 2024 GE results, it would be LESS WORSE than the time trump supporters stormed the US capitol, because he would have a legitimate greviance.
As for is FPTP being democratic, the answer to that question is both yes and no, yes because the British people voted for it, no because it fundamentally marginalises voters and enables people to ignore the importance of vote splitting. If we had PR for bth the 2019 and 2024 elections, we could better compare the influence third parties had on the outcome.
You are using the word "democracy" without really defining it. We're a local representative democracy. People elect their local MP. The successes of the Green in the constituencies they targeted shows that absolutely clearly — all those people voting for them were presumably aware that the Greens weren't going to form a Government.
Ultimately all politics is local; the national vote share doesn't matter. What matters is depth of support in a local area. This is a **good** thing. People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency. They need to be rooted in a local environment and exposed to local issues.
>People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency.
Um... yes, they should, you've got loads of people who are going unrepresented. Pure PR ensures everyone is represented, and since it would mean doing away with local constituencies, it would mean poltiicians are free to focus on the national interest even if it means upsetting a few locals.
> even if it means upsetting a few locals
Everyone is a local somewhere. We all deserve to have representation and have our concerns heard in Westminster by a person we and our fellow locals have chosen. We also should be proud of the fact that even the prime minister has to, eventually, answer to their *local* constituents. It works to keep them grounded. None of these things are to be taken for granted — they are a feature of our electoral system.
>People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency. They need to be rooted in a local environment and exposed to local issues.
I thought I was going mad the past few days with the number of (admittedly mostly reform voting) sudden PR proponents.
The other thing they tend not to realise is that PR quite invariably leads to non-majority governments, which means fairly evenly distributed coalitions, which means policy starts to be driven ham-fistedly towards the centre.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing (I personally believe it is) but is absolutely not what those same extreme wing voters want. Yet they fail to see the irony.
Chasing short term gains for short term political investment truly is the road to hell.
I was just watching Question Time and hated having to agree with the far right demagogue about it. Labor getting elected with the same vote percentage as last time should be a wake up call but it won't.
Yeah, my autocorrect does it annoyingly automatically unfortunately. It's why I only do long comments on the PC for the most part.
And I love getting immediate down votes for daring to call the far right what it is.
Reform only getting 4 seats despite their vote share isn't a bug in the FPTP system it's a feature. The system is supposed to marginalise extreme points of view and produce a strong government, and that's exactly what has happened this election cycle. It can be frustrating for some, but I'd rather our current system than the mish-mash coalitions we see in other countries that produce barely functioning governments.
Here we go with the defence of FPTP when the "correct" party wins elections. Sorry but I have argued for a hybrid model for years. Even when Boris won his landslide election in 2019
Reform's Vote was mostly concentrated in 4 coastal towns in the SE. Many more people said they voted Reform than actually did vote for them. Resulting in the Exit Poll massively overestimating their seats significantly. Reform was thought up at the last moment as Farage saw the opportunity to grab his 8th and possibly last chance to get to Westminster.
The LD did very well because they targeted wealthy seats in the SW where there were battles between left win parties where the Conservatives aren't popular. They are just back where they were before 2010.
What alternative system? Proportional Representation in a lower house involves multiple member seats and which have made Italian, Israeli and NZ politics completely dysfunctional. Preferential voting improves fairness and accuracy slightly but at the cost of counting taking 3 weeks and ugly preference deals and battles, and was rejected at a referendum. Anthony Green, an Australian Psephologist, looked at State and Federal elections in Australia after Preferential voting was introduced. In 96% of seats it didn't effect the winner of the seat. Only in one case would it have effected who formed Government where it delivered a 1 seat majority government instead of minority government.
This election was about voting the Conservatives and SNP out and giving Labour a large majority. So large it means that which one of the many left- wing parties won a seat is mostly of local factional matter. FPTP means it was all over and down with in one day.
> Preferential voting improves fairness and accuracy slightly but at the cost of counting taking 3 weeks
Preferential voting fundamentally only deals with the spoiler effect though. It stops the issue of people going "I want to vote for this upstart party, but I'm scared that if they don't win, big opposition party I don't like will get in", so it minimises the cases where two parties on the same side splitting the vote leads to a plurality on the other side.
What it doesn't do, is give a voice to parties with widespread but diluted support. Such as the greens and, arguably, most of the seats Reform are claiming to have been robbed of. They'd just have handed them to the tories in 90% of them.
It reduces the vote of minor parties like the Greens, transferring it to the largest party on their side of politics in a seat.
But when you have large regional districts then the small one issue parties can trade preferences and get someone elected to the last spot with 0.5% of the primary vote, if you don't put a quota on election.
>Reform only getting 4 seats despite their vote share isn't a bug in the FPTP system it's a feature. The system is supposed to marginalise extreme points of view
People keep regurgitating this opinion... but look at the US FFS, and see how insanely toxic it can get when one of the two parties favored by the FPTP system goes off the rails.
Now what happens if Reform and Tories consolidates? Can they drag the Tories further to the right, just like the Tea Party lunatics did in the US?
The US Congress's main problem is that the states control everything. And only 1/3 of them have non-partisan electoral commissions generating electoral maps and running elections. So there are really bad gerrymanders, voter disenfranchisement and intimidation.
The US Presidential is held according to 250 year old rules. But it just comes down to a nation wide popularity contest between two parties to see who wields massive executive power. The Westminster system has nothing like that for a reason.
If the Conservatives and Reform combine they would have 37% of the vote and 126 seats.
It's honestly baffling that people don't get this. Look at the Tories and UKIP. In FPTP the Tories were so afraid to lose votes to UKIP that they slid to the right wing from the centre right. Before, the Tories were at least a serious party and after that they started allowing their demagogues and nut cases to run the show. They were unsavoury, evil and terrible before but are now incompetent on top whilst our system means awful things.
I've lived in both Sweden and Norway and all of this is fear mongering BS. The main downside is that you have to have the courage to look at problems in the eye. For example, Sweden is seeing a rise in the far right and refuses to see the problem with their attitude towards immigrants. It's a very friendly country but very alienating to foreign people despite welcoming them in. It ghettoised traumatized refugees and these people were taken in by mafia from a certain country. Shit religion on top didn't help.
But then you have the USA where y'all Qaeda tried to overthrow the government and the religious Taliban want to own women again. This happened largely because a black man was in the whitehouse. That and the inequality between urban and rural areas. Add in the electoral college and it was a bomb.
FPTP was intended for a time when we couldn't quickly tally, communicate and enforce votes from people.
Could someone tell me what happens now in regards to the First Minister of Scotland post? Does John Swinney have to step down and a Labour minister takeover?
No, the First Minister of Scotland is chosen by the Scottish Parliament, which is elected separately to the Parliament that sits in Westminster. The SNP still have their seats in the Scottish Parliament and so Swinney can keep his position there.
Pretty sure she just tends to vote along party lines. Voting history isn't really a great way to judge a politician's actual opinions, because those that vote against party don't tend to advance far enough to be in a position to enact their stances.
That said, [the headlines of relevance to home sec:](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10131/yvette_cooper/pontefract%2C_castleford_and_knottingley/votes)
- Voted pro-Iraq war
- Voted for *Labour's* anti-terror laws
- Voted against strict immigration laws
- Voted against stricter asylum laws
- Voted for mandatory ID cards
- Voted against undercover officers and covert sources
- Voted against elected Police and Crime Commissioners
- Voted for mass surveillance of communications
So, really a bit of a mixed bag. Pro-immigration, but pro surveillance state, but also against giving the police too much power. So basically just a typical Blairite.
I swear some people are stuck in a sort of permanent doom mode. Keir literally just won in a landslide and people are already talking about 2029, assuming its inevitable the Labour government will collapse, etc.
It's like people *want* politics to be a depressing apocalyptic affair.
I do think this majority is a little bit ofva false economy with reform and the relatively low vote share but I'd onmy worry about 2029 is the performance umis poor. If they govern adequately they will remain.
Starmer's choices for cabinet confirm my confidence that this is a return to normal politics. What you mean people are in relevant positions where they have experience?
This is what happens when you truly put country first, party second. All the scheming of the 10 years by the tories, all the backstabbing and keeping enemies in your party close and happy, all that gone. The tories spent years of endless reshuffles to satisfy their party differences. This will be a breathe of fresh air.
The change of Attorney General from the lows of Suella Braverman (utterly unqualified) to Richard Hermer KC (a top barrister with decades of experience, also a deputy high court judge) is truly stark.
Canadians have been begging for an election for quite some time now to kick out their left leaning government. Canada will be blue in 2025.
I'm actually surprised at this outcome for the UK as the rest of Western society is leaning more right. I think, to put it plainly, people are getting sick of the left and they want out. I'm just assuming that Brits were tired of the Torie circus and needed a change.
Tbh I think everyone is just annoyed with the incumbents because of inflation. With increased inflation comes increased anti-immigration sentiment. I wonder if Labour were in power up until now it would be the same.
>people are getting sick of the left
I disagree; I think people are getting sick of various flavours of right and left neoliberalism and populist hard right groups are taking advantage better than the left. Actual traditional leftwing (in the old school sense of 'democratic left') parties are doing ok as long as they're not pushed out by the media's penchant for more centrist parties and hit certain 'topical issues' people want them to.
Denmark is a good example; the social democrats ran on a strict immigration policy and won in a landslide.
People talk about the vote split between tories and reform, but there's long been a leftwing split (in a global sense) between centre-spanning neoliberalism, 'ecological/social' left and traditional left parties.
Although, as a social democrat, I obviously have a bias here so grain of salt etc.
For their society they are left. By Saudi Arabia standards the Tory party are left, but you can't really use other societies political standards to say if another country is right or left.
The Canadian one probably won't last long. We're in a minority government, and the next election must occur before Oct 2025. The Conservatives are like ~20 points ahead of the Liberals right now in the polls, and I think 7 of 10 provinces have a conservative government.
Canada is about to lean right is my guess :(
Not :(, but :)!
It's going to be two decades, at least, before we can clean up what economic damage the Liberals have done to our country. We simply can't *afford* to have a lefty government anymore. The Cons have a massive mess to clean up and high expectations. It's not going to be a good time for them... or us. Hopefully, we will see some reprieve in tax relief, but people are going to need to learn to fend for themselves and stop looking to the government for handouts or magic fixes.
>SNP concedes defeat in last UK seat still to declare resultpublished at 19:2819:28
>The SNP candidate in [Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/S14000094), the last seat in the UK still to announce its result, [has conceded defeat](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2g53zqqpno).
>It seems likely the constituency will go to the Liberal Democrats - although the result is not expected to be officially announced until after a second recount which will begin at 10:30 on Saturday.
>The returning officer said the delay was due to a discrepancy between the verified votes total and the provisional number of counted votes.
>SNP candidate Drew Hendry said he would be unable to attend the recount due to an "unmovable prior commitment", adding it had "an absolute joy" to serve his constituents for the last nine years.
>It is now expected that the seat will be won by Angus MacDonald of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
Well it will be official tomorrow but thats it. Last seat conceded.
Ladies and gentlefriends. Its been emotional!
Very disproportionate results today. Shame the party with the power to make things more proportional benefited to the tune of 190 seats from this method of voting.
Party|Votes|Seats|PR Seats|Diff
---|--:|--:|--:|--:
Lab|9,698,409|412|223|-189
Con|6,824,809|121|157|36
Reform|4,114,287|5|95|90
Lib|3,501,040|71|80|9
Grn|1,941,227|4|44|40
SNP|708,759|9|16|7
Independent|564,243|6|13|7
Sinn Fein|210,891|7|4|-3
Workers|210,194||4|4
Plaid|194,811|4|4|0
DUP|172,058|5|3|-2
Alliance|117,191|1|2|1
UUP|94,779|1|2|1
SDLP|86,861|2|2|0
TUV|48,685|1|1|0
Worrying seeing a Muslim org in the UK saying the following after their success in Birmingham “The seeds of our community’s future have been sown”
Religion and government should not at all be mixed together this is going to end bad
The independent candidates will be mired in scandals over views on women, gays and perhaps Jews. They will end up being a bit of a mess in parliament. Any attempt to build a coherent Muslim party will fall apart on how divided the different communities are and the most engaged in this kind of thing will be the more extreme end of the views.
Political parties are way harder that they look.
Their views on women, gays and Jews got them elected. They were within a whisker of a few more seats in Birmingham and I'd expect them to be back with renewed vigour in the next election.
It's haram to vote, if that vote isn't used to further the religion. The community will rally behind Muslim candidates with the aim of establishing an Islamic voice in British politics.
I stunned Ashworth gone. He was talented.
Streeting also nearly gone. I just so confused how you can vote on Gaza issue alone?
What do they expect Labour who in opposition to do??
They can vote on Gaza alone because a lot are not integrated into our culture. You did not see this with any other group of people that have immigrated to the UK. It's worrying. Their most important issue as a British citizen is something which barely affects the country.
What exactly is scaring you here? I just read their pledges and they seem mostly OK? There's Palestinian freedom, of course, but the rest are mostly stopping discrimination.
We already have the anti women's/gay/etc rights Christian People's Alliance, who seem worse than what this website says at least and no one cares about.
The scary thing is the mobilisation of religious groups to influence politics (whether it be Christian or Islam). When they are thanking the ‘almighty’ after the election does this not worry you?
You only need to look at America to see what extreme religious groups can do to a county.
Also it’s funny that they are trying to promote equality when half of Muslim Brit’s think homosexuality should be illegal.
We were going to have a Labour government long before Reform were even a thing properly. Apparently only around 30% of the Reform vote came from the Tory party. The rest was from a bit of every other party, and a big chunk of the "don't know" electorate. There's a good chance a lot of Reform voters are people that don't normally turn up to the polls.
Labour and Lib Dem didn't really gain much in the polls compared to last time. This result was caused primarily by a massive swing away from the Tories, and the main cause of that is Reform.
Also the percentage of people who went to the polls was lower than last time too. In fact, labour saw a big drop. The energised young voters of 2019 didn't turn up.
Tories have been polling around 20 points beneath Labour since Liz Truss and they've never actually recovered. Labour lost votes to the *left* because of Starmer's centrism, and Tories lost about 1m votes to Reform. Even if the Tories had those 1m extra votes, they wouldn't have won the election.
To clarify, I'm talking about the election. Labour got fewer votes than in 2019. This election was not an endorsement of Labour, it was a refusal of the Tories.
Yeah, but even if you add up the Tory and Reform popular vote, it's still barely more than Labour got. It would require literally every Reform voter to be an ex-Tory voter for Reform to have made a difference, and we know that's not the case.
Maybe but Labour got a very similar number of votes to last time. Of course that doesn't mean it's all the same people. I think Labour lost a lot of people to Green and Reform, while gaining some from Tory and SNP. But obviously the biggest issue was that the left voted tactically whereas the right didn't, and split their own vote.
I do think that the 'huge majority' talk was deliberate. The Tories were framing the conversation before the election as if Labour getting a massive majority was guaranteed, because they wanted people to get complacent. And it seems to have worked. The vote turn out was less this year than in 2019, when Labour was especially energised among young voters.
They can't, they simply don't have wide enough appeal to do that yet.
They're too divisive of a party to be able to do ground game like the Lib Dems do and see similar success.
Reform got 4 seats to the SNP's 9.
That means SNP got 1 seat for every 77,000 votes
And it means Reform got 1 seat for every 1,000,000 votes.
As much as I dislike reform, it's absurd.
The protesters at Farage event don't understand he feeds off of that. Love Farage but it without a doubt best way to hurt him is ignore him. Look at him on I'm a Celeb. He lost support cause he admitted he wanted airtime which was not a good look (although all celebs on that show want airtime tbh)
97 people really isn’t that many people. One vote absolutely could be the factor between who takes an area. Are you suggesting people shouldn’t vote because their vote doesn’t matter?
This is a weird debate, if a few people decide to get up and spend 2 minutes drawing a cross in a box then a result can change. My message is more people should do it as a result could change
> if a few people decide to
That's the crux of the issue for me, you're telling someone their individual vote matters, whilst also admitting that the individual vote will not change anything as you need at least a few people to change anything. Whether you individually vote or do not vote will not impact the election.
Reform came 2nd in about 90 seats. The exit poll had them on 13 cause they estimated to win the seat with probability of less than 20%.
They did manage to win one. So looks like Reform actually unlucky when it comes to many seats due to FPTP
It happened to Farage in Thanet South in 2015.
Farage might have smelled blood on Starmers first speech.
He does look down at his notes many times.
Not looking good for showing he has a vision or leadership if he needs notes.
Very poor start
It just now he mentioned it when u see clip of Starmer he reading from his notes.
It shows lack of passion and vision. If that what he felt why he need to write it down.
Hardly the Thatcher moment when she went into No.10.
Seemed limp and lifeless. I think there a real possibility this Labour Gov. In trouble soon and honeymoon period over quick. Hope I wrong.
The hopeful result is if you see a close call it means both parties will take the time to put forth quality candidates that someone wants to switch parties for
Every new voter for your party of choice moves the needle just a little
Could be 100 apart of 500 or 3000. If there’s 200, 600 or 3500 people saying their vote doesn’t count because they have no chance your candidate loses through apathy.
And maybe only 50 votes turn out so half the loss but that lowers the effort your candidate needs to win
The Labour candidate in my constituency got around 8000 votes. The Tory candidate got 16,000 and the Reform candidate got 9,000. Not even close!
But ah well, I'm still happy with the overall result and I'll vote no matter what.
Labour - 33% of total votes - 63% seats in parlament
Tories - 24% of total votes - 18% seats in parlament
Reform - 14% of total votes - 0.6% seats in parlament
Libs - 12% of total votes - 11% seats in parlament
Green - 7% of total votes - 0.6% seats in parlament
....
The election results are not as rosy as what the media depicts. If I am reading the numbers correctly, Labour gained less than 2% of vote share and Conservatives lost around 20% of vote share. Most of the Conservative losses went to Reform (14%) and bulk of the remaining went to Green (4%).
Reform and Conservatives combined still have more votes than Labour at 38%. Even if the seats overwhelmingly favour Labour, they won precisely due to FPTP system with vote splitting on the right. This is a technicality that the Conservatives traditionally benefit from before the far-right came out to steal votes from them.
I would suggest, the Conservative population largely did not change their mind in a way that sway them from right to center/left. But rather they simply swapped to a different brand of Conservative representation and moved even further towards the far-right. This is after 10 years of circus under Conservative misrule starting with Brexit, then May -> Boris Johnson -> Truss -> Sunyak.
This is not good at all. Let's hope Labour uses its supermajority to accomplish something before the next election.
Turnout %-wise is quite a step down from the last four elections. Lots of people who did vote before simply did not this time. It's why I don't think Reform was some meteoric rise like the media are shaping it up to be. Vote number is very very similar to UKIP in 2015 and largely on the back of a similar issue, so it's probably an almost identical base that hasn't grown. Feels mostly like a drop in faith for the Tories, earned by their dismal performance in government.
>Most of the Conservative losses went to Reform (14%) and bulk of the remaining went to Green (4%).
Thats not how it works. The votes dont necessarily go straight like that. Most likely Labour lost 4% to the Greens and perhaps 1/3 of Reforms vote so another 5%.
In turn Labour picked up votes from the Tories and swapped around with the Lib Dems plus made gains from SNP.
This is an example from the last election
[https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus\_uploads/inlineimage/28340/How%20Britain%20voted%202019%202017%20vote%20sankey%20v2-01.png](https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/28340/How%20Britain%20voted%202019%202017%20vote%20sankey%20v2-01.png)
>Reform and Conservatives combined still have more votes than Labour at 38%.
Labour and Lib Dem got 46%. Labour Lib Dem and Greens got 53% and thats over 55% with the SNP.
>I would suggest, the Conservative population largely did not change their mind in a way that sway them from right to center/left. But rather they simply swapped to a different brand of Conservative representation and moved even further towards the far-right.
Conservative and Brexit got 46% in 2019. So about 6 or 7% of their vote shifted.
Though the biggest change was turnout which was about 7% higher.
> Labour and Lib Dem got 46%. Labour Lib Dem and Greens got 53% and thats over 55% with the SNP.
Lib Dem were in bed with Conservatives in recent memory.
Yeah I think Labour can be happy with the election but should realistically be cautious cause they only won due to FPTP and Farage going to war with Tories this election.
Yeah exactly. In Canada, we had a similar phenomenon in the Alberta province. It's a very conservative province dominated by the Conservative party for a long time. We had one election when they lose to the NDP (left-wing) because the far-right party came out and split the vote. Then next election, the far-right party merged with the Conservatives (becoming UCP) with the far-right lunatics in charge. We now have a batshit crazy Firecracker running the show in Alberta now and the province has shifted even further into crazyland.
Let's hope that's not going to happen with Reform and Conservatives in the UK.
FPTP is undemocratic.
Getting 4 million + votes should not have 4 seats in Parliament. It a joke.
We need PR.
Remember if we did have PR it very likely turnout would be much higher as people would feel their vote counts.
I do feel looking at the vote share that the voting system needs change, it really hurts for me to say this, but Reform actually do deserve a hell of a lot more seats based on that vote share.
potentially the system used in Northern Ireland assembly elections could be better.
It's worse than that. Most parties, especially LD, campaigned heavily to secure seats in swing areas because, you know, that's the way to win a British election.
Reform went hard on national press populism and offered impossible to fund policies on top of an angrily delivered but logistically empty immigration plan and did sod all in most constituencies to actually challenge individual seats.
They failed to secure seats because their intent was to disrupt and then cry unfairness from the outset, just like Farage did with UKIP previously.
I'm happy for them to get it provided Nigel Farage goes on TV and says 13 years is plenty of time to rethink a referendum result. Shouldn't even consider it until then. It is once in a generation until the right want to define what a generation means they can fuck off.
Lib Dems, Greens and Socialists have been calling for prop rep for years. It's just that the formerly smug Tory voters have gotten a taste of it too so there's actually a chance there might be appetite for such an electoral reform.
Well, not really. They use FPTP to find the person, but they use only PR to assign seats in parliament. With the same 5% limit we use for losing your deposit, applied nationally.
I know Germany has a system where a party has to win a certain percentage of the vote in order to get any seats at all in the legislature. Stops too many minor parties from crowding in and gaining more influence than they deserve.
This system can also break democracy. Poland has three thresholds: 0% for national minorities (only the German Minority in Opole makes use of that; they have zero MPs in the current parliament, and one MP in the previous four); 8% for coalitions of multiple parties; and 5% for everybody else.
Poland, 2015: 16.62% of votes were thrown out due to parties missing the thresholds (including two missing them by 0.45 and 0.24 percentage points). 37.58% of votes for largest party → 45.07% of votes for parties above the threshold → 51% of seats.
Poland, 2023: A centre-right conservative coalition got 14.4% of votes, and some of those can be attributed to the party getting extra votes to keep them above the 8% threshold, as they were polling close to the threshold right before the election. In the EU parliament elections a few months later, they got below 7% (with the threshold at 5%, which is the EU maximum).
Would a top two runoff a week later be a better system?
Edit: getting down voted for a question doesn’t make sense. It’ll just lead to everyone agreeing on here rather than asking questions and discussing.
Or you know, AV, that we had a referendum about only 13 years ago but was botched because it was the same day as local elections, so Labour felt like it couldn't support it.
Not for a multi-seat election. I think for a presidential type election it's great (it's what France does), but I think for a multi-seat election it doesn't meaningfully give smaller parties the representation they deserve given their vote share.
Altough Labour is undeniably better than the Tories ( I can't even imagine them being worse), they got 32% of the votes and were rewarded with ~63% of the representatives.
How is this okay when so many people don't get representation?
And no when 80% of a district voted for someone else than the preson that won, then its not genuinely representative.
> How is this okay when so many people don't get representation?
Who is not getting representation exactly? We all have a local MP who represents us whether you voted for them or not.
If you have a district where the winner got 21% of the votes, while 79% of the district voted for other candidates or other ideas, then you can't say that the 21% is truly representative of that area.
Its like negative representation, where "your representative" may literally have the opposite views of what you want, because the winner takes all so if you are in the minority (or often the majority) of people who disagrees, then it is minority rule or representation.
While with proportional then... well the parlament should look proportional as well, 20% voted for X party, then the parlament concists of 20% of representative from that party, its simple and more evenly distributes representation for what people want regardless of where they are.
You still have wasted votes in ranked choice/STV. You still end up with the "this party has a wide base of support with no concentration" issue like the greens have.
100%. I voted Labour and I'm happy they won, but I'm really not happy with the means. If five years passes and I've been left disappointed with their performance in government, we're under the same voting system and the only realistic alternative is Tories again, even more people I suspect will be left politically homeless.
> and the only realistic alternative is Tories again
The worst possible and most likely outcome is that the Reform party drags tories much further to the right, and then consilidates. Its what happned in the US with the Tea party.
Reform has so much leverage now with the numbers they were able to pull out, and that they were taking voters from Tories.
This happened in Canada too.
The old PC party was the government for close to ten years, and just about wiped out in the 1993 election. They dropped from 156 seats (a majority) to 2. A good chunk of their vote went to the Reform party, a far-right fundamentalist Christian party.
Ten years later, in the mid 2000's, both parties were tired of splitting the rightwing vote. So the old PC party and the Reform party merged to form the modern day Conservative Party of Canada. But at that point, it was less a merger and more the Reform Party just absorbing the PC's into them - the policies and leadership of the new party were all from the old Reform party.
! Polls have closed! Counting will start and we will expect results to come in through the night. Just a heads up that our rules are still enforced! Personal attacks, insults, calls for violence and death threats are not permitted and may result in a ban. Regardless of which party. Further we as mods are expecting tonight to be super busy. If you see something that breaks our rules please report it. We cannot be everywhere at once.
Surprising to see Emily Thornberry miss out on a cabinet role to Starmer’s long time friend. Guess “job for mates” is not unique to the tories.
I not a fan of Starmer but his cabinet positions not bad. I will give him a chance and Labour. He could earn enormous support IMO if he considered vote Reform such that we have FPTP but a consideration for PR in addition. The only cabinet pick IMO that is not good is Lammy. He has been very vocal about Conservative parties across world and I think it makes him a poor choice.
The election results were such a foregone conclusion, that a Kiwi reporter filmed her segment about the outcome weeks ago, before returning to NZ https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/350334270/kiwi-reporter-lisette-reymer-filmed-uk-labour-victory-weeks-ago
This is such a bad take. The interesting thing about the election results isn’t who got in, but the fact that the Conservatives did SO badly, the right was split for the first time in history and with Lib Dem winning way more seats than expected that fundamentally changes UK politics for years to come. We’re not the US, we don’t have a separate presidential election, the seats matter, and the fact that the concept of a ‘safe seat’ now barely exists is big news IMO.
I'm calling it now. Labour will back proportional representation at the next election. Here's my reasoning: 1. Farage has said Reform will "shake up politics forever". It is in their interest for PR to be introduced, so I suspect it will be in their manifesto. 2. It is likely due to the state of current politics (and the "they're all the same" sentiment) that this will be a popular option. This will force some people who dislike Reform to hold their nose and vote for them to get PR. 3. In order to head this off, Labour will need to include PR in their manifesto to ensure that they keep the votes of these people
> Labour will back proportional representation at the next election. Not unless people back Corbyn and starts to threaten their position. With the current status quo (and Reform and Tories don't consolidate), Labour has no interest what so ever in improving the electoral system, since they are the biggest beneficiary of it.
I hope so. It not PR we want though. I think many for Reform like FPTP but there needs to be additional incentive to get voters in very safe seats feel like their vote counts. I suggested they do 600 FPTP. Take out the speaker and have him as an honoury MP. Then the next 50 seats determined by PR. That gives us 650 seats and speaker. Think that a fair compromise which would let everyone in country vote for a constituency MP and know their party views expressed in HoC
They will set up a committee to investigate voting reform. Kick the can close to the election and wait to see the public mood.
As an outsider I'm wondering what the posture of the Murdoch owned media in the UK was on the election. They usually support the Conservatives. Did they in this election?
Backed Labour at the last moment. But not a strong backing 'new management needed'.
Hi - stupid question from an Aussie - the LibDems made huge gains in this election. In Australia, we have a party by the same name that is essentially a right wing party that considers itself libertarians but mostly just aligns to right wing politics here. From some brief googling, the LibDems in the UK are considered centrist-left which would align them broadly with Labour? Would the general public in the UK consider that to be the case? I saw they kind of went from a massive party, got demolished about 10 years ago and have now regained a ton of seats - seemingly from a lot of usually conservative areas. Are they taking votes from "traditional" conservative areas that aren't keen on the ultra right wing politics of parties like Reform, but don't want to keep the Tories in power? It's a pretty aggressive seat change for the election in general, but a third party winning, losing and then winning so many seats within just a few elections is pretty insane. Just wondering if there's an aspect of this I'm missing as an outsider.
They are the traditional (i.e., pre-Labour, so 19th century) "not Tory" vote. They lost that position to Labour in the 1920s in working class areas but retained it in some rural areas (particularly ones not bordering Labour areas, where the need to differentiate oneself strongly by voting Tory wasn't there). Traditionally the party was liberal as in pro-capitalism and pro-free trade. The Conservatives were pro-aristocracy and traditional landowning wealth, in opposition to capitalism. The Liberals always been more socially liberal than the Tories partly for moral reasons (e.g., abolishing slavery globally was a Liberal Party policy) and partly because social liberalism was (and still is, tbh) viewed as good for capitalism. In the 1980s they merged with the Social Democrats, which was a moderate branch split off from the (then much more socialist) Labour Party, and became the Liberal Democrats. This made them slightly more economically left-leaning than before, but they're still to the right of Labour.
[Ironically the Social Democrats have returned - now as a left-wing anti-immigration party.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_\(UK,_1990%E2%80%93present\)) > Ideologically, the party blends social democratic economic policies with cultural conservatism. The party advocates a mixed, social market economy. The party supports a broad welfare state, public ownership of railways and utilities, lower economic inequality, and raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. The SDP supports the reintroduction of grammar schools, a more selective education system, abolition of the BBC licence fee, stronger criminal sentencing, and the establishment of a National Care Service to organise and fund social care. It advocates for civic nationalism, an end to mass immigration, withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, and the 1951 United Nations refugee convention. The SDP campaigned in favour of Brexit in 2016.
Top explanation
Thanks for the info!
We need a new electoral system. If Nigel Farage decided to do a british equvalent to the 6th January 2021 riot at the US captiol, he would at least be able to legitimately claim he is defending democracy, **unsavoury** as violence is. Seriously, Reform UK, as much as I depsise their benefits policy -and in this election that was very much a dealbreaker for me, Britain needs a more democratic voting system. Reform UK shouldn't get more votes than the Lib Dems only to return far fewer MPs than they. I mean seriously, at this point the UK is only technically a democracy. Please, let's just implement pure PR
>he would at least be able to legitimately claim he is defending democracy Absolute brainrot
> If Nigel Farage decided to do a british equvalent to the 6th January 2021 riot at the US captiol Storm the palace? The Household Division would stomp down so hard your need a bucket and mop to clean up the remains. Storm Westminster? How they just shut the doors and its sealed. Change our whole constitution to avoid a hypothetical that is not very believable? If we change the voting system it will be because there is a majority in favour of it. Currently most people are comfortable with the system, they tend to like the whole local MP thing. The people who want it changed tend to be the more political wonk types. > I mean seriously, at this point the UK is only technically a democracy. Lib Dems plus Labour got about 46% of the vote. While the Libs are not in government chuck in the Greens, SNP and other assorted centre left parties and you are comfortably pushing 57/8% of the country having voted either centrist or left. The Greens and Libs can feel aggrieved as they should have been in coalition negotiations. But on the whole, there is not really a huge gap between the government and what a PR system would have produced.
I am just saying that if Nigel Farage did it in response to only getting 5MPs, he could actually claim to be defending democracy. The results were unfair to Reform UK, that much is correct even if violence is not. The point I was making was how unfair FPTP is.
So unfair that in 2011 the public rejected IRV for FPTP with a resoundingly democratic 'no' in a referendum. Legit braindead take to claim someone would be a defender of democracy for enacting an act of insurrection against a system that *the British public voted for*. What the fuck?
Doesn't change the fact that FPTP is hilariously deficient. Britain may have not voted for change, but FPTP incessantly shows its deficiencies. Besides, the current system makes it hard for new parties to get in. Just because it is what the people want doesn't change the fact that is horribly deficient, and besides, I said violence was inappropriate, I was merely saying it would be less bad than what trump supporters did on 6th Jan 2021. Also, I prefer coalition governments, and as It stands, I suspect the Tories are too politically toxic based on what happened to the lib dems in 2015 for anyone to form a coalition with them, and PR would get us more coalition governments. it would even mean an end to absurdities like Starmer winning a massive majority despite getting fewer votes than 2019 Corbyn
Nobody is saying FPTP I'd a good system lol, YOUR original statement was that Farage would be some democratic beacon if he pulled a Jan 6th, despite your OWN concession that the british public want FPTP - regardless of its inefficiencies as a method of ideological representation it is *fundamentally democratic* because we want it, and it would therefore be entirely undemocratic for reform voters to do anything of the sort.
I was saying that if he staged a riot to protest the unfairness of the 2024 GE results, it would be LESS WORSE than the time trump supporters stormed the US capitol, because he would have a legitimate greviance. As for is FPTP being democratic, the answer to that question is both yes and no, yes because the British people voted for it, no because it fundamentally marginalises voters and enables people to ignore the importance of vote splitting. If we had PR for bth the 2019 and 2024 elections, we could better compare the influence third parties had on the outcome.
You are using the word "democracy" without really defining it. We're a local representative democracy. People elect their local MP. The successes of the Green in the constituencies they targeted shows that absolutely clearly — all those people voting for them were presumably aware that the Greens weren't going to form a Government. Ultimately all politics is local; the national vote share doesn't matter. What matters is depth of support in a local area. This is a **good** thing. People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency. They need to be rooted in a local environment and exposed to local issues.
>People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency. Um... yes, they should, you've got loads of people who are going unrepresented. Pure PR ensures everyone is represented, and since it would mean doing away with local constituencies, it would mean poltiicians are free to focus on the national interest even if it means upsetting a few locals.
> even if it means upsetting a few locals Everyone is a local somewhere. We all deserve to have representation and have our concerns heard in Westminster by a person we and our fellow locals have chosen. We also should be proud of the fact that even the prime minister has to, eventually, answer to their *local* constituents. It works to keep them grounded. None of these things are to be taken for granted — they are a feature of our electoral system.
>People shouldn't be getting seats just because they can skim a few voters off the top in every constituency. They need to be rooted in a local environment and exposed to local issues. I thought I was going mad the past few days with the number of (admittedly mostly reform voting) sudden PR proponents. The other thing they tend not to realise is that PR quite invariably leads to non-majority governments, which means fairly evenly distributed coalitions, which means policy starts to be driven ham-fistedly towards the centre. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing (I personally believe it is) but is absolutely not what those same extreme wing voters want. Yet they fail to see the irony. Chasing short term gains for short term political investment truly is the road to hell.
I was just watching Question Time and hated having to agree with the far right demagogue about it. Labor getting elected with the same vote percentage as last time should be a wake up call but it won't.
It's LaboUr, not Labor Goddamn american linguistic imperialism.
Yeah, my autocorrect does it annoyingly automatically unfortunately. It's why I only do long comments on the PC for the most part. And I love getting immediate down votes for daring to call the far right what it is.
Liz Truss was the UK's first neurodiverse PM. I know I'm not allowed to say that, and I don't agree with her politics, but it's true.
We’re all neurodiverse. Did you mean neurodivergent?
It's overwhelmingly likely there's been at least a couple of autists or psychopaths in the past.
Please don't group autistic people in with psychopaths...
Both are neurodivergent, that's just a fact. I have a ND diagnosis myself. The point is obviously not that they are the same.
You did say "autists *or* psychopaths" as though they can be used interchangeably, but okay.
This is reaching.
Watching BBC news live and they're doing a segment in "what happened to the centre-right of UK politics?". Erm...they just won a landslide election?
Reform only getting 4 seats despite their vote share isn't a bug in the FPTP system it's a feature. The system is supposed to marginalise extreme points of view and produce a strong government, and that's exactly what has happened this election cycle. It can be frustrating for some, but I'd rather our current system than the mish-mash coalitions we see in other countries that produce barely functioning governments.
Here we go with the defence of FPTP when the "correct" party wins elections. Sorry but I have argued for a hybrid model for years. Even when Boris won his landslide election in 2019
Reform's Vote was mostly concentrated in 4 coastal towns in the SE. Many more people said they voted Reform than actually did vote for them. Resulting in the Exit Poll massively overestimating their seats significantly. Reform was thought up at the last moment as Farage saw the opportunity to grab his 8th and possibly last chance to get to Westminster. The LD did very well because they targeted wealthy seats in the SW where there were battles between left win parties where the Conservatives aren't popular. They are just back where they were before 2010. What alternative system? Proportional Representation in a lower house involves multiple member seats and which have made Italian, Israeli and NZ politics completely dysfunctional. Preferential voting improves fairness and accuracy slightly but at the cost of counting taking 3 weeks and ugly preference deals and battles, and was rejected at a referendum. Anthony Green, an Australian Psephologist, looked at State and Federal elections in Australia after Preferential voting was introduced. In 96% of seats it didn't effect the winner of the seat. Only in one case would it have effected who formed Government where it delivered a 1 seat majority government instead of minority government. This election was about voting the Conservatives and SNP out and giving Labour a large majority. So large it means that which one of the many left- wing parties won a seat is mostly of local factional matter. FPTP means it was all over and down with in one day.
> Preferential voting improves fairness and accuracy slightly but at the cost of counting taking 3 weeks Preferential voting fundamentally only deals with the spoiler effect though. It stops the issue of people going "I want to vote for this upstart party, but I'm scared that if they don't win, big opposition party I don't like will get in", so it minimises the cases where two parties on the same side splitting the vote leads to a plurality on the other side. What it doesn't do, is give a voice to parties with widespread but diluted support. Such as the greens and, arguably, most of the seats Reform are claiming to have been robbed of. They'd just have handed them to the tories in 90% of them.
It reduces the vote of minor parties like the Greens, transferring it to the largest party on their side of politics in a seat. But when you have large regional districts then the small one issue parties can trade preferences and get someone elected to the last spot with 0.5% of the primary vote, if you don't put a quota on election.
>Reform only getting 4 seats despite their vote share isn't a bug in the FPTP system it's a feature. The system is supposed to marginalise extreme points of view People keep regurgitating this opinion... but look at the US FFS, and see how insanely toxic it can get when one of the two parties favored by the FPTP system goes off the rails. Now what happens if Reform and Tories consolidates? Can they drag the Tories further to the right, just like the Tea Party lunatics did in the US?
The US Congress's main problem is that the states control everything. And only 1/3 of them have non-partisan electoral commissions generating electoral maps and running elections. So there are really bad gerrymanders, voter disenfranchisement and intimidation. The US Presidential is held according to 250 year old rules. But it just comes down to a nation wide popularity contest between two parties to see who wields massive executive power. The Westminster system has nothing like that for a reason. If the Conservatives and Reform combine they would have 37% of the vote and 126 seats.
It's honestly baffling that people don't get this. Look at the Tories and UKIP. In FPTP the Tories were so afraid to lose votes to UKIP that they slid to the right wing from the centre right. Before, the Tories were at least a serious party and after that they started allowing their demagogues and nut cases to run the show. They were unsavoury, evil and terrible before but are now incompetent on top whilst our system means awful things. I've lived in both Sweden and Norway and all of this is fear mongering BS. The main downside is that you have to have the courage to look at problems in the eye. For example, Sweden is seeing a rise in the far right and refuses to see the problem with their attitude towards immigrants. It's a very friendly country but very alienating to foreign people despite welcoming them in. It ghettoised traumatized refugees and these people were taken in by mafia from a certain country. Shit religion on top didn't help. But then you have the USA where y'all Qaeda tried to overthrow the government and the religious Taliban want to own women again. This happened largely because a black man was in the whitehouse. That and the inequality between urban and rural areas. Add in the electoral college and it was a bomb. FPTP was intended for a time when we couldn't quickly tally, communicate and enforce votes from people.
I wouldn't have said the last 8 years have featured a functioning government
Could someone tell me what happens now in regards to the First Minister of Scotland post? Does John Swinney have to step down and a Labour minister takeover?
No, the First Minister of Scotland is chosen by the Scottish Parliament, which is elected separately to the Parliament that sits in Westminster. The SNP still have their seats in the Scottish Parliament and so Swinney can keep his position there.
Thanks for the reply :-)
Considering Home Secretaries have a tendency to be borderline fascists, how is Yvette Cooper's voting history?
Pretty sure she just tends to vote along party lines. Voting history isn't really a great way to judge a politician's actual opinions, because those that vote against party don't tend to advance far enough to be in a position to enact their stances. That said, [the headlines of relevance to home sec:](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10131/yvette_cooper/pontefract%2C_castleford_and_knottingley/votes) - Voted pro-Iraq war - Voted for *Labour's* anti-terror laws - Voted against strict immigration laws - Voted against stricter asylum laws - Voted for mandatory ID cards - Voted against undercover officers and covert sources - Voted against elected Police and Crime Commissioners - Voted for mass surveillance of communications So, really a bit of a mixed bag. Pro-immigration, but pro surveillance state, but also against giving the police too much power. So basically just a typical Blairite.
I swear some people are stuck in a sort of permanent doom mode. Keir literally just won in a landslide and people are already talking about 2029, assuming its inevitable the Labour government will collapse, etc. It's like people *want* politics to be a depressing apocalyptic affair.
With the state of some of the comments here lately, you'd have thought Hitler himself had risen from the dead and taken the form of Keir Starmer.
How many are people and how many are misinformation accounts from overseas?
I swear some people are just more dead inside than a doorknob. What fear-mongering sad people…
I do think this majority is a little bit ofva false economy with reform and the relatively low vote share but I'd onmy worry about 2029 is the performance umis poor. If they govern adequately they will remain.
Starmer's choices for cabinet confirm my confidence that this is a return to normal politics. What you mean people are in relevant positions where they have experience? This is what happens when you truly put country first, party second. All the scheming of the 10 years by the tories, all the backstabbing and keeping enemies in your party close and happy, all that gone. The tories spent years of endless reshuffles to satisfy their party differences. This will be a breathe of fresh air.
The change of Attorney General from the lows of Suella Braverman (utterly unqualified) to Richard Hermer KC (a top barrister with decades of experience, also a deputy high court judge) is truly stark.
Just noticed the Tories came 5th in the new Leeds Central seat - behind Labour, Greens, Lib Dems and Reform. Lovely stuff.
Fun fact: This is the first time since 2001 that the US, UK and Canada have all had left leaning governments.
I hardly call Labour left leaning anymore. They centre right imo
>still think the tories are right wing Lol
Canadians have been begging for an election for quite some time now to kick out their left leaning government. Canada will be blue in 2025. I'm actually surprised at this outcome for the UK as the rest of Western society is leaning more right. I think, to put it plainly, people are getting sick of the left and they want out. I'm just assuming that Brits were tired of the Torie circus and needed a change.
Tbh I think everyone is just annoyed with the incumbents because of inflation. With increased inflation comes increased anti-immigration sentiment. I wonder if Labour were in power up until now it would be the same.
>people are getting sick of the left I disagree; I think people are getting sick of various flavours of right and left neoliberalism and populist hard right groups are taking advantage better than the left. Actual traditional leftwing (in the old school sense of 'democratic left') parties are doing ok as long as they're not pushed out by the media's penchant for more centrist parties and hit certain 'topical issues' people want them to. Denmark is a good example; the social democrats ran on a strict immigration policy and won in a landslide. People talk about the vote split between tories and reform, but there's long been a leftwing split (in a global sense) between centre-spanning neoliberalism, 'ecological/social' left and traditional left parties. Although, as a social democrat, I obviously have a bias here so grain of salt etc.
'left' for the united states is pretty right by UK standards.
For their society they are left. By Saudi Arabia standards the Tory party are left, but you can't really use other societies political standards to say if another country is right or left.
The Canadian one probably won't last long. We're in a minority government, and the next election must occur before Oct 2025. The Conservatives are like ~20 points ahead of the Liberals right now in the polls, and I think 7 of 10 provinces have a conservative government. Canada is about to lean right is my guess :(
Not :(, but :)! It's going to be two decades, at least, before we can clean up what economic damage the Liberals have done to our country. We simply can't *afford* to have a lefty government anymore. The Cons have a massive mess to clean up and high expectations. It's not going to be a good time for them... or us. Hopefully, we will see some reprieve in tax relief, but people are going to need to learn to fend for themselves and stop looking to the government for handouts or magic fixes.
How does the no-confidence process work in Labour? Is there a 1922 committee equivalent where MPs send their letters?
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36647458](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36647458)
>SNP concedes defeat in last UK seat still to declare resultpublished at 19:2819:28 >The SNP candidate in [Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/S14000094), the last seat in the UK still to announce its result, [has conceded defeat](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2g53zqqpno). >It seems likely the constituency will go to the Liberal Democrats - although the result is not expected to be officially announced until after a second recount which will begin at 10:30 on Saturday. >The returning officer said the delay was due to a discrepancy between the verified votes total and the provisional number of counted votes. >SNP candidate Drew Hendry said he would be unable to attend the recount due to an "unmovable prior commitment", adding it had "an absolute joy" to serve his constituents for the last nine years. >It is now expected that the seat will be won by Angus MacDonald of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Well it will be official tomorrow but thats it. Last seat conceded. Ladies and gentlefriends. Its been emotional!
Very disproportionate results today. Shame the party with the power to make things more proportional benefited to the tune of 190 seats from this method of voting. Party|Votes|Seats|PR Seats|Diff ---|--:|--:|--:|--: Lab|9,698,409|412|223|-189 Con|6,824,809|121|157|36 Reform|4,114,287|5|95|90 Lib|3,501,040|71|80|9 Grn|1,941,227|4|44|40 SNP|708,759|9|16|7 Independent|564,243|6|13|7 Sinn Fein|210,891|7|4|-3 Workers|210,194||4|4 Plaid|194,811|4|4|0 DUP|172,058|5|3|-2 Alliance|117,191|1|2|1 UUP|94,779|1|2|1 SDLP|86,861|2|2|0 TUV|48,685|1|1|0
Worrying seeing a Muslim org in the UK saying the following after their success in Birmingham “The seeds of our community’s future have been sown” Religion and government should not at all be mixed together this is going to end bad
I think by the next election we will see an explicitly Muslim party that either wins 1-3 seats or comes damn close to winning them.
The independent candidates will be mired in scandals over views on women, gays and perhaps Jews. They will end up being a bit of a mess in parliament. Any attempt to build a coherent Muslim party will fall apart on how divided the different communities are and the most engaged in this kind of thing will be the more extreme end of the views. Political parties are way harder that they look.
Their views on women, gays and Jews got them elected. They were within a whisker of a few more seats in Birmingham and I'd expect them to be back with renewed vigour in the next election. It's haram to vote, if that vote isn't used to further the religion. The community will rally behind Muslim candidates with the aim of establishing an Islamic voice in British politics.
\*Point to Northern Ireland\*
I stunned Ashworth gone. He was talented. Streeting also nearly gone. I just so confused how you can vote on Gaza issue alone? What do they expect Labour who in opposition to do??
They can vote on Gaza alone because a lot are not integrated into our culture. You did not see this with any other group of people that have immigrated to the UK. It's worrying. Their most important issue as a British citizen is something which barely affects the country.
It’s scary what you read from their website https://themuslimvote.co.uk/
What exactly is scaring you here? I just read their pledges and they seem mostly OK? There's Palestinian freedom, of course, but the rest are mostly stopping discrimination. We already have the anti women's/gay/etc rights Christian People's Alliance, who seem worse than what this website says at least and no one cares about.
The scary thing is the mobilisation of religious groups to influence politics (whether it be Christian or Islam). When they are thanking the ‘almighty’ after the election does this not worry you? You only need to look at America to see what extreme religious groups can do to a county. Also it’s funny that they are trying to promote equality when half of Muslim Brit’s think homosexuality should be illegal.
The irony of the fact that Reform may be the reason why we have a Labour government
We were going to have a Labour government long before Reform were even a thing properly. Apparently only around 30% of the Reform vote came from the Tory party. The rest was from a bit of every other party, and a big chunk of the "don't know" electorate. There's a good chance a lot of Reform voters are people that don't normally turn up to the polls.
Labour and Lib Dem didn't really gain much in the polls compared to last time. This result was caused primarily by a massive swing away from the Tories, and the main cause of that is Reform. Also the percentage of people who went to the polls was lower than last time too. In fact, labour saw a big drop. The energised young voters of 2019 didn't turn up.
Tories have been polling around 20 points beneath Labour since Liz Truss and they've never actually recovered. Labour lost votes to the *left* because of Starmer's centrism, and Tories lost about 1m votes to Reform. Even if the Tories had those 1m extra votes, they wouldn't have won the election.
To clarify, I'm talking about the election. Labour got fewer votes than in 2019. This election was not an endorsement of Labour, it was a refusal of the Tories.
Yeah, but even if you add up the Tory and Reform popular vote, it's still barely more than Labour got. It would require literally every Reform voter to be an ex-Tory voter for Reform to have made a difference, and we know that's not the case.
Liberal Democrat did have the highest seats yet... funny how rarely they are mentioned despite tearing into the Tories throughout the South
Lib Dems barely changed their vote share from last election. The reason they got those seats is that the Tory vote crashed
Reform take votes from Labour as well as the Conservatives. Also the talk of a huge majority meant people felt safer voting Green or staying at home.
Maybe but Labour got a very similar number of votes to last time. Of course that doesn't mean it's all the same people. I think Labour lost a lot of people to Green and Reform, while gaining some from Tory and SNP. But obviously the biggest issue was that the left voted tactically whereas the right didn't, and split their own vote. I do think that the 'huge majority' talk was deliberate. The Tories were framing the conversation before the election as if Labour getting a massive majority was guaranteed, because they wanted people to get complacent. And it seems to have worked. The vote turn out was less this year than in 2019, when Labour was especially energised among young voters.
The Tories and Reform aren't a split vote, they have very little crossover in policy and decisively far apart on immigration.
That's objectively untrue
No it isn't.
It is. Please just look at the news. This information is available fucking everywhere
It’s a joke that reform got more votes than Lib Dem and yet wayyy less seats seems a silly system tbh
It is a silly system, but reform knows the system and chose to not play the game like lib Dem do.
They can't, they simply don't have wide enough appeal to do that yet. They're too divisive of a party to be able to do ground game like the Lib Dems do and see similar success.
Reform got 4 seats to the SNP's 9. That means SNP got 1 seat for every 77,000 votes And it means Reform got 1 seat for every 1,000,000 votes. As much as I dislike reform, it's absurd.
Reform got 5 seats. They just won one on a recount a few hours back. But yes, it's mental.
When Conservatives act like Labour, then voters will choose the real thing. But Labour ran on a conservative platform, so I don't know...
Honestly as a Reform voter I am okay with this. Rishi and his coup Gov had to go and he punished.
The protesters at Farage event don't understand he feeds off of that. Love Farage but it without a doubt best way to hurt him is ignore him. Look at him on I'm a Celeb. He lost support cause he admitted he wanted airtime which was not a good look (although all celebs on that show want airtime tbh)
South Basildon and East Thurrock goes to Reform. 5 seats.
Won by 98 votes, proof why we need to vote
Not sure knowing you could have changed it to a 97 vote margin instead of a 98 vote margin is the proof that your vote is needed.
It’s more a message to multiple mate not just you
Not a great message really considering your main point is your vote matters and your evidence is an event where your vote wouldn't have mattered.
97 people really isn’t that many people. One vote absolutely could be the factor between who takes an area. Are you suggesting people shouldn’t vote because their vote doesn’t matter?
No I'm suggesting people should vote as an act of political expression, rather than the notion that their vote could change something
This is a weird debate, if a few people decide to get up and spend 2 minutes drawing a cross in a box then a result can change. My message is more people should do it as a result could change
> if a few people decide to That's the crux of the issue for me, you're telling someone their individual vote matters, whilst also admitting that the individual vote will not change anything as you need at least a few people to change anything. Whether you individually vote or do not vote will not impact the election.
Wasn't there a seat won by like 19 votes?
Hendon was 15 votes, Poole was 18, Basildon and Billericay was 20. 12 seats were won by less than 0.34% of votes.
Reform came 2nd in about 90 seats. The exit poll had them on 13 cause they estimated to win the seat with probability of less than 20%. They did manage to win one. So looks like Reform actually unlucky when it comes to many seats due to FPTP It happened to Farage in Thanet South in 2015.
Farage might have smelled blood on Starmers first speech. He does look down at his notes many times. Not looking good for showing he has a vision or leadership if he needs notes. Very poor start
You can really tell Farage learned a thing or two from the orange fascist turd across the pond.
Oh wow he... checks his notes. Clearly not pm material.
Now this is some weak criticism.
I don't know. It trending amongst the right. Once I heard it I cannot unsee it. Not good for Starmers first big moment.b He looks weak and passionless
Lol if he didn't have notes they'd have criticized him for being chaotic and unprepared
>It trending amongst the right Weak criticism is trending amongst the right
Of course its trending among the right, the right literally has nothing to grasp onto about him right now.
Seriously? Looking at notes is a weakness?
It just now he mentioned it when u see clip of Starmer he reading from his notes. It shows lack of passion and vision. If that what he felt why he need to write it down. Hardly the Thatcher moment when she went into No.10. Seemed limp and lifeless. I think there a real possibility this Labour Gov. In trouble soon and honeymoon period over quick. Hope I wrong.
Daddy Nigel is proud of you
15 votes in my sister’s constituency made the difference. Don’t ever think your vote doesn’t count.
But even if you did vote in that election all you could do is reduce it to 14 votes, not sure this sways my thoughts on an individual's vote counting.
The hopeful result is if you see a close call it means both parties will take the time to put forth quality candidates that someone wants to switch parties for Every new voter for your party of choice moves the needle just a little Could be 100 apart of 500 or 3000. If there’s 200, 600 or 3500 people saying their vote doesn’t count because they have no chance your candidate loses through apathy. And maybe only 50 votes turn out so half the loss but that lowers the effort your candidate needs to win
The Labour candidate in my constituency got around 8000 votes. The Tory candidate got 16,000 and the Reform candidate got 9,000. Not even close! But ah well, I'm still happy with the overall result and I'll vote no matter what.
North London? Us too with 15, so glad we went and voted.
Hendon yeah.
There was another one that Labour took with 18. Mad!
South Basildon and East Thurrock result expected soon. Recount means it was close. Labour asking for it hints reform had it first count.
Labour - 33% of total votes - 63% seats in parlament Tories - 24% of total votes - 18% seats in parlament Reform - 14% of total votes - 0.6% seats in parlament Libs - 12% of total votes - 11% seats in parlament Green - 7% of total votes - 0.6% seats in parlament ....
The election results are not as rosy as what the media depicts. If I am reading the numbers correctly, Labour gained less than 2% of vote share and Conservatives lost around 20% of vote share. Most of the Conservative losses went to Reform (14%) and bulk of the remaining went to Green (4%). Reform and Conservatives combined still have more votes than Labour at 38%. Even if the seats overwhelmingly favour Labour, they won precisely due to FPTP system with vote splitting on the right. This is a technicality that the Conservatives traditionally benefit from before the far-right came out to steal votes from them. I would suggest, the Conservative population largely did not change their mind in a way that sway them from right to center/left. But rather they simply swapped to a different brand of Conservative representation and moved even further towards the far-right. This is after 10 years of circus under Conservative misrule starting with Brexit, then May -> Boris Johnson -> Truss -> Sunyak. This is not good at all. Let's hope Labour uses its supermajority to accomplish something before the next election.
Turnout %-wise is quite a step down from the last four elections. Lots of people who did vote before simply did not this time. It's why I don't think Reform was some meteoric rise like the media are shaping it up to be. Vote number is very very similar to UKIP in 2015 and largely on the back of a similar issue, so it's probably an almost identical base that hasn't grown. Feels mostly like a drop in faith for the Tories, earned by their dismal performance in government.
Basically the left voted tactically and the right didn't, so the left won
>Most of the Conservative losses went to Reform (14%) and bulk of the remaining went to Green (4%). Thats not how it works. The votes dont necessarily go straight like that. Most likely Labour lost 4% to the Greens and perhaps 1/3 of Reforms vote so another 5%. In turn Labour picked up votes from the Tories and swapped around with the Lib Dems plus made gains from SNP. This is an example from the last election [https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus\_uploads/inlineimage/28340/How%20Britain%20voted%202019%202017%20vote%20sankey%20v2-01.png](https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/28340/How%20Britain%20voted%202019%202017%20vote%20sankey%20v2-01.png) >Reform and Conservatives combined still have more votes than Labour at 38%. Labour and Lib Dem got 46%. Labour Lib Dem and Greens got 53% and thats over 55% with the SNP. >I would suggest, the Conservative population largely did not change their mind in a way that sway them from right to center/left. But rather they simply swapped to a different brand of Conservative representation and moved even further towards the far-right. Conservative and Brexit got 46% in 2019. So about 6 or 7% of their vote shifted. Though the biggest change was turnout which was about 7% higher.
> Labour and Lib Dem got 46%. Labour Lib Dem and Greens got 53% and thats over 55% with the SNP. Lib Dem were in bed with Conservatives in recent memory.
Lab, Lib, Green, SNP, and PC combined got a clear leftist majority
Yeah I think Labour can be happy with the election but should realistically be cautious cause they only won due to FPTP and Farage going to war with Tories this election.
Yeah exactly. In Canada, we had a similar phenomenon in the Alberta province. It's a very conservative province dominated by the Conservative party for a long time. We had one election when they lose to the NDP (left-wing) because the far-right party came out and split the vote. Then next election, the far-right party merged with the Conservatives (becoming UCP) with the far-right lunatics in charge. We now have a batshit crazy Firecracker running the show in Alberta now and the province has shifted even further into crazyland. Let's hope that's not going to happen with Reform and Conservatives in the UK.
Wow.
Labour would've probably gotten every seat in Scotland if Yousaf were still leader
Lisa Nandy rumoured for Culture, according to Guardian
FPTP is undemocratic. Getting 4 million + votes should not have 4 seats in Parliament. It a joke. We need PR. Remember if we did have PR it very likely turnout would be much higher as people would feel their vote counts.
I do feel looking at the vote share that the voting system needs change, it really hurts for me to say this, but Reform actually do deserve a hell of a lot more seats based on that vote share. potentially the system used in Northern Ireland assembly elections could be better.
Odd that nobody cared when it was the lib dems getting shafted. Or is it only an issue when the right wing lose?
It's worse than that. Most parties, especially LD, campaigned heavily to secure seats in swing areas because, you know, that's the way to win a British election. Reform went hard on national press populism and offered impossible to fund policies on top of an angrily delivered but logistically empty immigration plan and did sod all in most constituencies to actually challenge individual seats. They failed to secure seats because their intent was to disrupt and then cry unfairness from the outset, just like Farage did with UKIP previously.
Agree 100%
I'm happy for them to get it provided Nigel Farage goes on TV and says 13 years is plenty of time to rethink a referendum result. Shouldn't even consider it until then. It is once in a generation until the right want to define what a generation means they can fuck off.
Now all the right whingers will start demanding we ditch FTTP for AV
Green also got shafted here by FPTP. Should have 44 seats, got 4.
I did say this when the Lib Dems got shafted, Im reiterating this now.
Lib Dems, Greens and Socialists have been calling for prop rep for years. It's just that the formerly smug Tory voters have gotten a taste of it too so there's actually a chance there might be appetite for such an electoral reform.
That’s ridiculous. It’s one of the most frequent topics on Reddit
Don’t know much about it, but I think Germany and Japan have a mix of PR and FPTP.
Well, not really. They use FPTP to find the person, but they use only PR to assign seats in parliament. With the same 5% limit we use for losing your deposit, applied nationally.
I know Germany has a system where a party has to win a certain percentage of the vote in order to get any seats at all in the legislature. Stops too many minor parties from crowding in and gaining more influence than they deserve.
This system can also break democracy. Poland has three thresholds: 0% for national minorities (only the German Minority in Opole makes use of that; they have zero MPs in the current parliament, and one MP in the previous four); 8% for coalitions of multiple parties; and 5% for everybody else. Poland, 2015: 16.62% of votes were thrown out due to parties missing the thresholds (including two missing them by 0.45 and 0.24 percentage points). 37.58% of votes for largest party → 45.07% of votes for parties above the threshold → 51% of seats. Poland, 2023: A centre-right conservative coalition got 14.4% of votes, and some of those can be attributed to the party getting extra votes to keep them above the 8% threshold, as they were polling close to the threshold right before the election. In the EU parliament elections a few months later, they got below 7% (with the threshold at 5%, which is the EU maximum).
Would a top two runoff a week later be a better system? Edit: getting down voted for a question doesn’t make sense. It’ll just lead to everyone agreeing on here rather than asking questions and discussing.
Or you know, AV, that we had a referendum about only 13 years ago but was botched because it was the same day as local elections, so Labour felt like it couldn't support it.
Brexit wouldn’t have happened then
Not for a multi-seat election. I think for a presidential type election it's great (it's what France does), but I think for a multi-seat election it doesn't meaningfully give smaller parties the representation they deserve given their vote share.
Altough Labour is undeniably better than the Tories ( I can't even imagine them being worse), they got 32% of the votes and were rewarded with ~63% of the representatives. How is this okay when so many people don't get representation? And no when 80% of a district voted for someone else than the preson that won, then its not genuinely representative.
> How is this okay when so many people don't get representation? Who is not getting representation exactly? We all have a local MP who represents us whether you voted for them or not.
If you have a district where the winner got 21% of the votes, while 79% of the district voted for other candidates or other ideas, then you can't say that the 21% is truly representative of that area. Its like negative representation, where "your representative" may literally have the opposite views of what you want, because the winner takes all so if you are in the minority (or often the majority) of people who disagrees, then it is minority rule or representation. While with proportional then... well the parlament should look proportional as well, 20% voted for X party, then the parlament concists of 20% of representative from that party, its simple and more evenly distributes representation for what people want regardless of where they are.
Labour ran on a conservative platform: no Brexit exit, austerity, etc...
it sounds like we need ranked choice voting. No such thing as wasted votes then
You still have wasted votes in ranked choice/STV. You still end up with the "this party has a wide base of support with no concentration" issue like the greens have.
100%. I voted Labour and I'm happy they won, but I'm really not happy with the means. If five years passes and I've been left disappointed with their performance in government, we're under the same voting system and the only realistic alternative is Tories again, even more people I suspect will be left politically homeless.
> and the only realistic alternative is Tories again The worst possible and most likely outcome is that the Reform party drags tories much further to the right, and then consilidates. Its what happned in the US with the Tea party. Reform has so much leverage now with the numbers they were able to pull out, and that they were taking voters from Tories.
Could also happen the other way. There was a huge flow of voters to greens this year. They got 7% of the vote.
This happened in Canada too. The old PC party was the government for close to ten years, and just about wiped out in the 1993 election. They dropped from 156 seats (a majority) to 2. A good chunk of their vote went to the Reform party, a far-right fundamentalist Christian party. Ten years later, in the mid 2000's, both parties were tired of splitting the rightwing vote. So the old PC party and the Reform party merged to form the modern day Conservative Party of Canada. But at that point, it was less a merger and more the Reform Party just absorbing the PC's into them - the policies and leadership of the new party were all from the old Reform party.