[teestub]

Truss loses her seat! Probably a picture seen around the country to greater or lesser extent, Con, Lab and Reform all got >20% <30% of the vote, with Lab squeaking in.

[Davo]

Looking at the percentages for each party, these are rough figures without a calculator:
Labour, Lib Dem & Green: 53%
Conservative & Reform: 38%

So, overall there were a majority of people voting for “progressive “ parties but these were split and if the right joins together the results would look very different indeed.
Personally I think this justifies the Labour and Starmer approach here of trying not to lose and trying to do nothing that would alienate those voters in the middle.

Our local MP Michael Fabricant lost simply because Reform took nearly 10000 votes from him. However not far from the same amount voted Lib Dem and Green here as well which seems baffling considering it was a straight contest between Labour and Tory here.

[stone]

FT has clear info https://ig.ft.com/uk-general-election/2024/results/
For High Peak:
2024 Lab 22533votes 45.8% win
2019 Lab 24254votes 44.8% lose
2017 Lab 26753votes 49.7% win

I'm delighted that Starmer has booted the Tories out. I'm hoping and praying that he does something OK in power.

I also take some (pointless) delight in the fact that it seems my local result is echoed up and down the country. Starmer trumpets about how he "has permanently changed Labour to win back the trust of working people". From the numbers, that seems to be Starmer winning the trust of Tory voters to embolden them stay at home or vote Reform. That evidently leads to a Labour(of a sort) landslide and that's great but I'm not convinced it says great things about our electoral system.

I'm also delighted Corbyn kept his seat   

I just belatedly found BBC infographics https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001287

[Oldmanmatt]

Looking at the percentages for each party, these are rough figures without a calculator:
Labour, Lib Dem & Green: 53%
Conservative & Reform: 38%

So, overall there were a majority of people voting for “progressive “ parties but these were split and if the right joins together the results would look very different indeed.
Personally I think this justifies the Labour and Starmer approach here of trying not to lose and trying to do nothing that would alienate those voters in the middle.

Our local MP Michael Fabricant lost simply because Reform took nearly 10000 votes from him. However not far from the same amount voted Lib Dem and Green here as well which seems baffling considering it was a straight contest between Labour and Tory here.

I agree that looking at as progressives vs conservatives (small p&c) is a better way to view society than Left vs Right, but, allowing for protest votes, I’d bet society is pretty evenly split between progressive and conservative.

[Wellsy]

Congrats due to Will and Daisy in particular I'd say!

[teestub]

Our local MP Michael Fabricant lost 

Sad to see the back of the best wig in politics!

Independent probably the best thing for Corbyn, he can sit on his own and vote against things to his heart’s content.

Some of the madness of FPTP summed up by Lib Dem with 71 seats off 12% of the vote and Reform with 4 seats off 14%!

[stone]

Leicester has utterly zany results.

The Tories won Leicester East with a medley of various expelled previous Labour MPs standing as rival candidates 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001326
https://www.itv.com/news/central/2024-07-05/shock-result-as-leicester-east-turns-conservative

And Labour front bencher Jonathan Ashworth  lost Leicester South to a "this is for Gaza" independent
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001327

[Davo]

Looking at the percentages for each party, these are rough figures without a calculator:
Labour, Lib Dem & Green: 53%
Conservative & Reform: 38%

So, overall there were a majority of people voting for “progressive “ parties but these were split and if the right joins together the results would look very different indeed.
Personally I think this justifies the Labour and Starmer approach here of trying not to lose and trying to do nothing that would alienate those voters in the middle.

Our local MP Michael Fabricant lost simply because Reform took nearly 10000 votes from him. However not far from the same amount voted Lib Dem and Green here as well which seems baffling considering it was a straight contest between Labour and Tory here.

I agree that looking at as progressives vs conservatives (small p&c) is a better way to view society than Left vs Right, but, allowing for protest votes, I’d bet society is pretty evenly split between progressive and conservative.

I think you are correct here, I think turnout was quite low around here and possibly with higher turnout the vote would have been almost a dead heat between progressive and conservative.

I have no figures on this and it’s just anecdote but I didn’t see anyone under 50 at the polling station yesterday but I did see an elderly gentleman with a walking stick hobbling across the car park to vote. I wonder how many young people (under 30?) voted yesterday?

[Davo]

FT has clear info https://ig.ft.com/uk-general-election/2024/results/
For High Peak:
2024 Lab 22533votes 45.8% win
2019 Lab 24254votes 44.8% lose
2017 Lab 26753votes 49.7% win

I'm delighted that Starmer has booted the Tories out. I'm hoping and praying that he does something OK in power.

I also take some (pointless) delight in the fact that it seems my local result is echoed up and down the country. Starmer trumpets about how he "has permanently changed Labour to win back the trust of working people". From the numbers, that seems to be Starmer winning the trust of Tory voters to embolden them stay at home or vote Reform. That evidently leads to a Labour(of a sort) landslide and that's great but I'm not convinced it says great things about our electoral system.

I'm also delighted Corbyn kept his seat   

I just belatedly found BBC infographics https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001287

Agree in all regards here. I’m glad Corbyn held on, he was dreadful leader but he has been a hardworking public servant for decades and needs to be respected for that. Yes, it doesn’t say anything good about our electoral system but at least for once I’m happy with the result.
Starmer has indeed made it possible for disgruntled Tory voters to stay at home by bringing the Labour Party closer to the centre. Like you I hope he takes the power and opportunity he now has to make a difference. Power like this most likely only comes along once in a generation and if he doesn’t accomplish things I suspect the public will swing against Labour very hard.

[remus]

Some of the madness of FPTP summed up by Lib Dem with 71 seats off 12% of the vote and Reform with 4 seats off 14%!

Small mercies! I fear what remains of the conservatives will see those reform numbers as a sign they need to become more far right though which is a scary prospect.

[petejh]

Glad that's all over. Tories deservedly had their ass handed to them in a sling.

All the stats show this election result was born from a volatile national mood of negativity towards the conservatives (and SNP), leading to an extremely weak consensus for a majority party despite the mask of a 'landslide victory':

Volatility: 2019 con landslide to 2024 lab landslide.
Negativity: Lowest voter turnout in a UK election since 1885!
Very weak consensus: The lowest vote share for a majority party ever? Despite the FPTP 'landslide victory' Labour's vote share is 34.6% - which is lower than the 40% Labour vote share for Corbyn's losing party in 2017 of 40% 
(Labour share was 32% in 2019 under Corbyn).

Other remarkable features. The vote share for Labour in England didn't increase at all, and their share of votes decreased in Wales - Labour's only gains in share of votes were in Scotland where the SNP imploded.


John Curtice:
Labour have won the 2024 general election with a landslide and are expected to end the night with a majority of 170. However, their victory is largely on the back of a dramatic 20 point decline in Conservative support.

This is likely to be the worst Conservative result in terms of seats in history, with the party winning as few as 129. It is also likely to be the highest Lib Dem tally since 1923, with the party winning 69 seats. However Labour's likely tally is, at 410, a little less than the 419 seats that they won in 1997.

Labour's vote share is expected to be up by just under two points across the country. This is entirely as a result of a 19 point increase in support in Scotland.

In Wales, the party's vote has actually fallen back by four points, while in England the party's vote is largely unchanged from 2019.

It is possible that Labour will secure its landslide on a lower share of the vote (35% in Great Britain) than any of Tony Blair's victories, including the 36% the party won in 2005. That itself was hitherto the lowest share of the vote won by a majority single party government.

In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour have won.


This was a vote against incumbent governments, not a vote for Labour's vision (whatever it is - nobody knows). I think based on the above I'd expect an extremely rough next election and wouldn't be surprised if there's another swing the opposite way!

With this massive majority Labour can enact whatever policies they want for the next 4-5 years. The party now has a choice to make, whether to allow the left of the party to agitate for and enact policies for a much more socialist vision for the UK to please the Stones of this world - and hope that the national mood improves in time for the next election to avoid another volatile protest vote the opposite way; or play it very safe by sticking to the middle ground and trying not to upset too many people by the time the next election rolls around.

In the meantime the US might be in meltdown, inflation on its next upswing, sovereign debt becoming unsustainable and China/Russia et al taking advantage. Interesting times!

[stone]

Does the lower turn out in 2024 mean that even with a slightly increased vote share than in 2019 there were actually fewer Labour votes than in 2019 (there certainly were more Labour votes in 2017)?

I haven't yet found total UK vote numbers.

To answer Pete's point, I think Labour's best hope for winning a second term will be to make positive changes of any kind. If they manage to get the NHS back on its feet and people feel better off and more hopeful, then they will get and deserve a second term.

[petejh]

Figures for 2019 from Commons Library: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8749/

Turnout was 67.3% The total registered electorate was 47.6 million

67.3% of 47.6 million = 32.03 million voter turnout.

Labour won 32.1% of votes = 10.28 million votes


Figures for 2024, need to wait to find out the total registered electorate.

[stone]

wikipedia now has 2024 Labour vote as 9,650,254 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_election

2019 Labour vote as 10,269,051 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election

2017 Labour vote as 12,877,918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Kingdom_general_election

zany FPTP 

Perhaps the LibDem result is even more zany
2024 votes=3,489,534 ; seats=71
2019 votes=3,696,419 ; seats=11

[petejh]

Yep, pretty zany.

Vote share visualised, my age-5 annotations. First 3 circles are Blair, next 2 are Corbyn, last one is Starmer.
(edit: actually that second Corbyn circle should maybe be higher as well, based on wikipedia numbers for 2019)

As the Telegraph put it:  'if Corbyn had just stayed on as leader he too would likely have won this majority'.
(impossible to prove obviously but interesting. And this is what Labour's left will very shortly begin agitating for.)

[stone]

As the Telegraph put it:  'if Corbyn had just stayed on as leader he too would likely have won this majority'.
(impossible to prove obviously but interesting. And this is what Labour's left will very shortly begin agitating for.)

Whilst I wish that were true, I doubt it.

I do think Corbyn would have won a small majority and would have done what the country needs and I hope that would have caused a long term change in our system with us lumped in with Norway and Finland etc as an inspiring example to the world 

I think you underestimate just how destroyed the Labour left is. Starmer has been far more ruthless in expulsions and candidate selections than Blair ever was. Brown had Dawn Butler (in the Socialist Campaign Group) as a minister.

[galpinos]

I think reform will end up with 5 or 6. They'll be second in loads of seats though but under FPTP that's obviously worth bugger all. Will be interesting to see how the reform vote correlates with brexit votes.

2015   UKIP      3.9 million Votes
2024   Reform   4.0 million Votes

[slab_happy]

As the Telegraph put it:  'if Corbyn had just stayed on as leader he too would likely have won this majority'.

... only if we didn't have a FPTP, constituency-based system, maybe. I thought it was a given that one of the major problems for Corbyn was that his supporters were very strongly concentrated in certain areas, so percentage of voters didn't translate into percentage of seats.

Whereas Starmer seems to have deliberately tried to avoid that pattern, by concentrating on taking Tory seats even at the risk of eroding some of the support in "safe" Labour seats.

[monkoffunk]

As the Telegraph put it:  'if Corbyn had just stayed on as leader he too would likely have won this majority'.
(impossible to prove obviously but interesting. And this is what Labour's left will very shortly begin agitating for.)

If we think of first past the post as regions electing their representatives given a non-homogeneous population, then this is very unlikely to be true.

Regardless opinions on FPTP, there are reasons why it isn’t a straight popular vote. It allows the different character of places to have bespoke representation.

Now we could have an argument about AV or something, but given that referendums are sacrosanct unchanging decisions until the end of time I’d imagine there is no appetite for that.

[stone]

actually that second Corbyn circle should maybe be higher as well, based on wikipedia numbers for 2019)

The wikipedia numbers I quoted though were total vote whilst your chart is of vote share. I guess the turn out being higher in 2019 than 2024 explains the apparent difference.

[stone]

Regardless opinions on FPTP, there are reasons why it isn’t a straight popular vote. It allows the different character of places to have bespoke representation.
Now we could have an argument about AV or something, but given that referendums are sacrosanct unchanging decisions until the end of time I’d imagine there is no appetite for that.

What I'd like is two person constituencies twice the size of the current ones. One MP would be the FPTP winner, the second would be either the 2nd or 3rd fudged so as to make the UK-wide MP count representative of the UK-wide total Party votes.

To me that would be mean every vote anywhere counted and every MP everywhere was accountable to the electorate both locally and nationally. It would also ensure governments were formed by coherent Parties that could work as a team.

[Oldmanmatt]

Pondering the number of votes and the vote share, in light of the Lowish turn out.
Apathy or did many Labour supporters (of the less ardent type) not bother, seeing it as a done deal?
Are the pre election polls not a more accurate guide to public opinion?

[Davo]

The idea that Corbyn would have gained a majority here is simply nonsense and underestimates how many middle of the road voters truly disliked him and how much work Starmer has put into if not winning them over at least making them not fear a Labour government.
As part of work I meet a large number of people and my abiding memory of the Corbyn time was how many pretty reasonable people thought he was beyond the pale and would bankrupt the country. With Starmer most of these kind of people didn’t exactly like him but they weren’t terrified of him and at worst would say that he would not be able to accomplish anything.

People have left the tories in droves because they aren’t terrified that a vote for reform or the lib dems will put Corbyn or someone like him in power.

Dave

[spidermonkey09]

Labour have leveraged the system they were given and exploited a historically large anti-Tory sentiment to deliver their landslide. It was the only real path to power open to them and they've delivered it in spades. An amazing effort. I absolutely don't buy the idea that anyone would have won this election but its obviously a counterfactual. Starmer was the acceptable face of a prospective prime minister to that huge anti-tory coalition. Corbyn would not have been that person. But its a dumb argument because its unprovable, and I suspect the Telegraph are just a bit salty this morning.

For me Labour will have to improve things to remain in power in five years time, but thats a) a problem for another day and b) politics as it should be. You should have to earn people's vote, not just rely on it blindly like the Tories have been able to for years due to voter apathy and poor Labour strategy. If they do the job right, they'll be in with a chance of being rewarded. The work starts now. I'm optimistic about the next few years; planning reform, housebuilding, interest rate cut likely coming in August, a removal of the ban on onshore wind all coming in the Kings Speech. FTSE up this morning. A job well done!

Anyone know what the deal is with Badenoch; can Labour challenge that count based on the postal votes fiasco or not?

https://x.com/georgeeaton/status/1809167260021309711

[seankenny]

^^^^ This exactly.