The outcome of Thursday’s election has raised questions about how Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has turned the votes cast into seats won.
How can it be possible, it is being asked, that a party with barely more than a third of the vote (34 per cent) can end up with nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of the seats?
And how can it be that a party which wins just 12 per cent of the vote ends up with 71 seats, whereas a party that won rather more support, 14 per cent, secures just five?
Neither pattern is, in truth, a new phenomenon.
In 2001, Tony Blair also won 63 per cent of the seats despite winning just 41 per cent of the vote. Indeed, for defenders of the current system, this tendency to give the party that secures most votes well over half the seats is precisely why they like it.
It means, they argue, that when voters are dissatisfied with the current government they can boot it out and ensure the election of an alternative – just as happened on Thursday. In the meantime, governments with a majority have the chance to govern effectively, in contrast, for example, to the Brexit impasse that befell Parliament between 2017 and 2019.
However, never before has a party with as little as 34 per cent been able to form a single party majority government. The nearest was Labour in 2005 when, despite winning only 35 per cent of the vote, the party ended up with 55 per cent of the seats.
Meanwhile, a similar fate to that which befell Reform last week was also visited in 2015 upon Ukip, previously the UK’s principal anti-EU party. Ukip won nearly 13 per cent of the vote and just one seat, whereas at the same election the Liberal Democrats with just eight per cent secured eight seats. However, both parties were disadvantaged at that election compared with the SNP who, with just 5 per cent of the vote, secured as many as 56 seats.
How well parties do under Britain’s electoral system depends not only on how many votes they win, but also on where they do so. Small parties whose votes are geographically concentrated do relatively well. Those whose support is evenly spread across the country lose out. Large parties, in contrast, do well if their support is fairly evenly spread, and less well if it is geographically heavily concentrated.
Both Conservative and Labour support became more evenly spread on Thursday. This was especially true of the Conservatives, whose vote fell most heavily in constituencies where the party was previously strongest. This helped ensure the party lost many more seats than would otherwise have been the case.
Labour’s vote actually fell back in most seats it already held – most notably in constituencies with large numbers of Muslim voters. But the party advanced in Conservative-held seats where it previously lay in second place. That helped make Labour’s vote more “efficient”.
It is these two patterns that explain why this time around Labour has profited so handsomely from first-past-the-post’s tendency to favour the largest party – and why some have asked whether a party with so small a share of the overall vote should in fact be given so large an overall majority.
Among the smaller parties, the Liberal Democrats’ vote became more geographically concentrated on Thursday. It is now more concentrated than at any election since February 1974, the first to be fought by the former Liberal Party on a Britain-wide basis. The party’s support rose markedly in seats where it started in second place to the Conservatives, while elsewhere its vote was typically slightly down.
Support for both Reform and the Greens was more evenly spread than the Liberal Democrats’ vote, albeit in the case of the Greens it was a little more concentrated than in 2019. The geography of Reform support was similar to that of Ukip in 2015.
Yet there is nothing in the traditional defence of first-past-the-post that justifies one smaller party being treated so differently from another. Rather, our electoral system is meant to punish all small parties and, as a result, discourage voters from voting for them.
By these criteria, first-past-the-post proved a failure last week. In a contest that, for the first time, was fought almost everywhere by as many as five parties, a record low of 58 per cent of all votes cast were given to the Conservatives or Labour.
Meanwhile, for the first time since 1923, over 100 MPs (117) were elected to the new House of Commons under something other than the Conservative or Labour banner.
These are signs of a system that is no longer working as its defenders claim. We should not be surprised that some are now arguing that it is time for a rethink.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and a Senior Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research and ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’. He is also co-host of the Trendy podcast