Labour did not win the 2024 UK General Election
There was so much going on in this election.
Labour did not win
First of all, Labour did not win it. The Tories lost it. Labour only got about 33.8% of the vote. Under proportional representation, they would have had to form a coalition.
48% of Labour voters said their main reason for voting Labour was to defeat the Tories.
Labour got fewer votes than it did in the past, but this was more than made up for by Tory voters switching to other parties or staying home.
There was also some tactical voting going on. This requires good pre-election polling, but polling has become less accurate since so many people switched from land lines to mobile phones. It will likely get worse when BT switches off the land line network.
A lot of experienced Tories had left before the election or did not run for re-election (see my last article), so candidates were inexperienced and had no name recognition.
Some races were affected by parties’ stances on Gaza, if there were a lot of Muslims or Jews in the constituency.
The exit poll is usually pretty good, but it only polls a relatively small sample of polling stations. With some parties focusing very heavily on a few specially targeted constituencies this time round, the poll can be skewed.
The Green Party increased its MPs from 1 to 4 by heavily targeting 4 seats.
The SNP decline in Scotland gave Labour a boost of 35 seats
It is possible that some voters were put off by reading just before the election that Keir Starmer said Britain would not rejoin the EU in his lifetime, else Labour might have done better.
The table above compares the percentage of seats won versus the percentage of votes won and shows the approximate number of seats if they were allocated in proportion to the overall votes and what a difference it would have made. It shows how unfair first past the post is. (with one seat left to call, and with rounding)
Lib dems got a smaller percentage of the vote than Reform UK yet got far more seats, for example.
The BBC’s polling expert, Sir John Curtice, gives more detail.
The role of Media
It’s not only the voting system that was unfair. The media was too. For example, BBC Question Time has favoured right-wing guests.
When the main stream media displayed live counts of how many seats each party had won so far, they often showed Reform’s count separately while burying the Greens under ‘other’, even when they were running neck and neck.
Characters like Farage and Johnson and Trump tend to be favoured by media over competent, straight-talking people, like the Greens.
Rigging the election
The Tories raised campaign limits, hoping that they would be able to raise far more from their rich donors than Labour could. Unfortunately for them, many big donors saw which way the wind was blowing and switched parties.
The Tories introduced voter ID (totally unnecessary expense and bureaucracy) and by allowing some forms of ID and not others, suppressed the votes of some groups.
There were a lot of complaints that absentee voting forms did not arrive on time. The Royal Mail said they had no backlog, so it must have been a delay in printing and dispatching them by councils. Whether this was in any way political, or due to due to incompetence or the short warning Sunak gave or lack of resources, only an investigation can tell.
There was a huge amount of partisan rubbish on social media. Oly time will tell how much was from bots from Russia or other nations.
So, it is all to play for next time
Keir Starmer has to overcome both the fact that the premiership was handed to him on a plate, and the terrible mess the Tories have left the country in, both physically and economically (despite what Sunak and his party claim) and in terms of the lack of trust in politicians.
Who knows which factors will dominate in the next election?