The Result versus The Vote

The Will of the People?

The 2024 General Election is over, but does the result in Parliament truly reflect how the nation voted? The following analysis shows a stark disconnect. The First Past the Post (FPTP) system distorted the final seat count, leaving millions of voters unrepresented and millions of votes wasted. This report breaks down the numbers.

Summary of Findings

• The result of the 2024 UK General Election did not reflect the will of the people.
• FPTP gave Labour a landslide victory on around one third of the national vote.
• Reform UK and the Green Party got far fewer seats than their share of the national vote would suggest.
• Reform UK polled more votes that the Liberal Democrats but only gained five seats compared to the Liberal Democrat's 65.
• Labour needed only an average 23,622 national votes to secure one seat while Reform UK needed a massive 823,522 votes.
• The vast majority of constituency seats were won with less than fifty percent of the votes cast.
• It is more than likely your vote did not count in the 2024 UK General Election

What happens when we have a general election?

We listen to all the punters, politicians, vested interests, nutcases, shysters and the media for a few weeks and make up our minds who to vote for. The great day cometh and we cast our vote. Our democratic destiny is fulfilled. The votes are counted and a Government is created by the will of the people and is of the will of the people.

Bullshit!

Let's take a more objective look at our most recent General Election that took place on the 4th of July 2024.

649, excluding the Speaker's, seats were at stake and Labour won by a landslide returning 411 MPs, easily beating the Conservatives, who returned 121, into second place. This is a very large majority giving Labour carte blanche to carry through their manifesto promises.

Such a resounding victory can surely only be gained by securing a huge number of votes?

Well, not necessarily.......

The 2024 General Election in Numbers

649 seats were at stake at the last general election. The voting population was 48,224,212 of which 28,925,593 cast their votes. 116,253 votes were deemed invalid leaving 28,809,340 valid votes. Turnout was a shade under 60 percent

The UK comprises four countries, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have much smaller voting populations than England and hence proportionally fewer seats in Parliament. All UK countries use the same voting system (FPTP) in general elections and this is how it breaks down.

Size of the vote in countries of the UK

Turnout - proportion of those who voted

Here is a list of Parties in the UK that won seats.

Votes versus Seats

FTPT - Performance of the winning parties

At the time of the 2024 General Election 48,224,212 people were eligible to vote, around 60 percent of whom voted. When invalid votes were removed 28,809,340 valid votes were cast. Labour got 9,708,716 of these votes and won 411 seats, a huge majority. I appreciate some people don't like large numbers, but are any of you beginning to smell a rat?

What these numbers tell you is that Labour secured 33.7 percent of the votes and won 411 seats out of 650, or 63.2 percent of Parliamentary seats.

This is illustrated below:

A glance at the chart above shows disparity between votes gained and seats secured. Labour did much better than their votes would suggest, the Tories worse and the Lib Dems about on par. The Green Party and Reform UK were the biggest losers. Reform got a paltry five seats for fourteen percent of the vote and the Green Party got four seats for nearly seven percent of the vote.

The chart below shows the votes gained and seats seured for regional parties taking into account the different populations for each Country.

Note:The winning Independent for North Down is excluded as it is not a registered political party.

The regional chart above looks somewhat different to the national chart because far fewer seats than England are contested in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. There were however winners and losers due to FPTP. The biggest loser was the SNP who gained 30 percent of the Scottish vote for only 16 percent of the available seats. Sinn Fein did nicely with their share of the vote securing seven seats, making them the largest single party in Northern Ireland despite them not taking their UK seats in Parliament. The Northern Ireland Unionist vote is fragmented with the TUV and UUP taking seats, and votes, from the DUP, thus relegating them to second place behind the nationalist Sinn Fein.

'Bang for your voting buck'

FPTP in a UK general election is effectively 649 separate contests with each winner gaining a seat in Parliament and representation of a Parliamentary constituency. The losers go home with nothing. It's argued that FPTP favours larger parties disproportionately and makes it very difficult for smaller parties to gain a foothold in Parliament. There is some truth in this both statistically and behaviourally. Statistically FPTP produces a vote threshold below which it's nearly impossible to gain more than a handfull of seats at most. Above this threshold seats can be won easily, the case in point in 2024 being Labour's landslide victory. The system can be manipulated by parties concentrating their votes in a small number of constituencies.

Behavourally, the voting public recognises that voting for smaller parties is often futile and are reluctant to waste their votes.

More on wasted votes later....

To examine how this operated in the 2024 general election we can observe the vote to seat ratio which is a measure of how many votes were cast in total for each party to gain one seat.

National Ratio

Regional Ratio

Note: The winning Independent for North Down is excluded as it is not a registered political party.

It's clear from the charts above that the big result is that Labour only needed 23,622 votes nationally to gain a seat while Reform UK needed a massive 823,522 votes. Put another way, Reform UK seats were around 35 times more costly in votes than Labour seats. Reform UK winning five seats polled more votes than the Lib Dems who won 65 seats. The Green Party seats were also hard earned needing 486,125 votes per seat won.

In the Regions disparities were also evident. Sinn Fein's votes to seats ratio was relatively modest coming in at just over 30,000 whilst the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland required just over 117 thousand votes for their one seat. The Ulster Unionist Party's votes to seats ratio was also very high approaching 100 thousand.

The Scottish National Party's ratio was high at nearly 50 thousand and Plied Cymru also had to work hard for their four seats.

What if all votes counted?

It's beyond the scope of this report to examine the many and various forms of proportional representation, but a simple comparison of FPTP and each vote counting equally in the 2024 general election provides a glimpse of how every vote counting equally could change the political landscape.

Comparison of seats for each party under FPTP and proportion of vote

The four charts above compare performance of the winning parties regionally. It was necessary to calculate regionally to equalise the voting base for national and regional parties. Overall, Labour is the loser when we shift from FPTP to proportional votes with their seat counts dropping significantly in England, Scotland and Wales. In fact, Labour loses its overall majority. In England we see increases in seats for all the major parties except Labour, particularly for Reform UK and the the Green Party. Interestingly, proportional voting sees the Workers Party of Great Britain included with five seats where it had no representation before.

Under proportional voting in England, Reform UK increase their seat count massively from five under FPTP to 85, surpassing the Liberal Democrats. The Green Party also has a large increase from four to 41 seats. In Scotland, the SNP move much closer from a poor second to Labour. Reform UK and the Green Party arrive on the scene from nothing under FPTP to a few seats each under proportional voting. Wales sees a small increase in Plaid Cymru seat count and the emergence of the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Green Party under proportional voting. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein would lose two seats under proportional voting and the DUP one. The Alliance party and the UUP gain two and one seats respectively.

The above chart compares FPTP and proportional voting for the five major National Parties. It shows Labour losing 46 percent of its seats and its overall majority. The Conservatives would gain 36 seats and the Liberal Democrat's total would increase slightly by nine seats. But, the stand outs here are Reform UK and the Green Party. The Green Party would increase their seats eleven-fold and Reform UK would massively increase their seats launching them into third place above the Liberal Democrats.

Note: 443 seats were used in the above caluclations as six independent seats held under F PTP and the Speaker's seat were excluded.

First Past the Post and Wasted Votes

In addition to distorting party numbers in Parliament, FPTP also wastes a huge proportion of your votes. In a winner takes all scenario votes for the other parties are binned. Even for the victorious candidate many votes are surplus to requirements as a victory of one is as good as a victory of ten thousand. The following analysis of losing votes only takes into account the number of votes for losing parties, not the surplus votes of winning candidates.

Binning the losing votes wouldn't be so bad if candidates got a mandate to govern with over half of the votes cast. This is not the norm as shown below.

An examination of constituency winners in the 2024 General Election shows that only one in six seats were won with fifty percent or more of the vote, arguably giving the outright winner a mandate to govern. The remainder were won with a minority of votes. In fact, two English constituences, Blackburn and South West Norfolk, were won with a shade over one quarter of the vote. In these constituencies, as in many others, a very large number of votes were binned and counted for nothing.

Conclusion

This Report has highlighted the distorting effect that FPTP had on the overall results of the 2024 General Election. It's evident that FPTP has lost its relevance due to the reduced dominance in votes of the Labour and Conservative parties coupled with a fragmentation of the traditional left and right wing parties. The main take-out here is that Labour's huge majority and mandate to govern is more a result of FPTP statistical anomolies than voter popularity.

About The Data

Data Source: The data for this analysis was sourced from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) official election datasets.

Tools Used: Data was aggregated and queried using an SQL database. Final data collation, analysis, and chart production were performed using Microsoft Excel.