Labour’s “loveless landslide”, securing a two thirds majority of seats from just 34 per cent of the votes, differs significantly from the Thatcher/Blair landslides, achieved with far greater support. Yet Patrick Dunleavy shows that beneath the national picture of a multi-party system that is set in concrete now, 70 per cent of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs enjoy over two fifths support in their constituency. Displacing them will be a pretty hard task for the Conservatives or Reform in England’s resurgent multi-party system.
The UK’s mediaeval-era plurality voting system (misleadingly called “first past the post”, when it has no fixed winning post) has been controversially discounting and discarding millions of third, fourth and fifth party votes since the first Liberal surge in 1974. Some political scientists have argued for over two decades that the UK had become a standard European multi-party system by the early 2000s, not just in terms of votes but also in terms of the institutional defects, democratic back-sliding and poor policy-making caused by repeatedly governing with “artificial” parliamentary majorities. Yet many political scientists, and almost all political journalists, continued to talk of a thoroughly mythical “two-party-system”.
The best measure of how deformed are the results we get under the current system versus the ones we would get under proportional representation remains the DV score shown below:
Simple example of how to calculate the “deviation from proportionality” (DV) score
Source: Dunleavy (2018), Figure 2. Notes: Many political scientists mistakenly rely on a different indicator, the thoroughly biased Gallagher formula. Its squaring of party vote shares systematically assigns far too much weight to the largest parties’ vote shares, and too little to smaller ones.
The DV score for the 2024 election shown in Chart 1 shows that over thirty percent of MPs in the Commons would not be there if seats were awarded by their national party vote share. Labour was the only party in Britain to be over-represented in GB seats terms (gaining 31 per cent more seats in Parliament than votes), with all other parties under-represented to some degree. The brunt of disadvantage fell on Reform, the Greens and the Tories. Couple this record disproportionality level with low turnout (approximately 60 percent) ), plus the fact that Labour’s 2024 vote share is almost three quarters of its 2019 voter share under Corbyn (the party’s number of votes dropping by 4.24 million), and the basis for impugning the outcomes of the general election as a “loveless landslide” may seem strong indeed.
Chart 1: The Deviation from Proportionality (DV) score in 2024 for Great Britain
Source: Computed from Wikipedia 2024, checked against the Election Maps GEO2024 Supersheet Note: All early-stage 2024 election data may contain slight defects, so please use with caution.
To gauge the transition to multi-party politics Chart 2 shows the possible arena for the general election in terms of the percentage Conservative lead over Labour at the local constituency level on the horizontal axis , graphed against the total percentage of votes cast for all other parties on the vertical axis. In this representation the possible space where results can occur is shown by the large purple triangle – all the local vote share outcomes must fall inside this shape, and each constituency is shown there as a grey dot. It is apparent that the combined votes for 3rd, 4th etc. parties were more than a fifth of total votes in all but four constituencies – indeed, they averaged 35 to 40 per cent, and n large numbers of seats support for all the ‘other’ parties was up to 70 per cent.
If you look a little deeper at the patterns that have been produced at local level, there are some unexpected strengths for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and indeed perhaps for the electoral system itself.
Chart 2: The votes outcomes in the 2024 general election at local constituency level
Source: PJD computation from the Election Maps GEO2024 Supersheet of local votes data set. Huge thanks to Election Maps UK for their great work in so speedily collating this data. For more on the graphic see Dunleavy (2011), and Dunleavy and Diwakar, (2013).
Notes: In this graphic all local results must fall within the large purple triangle shown. Each blob is a constituency outcome. (The very top blob is the Speaker). The blue and red dotted triangles show the areas within which the Conservative (blue) or Labour (red) candidates won a majority (that is, over 50 per cent) of the local votes. In the large area above these triangles almost all candidates won only a plurality (the largest total) of local votes.
Demanding that every MP has over 50 per cent support is quite a tough test to ask of the parties in a multi-party system.
Yet if you look a little deeper at the patterns that have been produced at local level, there are some unexpected strengths for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and indeed perhaps for the electoral system itself. In a startling turnaround from 2019, only a single Tory seat falls within the blue triangle ,they had local majority support only in Harrow East. By contrast, despite Labour’s lowered vote-share nationally, Chart 2 shows that a sizeable number of Labour MPs (70) fell within the red triangle indicating majority support in their constituencies. Quite a similar share of Liberal Democrat MPs also had majority backing locally. The total number of MPs with majority support in their constituency reached a record low point in Great Britain (just 89 of 635 GB seats) in 2024 – but amidst that wreckage, the strength of Labour and Liberal Democrat local support stood out.
The UK is now certain to remain a multi-party system.
Demanding that every MP has over 50 per cent support is quite a tough test to ask of the parties in a multi-party system, with lots of candidates (around 8) standing in each area this time around. So, in practical terms it is fairer to look more closely at how many candidates won at least either a large plurality or a majority of votes locally. Chart 3 below shows that seven out of ten Labour MPs (288) have substantial votes shares in the constituencies they won, ones where they are clearly out in front of competitors in a multi-party system and that will be hard to erode in 2029. Similarly, over three quarters of Liberal Democrat MPs are above 40 per cent. By contrast only 24 Tory MPs (one in five) hold a similar position.
Chart 3: The strength of local majority or plurality support for MPs of the top four parties
Source: Computed as for Chart 2. No SNP percentages because seats number is too low.
Despite his pledge to put “country before party”, Starmer and Labour MPs are highly unlikely now to alter the Parliamentary voting system to make it any fairer.
Looking ahead to 2028-9
The UK is now certain to remain a multi-party system. Reform achieved a creditable share of the vote nationally (as UKIP did in 2015), but it gained a small bridgehead in Commons seats – and might have done better had Farage committed from the outset instead of announcing his candidacy so late. Its distribution of votes also suggests that it may be quickly able to develop the same capacity as the Liberal Democrats to target seats and create local concentrations of support – overwhelmingly likely to be at the Conservatives’ expense, permanently establishing the standard European split between two right-wing parties by 2028-9. Possibly the most ominous signs for Labour are the splitting of off Muslim support over Gaza in some seats, the election of five left-aligned independents on that issue, and the Greens’ substantial successes, winning 4 MPs and getting well-placed at second in many more seats. There are arguably now 9 MPs to the left of Labour in England now, another record.
Yet still, the omens for Labour in terms of winning a second term and holding onto most of the seats they have won in 2024 look disconcertingly good. Despite his pledge to put “Country before party”, Starmer and Labour MPs are highly unlikely now to alter the Parliamentary voting system to make it any fairer (as a move to PR would be), given the permanent move to coalition governments that would now lead to, and the still vivid memories of the disastrous austerity wreaked by the last Con-Lib coalition in 2010-15.
With such weak national support and a still strong Tory press, any recurrence of “sleaze” would be very damaging for Labour in government, as it was for the Tories.
Labour could do something to make it easier for new and small parties to register their votes without tactical voting by bringing back the Supplementary Votes system abolished for London mayor, other mayoral and Police Commissioner elections by the Tories only in 2023. Such a modest and feasible change (needing only a three-line bill and no referendum) would not challenge Labour’s strong position, nor would it make UK elections less disproportional in the short term. But it would open up new and smaller parties’ ability to campaign and in the long run help them build some local strongholds better. It could also help Labour cope with an emergent potential trend for Muslim and Hindu communities to both vote more on ethnic lines in future, rather than their past reliance on voting Labour. And as in France’s double ballot system, it could erect a “cordon sanitaire” to stop any Reform landslide from ever occurring – since left and centrist voters could unit against that.
However, Starmer’s ultra-conservatism, his timidity and strong party tribalism on all constitutional matters, make even this small concession unlikely. It remains to be seen if his own purism will be enough to ward off the kind of bad governance that has developed in every other landslide government. For instance, it is doubtful that Labour’s weak new integrity body can avoid any scandals (like “cash for honours” in 2006 under Blair), or the other forms of malversation endemic under the last three Conservative governments. With such weak national support and a still strong Tory press, any recurrence of “sleaze” would be very damaging for Labour in government, as it was for the Tories.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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