The year 2024 has been England’s first six party election. Four parties from the Left – Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and George Galloway’s Workers Party which contested around one sixth of the constituencies – have been fighting two parties from the Right – Conservatives and Reform. In Scotland and Wales the nationalists made it a seven party election.
Our electoral system works reasonably well when, as between 1951 and 1959, just two parties, Labour and the Conservatives win at least 90 per cent of the vote. It works less well in a multi-party system. In consequence, the 2024 election has produced the most unbalanced parliament in our history.
Labour’s share of the vote – 33 per cent – is just over one per cent larger than that secured by Jeremy Corbyn in the party’s 2019 debacle, and seven per cent lower than Corbyn secured in 2017. Indeed it is by far the lowest share of the vote for a winning party since Ramsay MacDonald gained just 30 per cent of the vote in December 1923. But Labour then won just 191 seats out of 615 and MacDonald had to rule as a minority Prime Minister, his government lasting just nine months. Keir Starmer, by contrast, has been rewarded with a landslide and will remain in Downing Street for five years, perhaps 10.
The parties of the Left, which won around 53 per cent, have 487 seats out of the 650 in the new House of Commons. The parties of the Right, by contrast, with 38 per cent of the vote have just 126 seats out of 650, the remainder being held by the nationalists, independents and the Northern Ireland parties. The total Conservative/Reform vote – 38 per cent, was higher than that of Labour.
The Liberal Democrats, a party favouring electoral reform are, ironically, represented almost in proportion to their 3.5 million votes. With 12 per cent of the vote, they won around 11 per cent of the seats in the Commons.
Reform UK was supported by one in seven of the voters, gaining around four million votes. But, with two per cent more of the vote than the Liberal Democrats, it secured just five seats.
Under first past the post, the number of seats which a party receives depends not only on how many votes it secures, but on how those votes are distributed. A party whose votes are concentrated will win more seats than a party whose vote is evenly spread.
The Liberal Democrats have understood how to work the electoral system, concentrating their resources on winnable seats, while neglecting many of the others. So it was that in 2024, 12 per cent of the vote gave them 71 seats while in 2010 nearly a quarter of the vote – 23 per cent – gave them just 57. The votes of Reform UK, by contrast, have been evenly spread.
It will hardly be surprising if proportional representation returns, once again, to the political agenda.
Although Reform won few seats, its incursion into the election had a huge effect, ruining the Conservatives and breaking the Right. Reform has done to the Right what the SDP breakaway, in alliance with the Liberals, did to the Left in the 1980s. The SDP enabled Margaret Thatcher to win a landslide majority of 144 in the general election of 1983, on just 42 per cent of the vote, 2 per cent less than she had won in 1979 when her majority had been only 43.
In the 1980s, the dissidents of the SDP wanted to move British politics to the centre. Its leaders had broken with Michael Foot’s Labour Party which they believed had moved too far to the Left. The SDP regarded itself as a radical party; but in reality it was offering what sociologist, Ralf Dahrendorf, called a “better yesterday”. It sought to restore a consensus under threat not only from the Labour Left, but, more successfully, from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives.
Reform, by contrast, wants to break a consensus. It seeks to move British politics away from the centre. It believes that the Conservatives have become semi-socialist. Taxation and public expenditure are at their highest level since the 1950s, while immigration is over twice as high as it was when Britain was in the European Union. Richard Tice, the new Reform MP for Boston and Skegness, labelled the 2024 election the “immigration election”.
The election has revealed the new party’s vitality. It is worth comparing it with another breakaway movement, Change UK, formed in February 2019 by Labour dissidents and led by Chuka Umunna, a glamorous figure who had sometimes been thought of as a future Labour leader. The party lasted for just ten months and then disappeared without trace, all of its MPs being defeated in 2019.
Reform UK, by contrast, is likely to prove a continuing presence in Britain. It articulates a mood of alienation and disillusionment, masked by an electoral system which misleadingly suggests a wave of enthusiasm for Labour. But there are too many voters who feel that the political system is not working for them.
Sir Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London. His book, Making the Weather: Six Politicians who Changed Britain will be published later this year
