The UK’s Labour Party Secures Landslide Win
You will find more infographics at StatistaThe UK’s Labour Party has won the 2024 general election, pushing out the Conservatives after 14 years of rule. The Labour Party, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, won 412 parliamentary seats across the UK, securing a landslide majority well over the 326 seats mark and saw a gain of 211 seats since the last general election in 2019. Counting was still ongoing at the time of writing, with two seats yet to be accounted for.
As the following chart based on BBC reporting shows, the Conservatives, or Tories as they are commonly known, trailed some way behind, having lost 250 seats since the last parliamentary election - their worst defeat ever. Among the MPs to have lost their positions are Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Penny Mordaunt.
It seems that the British system allows for big differences between the popular vote and the numbers of seats in the parliament.
UK VOTES Britain’s Labour pulled off a thumping election victory with just 34% of the national vote
Labour won just 34% of the national vote, while the Conservative Party secured nearly 24% of that number.
Smaller parties including the centrist Liberal Democrats, right-wing Reform U.K. and the Greens took nearly 43% of the popular vote but gained just less than 18% of the seats.
This was aided by the U.K.‘s “first past the post” system, where voters choose only one single candidate from their local list in each of the country’s 650 constituencies. The person with the most votes in each constituency is elected as a Member of Parliament to the House of Commons, the U.K.’s lower house. The party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons usually forms the new government and its leader becomes prime minister.
Unlike in other voting systems, there are no second rounds or ranking of first- and second-choice candidates, meaning it can be difficult for smaller parties to translate an increased share of the popular vote into parliamentary seats.
I have not been following the U.K. political scene, but the Statista infographic was impossible to ignore.
ReplyDeleteEven though they have a multiparty system, they seem to have difficulties in translating individual votes into representation by new parties.
The Labour Party is really going to have to pull out all the stops if they hope to come up with more quaintly British names than Jacob Rees-Mogg and Penny Mordaunt.
ReplyDeleteLOL, yes, and their new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. They need a Bertie Wooster in the government somehow.
DeleteThe pendulum really went to the opposite extreme after many years of extreme conservatives in power. Boris Johnson’s movement is dead. The size of the defeat is startling, given that less than 5 years ago they had the landslide. Brexit is near death too. Apparently there is a movement going on to find a way to rejoin the EU quietly without losing face. But apparently the EU isn’t anxious to have them back.
ReplyDeleteNow, how can we finish off MAGA the same way? Sadly, I don’t think we can now. And if trump gets four more years he and his cronies, including his SC judges, might make sure that MAGA will rule indefinitely. The separation of powers will be tossed in favor of an authoritarian executive branch.
I think if we can avoid electing Trump this fall, the Maga movement will fade. There will still be a troublesome right wing, and bad SC rulings around, but Trump has the reality show, snake oil salesman, secret sauce.
DeleteLabour got about 1/3 of the popular vote. I'd think these results would be read as a smashing rejection of the Conservative Party, but not a mandate for Labour (despite Labour's new rock-solid Parliamentary majority).
ReplyDeleteOne analysis I read stated that Brexit turned a legal-immigration problem into an illegal-immigration problem. The idea is that EU members have freedom of movement within member countries, so Eastern Europeans from less-prosperous EU countries couldn't be prevented from coming to the UK. I understand this was one of Brexit's biggest selling points on the Right: stop the foreigners from "invading". So the UK exited the EU, but apparently the immigration didn't stop. I guess they are learning what we already know: the mass movement of peoples is a complex phenomenon, and laws don't really stop it, they just drive it underground. And perhaps we see again that big changes can have unintended consequences.
When Brexit was being debated, my heart had some sympathy for the Brexiteers, not because I am anti-immigrant but because the I find the image of the staunch and independent British bulldog appealing. (And there are a number of things about the EU I find unappealing.) But that was my heart. My head told me that exiting the EU would hurt the UK economically. And it's pretty clear that has transpired. My guess is, the state of the UK economy also is a huge driver of these election results.
"...the UK economy also is a huge driver of these election results." Especially when their present pains are so directly a result of the Brexit decision.
DeleteAbout their immigration situation, they already had the policy that people from their former colonies which remained in the Commonwealth could come in legally.
Brexit was not about the independent British bulldog. It was about the One Percenters making more money and loosening regulations.
DeleteOops, meant to attach this to above. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/03/observer-view-list-of-brexit-wins-is-in-short-and-feeble
DeleteInteresting article. Jean. One thing I saw no mention of was whether this made the UK more dependent on the US and prey to that pack of ravenous hyenas, the American investment capitalists. Of course, the return of Labour is the return of Blairified Labour, just as the Democratic Party here is a Clintonized Party. Not much use for the common shmoop.
ReplyDeleteAny country that hitches itself to our failing, overextended empire may be in for a lot of hurt. Jeremy Corbin might have brought some common sense to the UK’s relation with Israel but slandering him as antisemitic drove him out of power. Some good news in that he won his seat in Parliament.
Looking for a group to possibly join to go to DC on the 24th to protest Netanyahu’s presence on that date at the invitation of the femtobrains in Congress. I’m concerned about what the weather will be then in this hot Climate Catastrophe year. I’m not as indestructible as I used to be.
To David: thank you for sending the blog invitation, I assume it was in answer to expressing my problem with commenting on my iPhone and posting. I tried it but, unfortunately, I still have the same problem. I may tackle it again in a few weeks during a break in the heat. Thanks again.
I gather from a few Brit correspondents that saving the NHS something of a motivator in the swing toward Labor. The voter turnout was very low, possibly because of dispirited Tories.
DeleteBoris Johnson and his cushy salary as a columnist and speaker proves that Fat Cats always land on their feet, though I'd like to find the poll worker in this story off Wikipedia and buy him/her a pint:
"On 2 May 2024 Johnson was turned away from his polling station for the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, after forgetting to bring valid photographic identification, a requirement of the Elections Act, which Johnson introduced while in office. When he arrived he had nothing to prove his identity except the sleeve of his copy of Prospect magazine, on which his name and address had been printed."
Netanyahu and Congress. Ugh.
It was always obvious to any rational economist that Brexit would severely damage the economy.The Brexiteers refused to look at the realities of 21 st century international trade to know that negotiating bilateral trade agreements with itty bitty countries would not make up for their access to most of Europe via the EU trade arrangements. The hubris is partly found in their false idea that England is still the most powerful country in the world. Long live the empire, even though most of the empire is long gone. The main legacy of empire is immigration from all those brown and black countries. It’s legal, as Jean notes. They also heartily dislike all the Eastern Europeans - educated and skilled - taking jobs from Brits,. The NHS relies on immigrants, much to their chagrin.Including high level MD specialists . I studied the health systems of multiple OECD counties in some depth. Almost all have way better, more cost efficient systems than ours and all provide coverage for all citizens. Every country I studied had a different system. Almost all were superior to the disastrous system in the US. Most were a combination of state funded and private funding. Except the UK which is 100% government run and although the quality of care is decent, the efficiency isn’t great - the wait times for elective surgery like knee replacements can be two or three years. It’s bad here, but more like 6 months. The Leave group convinced voters that all the money that would be gained by leaving the EU would go to the NHS. It was a lie of course. And many of those in the poorer areas of the country also lost EU subsidies that they needed to support pensioners and Council housing, making the poor cities and counties even worse off. Brexit has been a disaster - just as was predicted. Will Labour be able to reverse the decline? I doubt it.
ReplyDeleteMAGA voters who swallow trumps fantasy that our government can be funded by tariffs are also swallowing a lie. But few Americans know anything at all about economics, and even less about international economics.
Having traveled in England more times than I can remember during a period of almost 50 years, often visiting the former colleagues of my husband there, and having a son go to grad school there for two years, I began to realize that they are such a classist and racist society that they hold themselves back. Brits with the “ wrong” accent are barred from the “ good” jobs, not just those with the wrong complexion. When the job candidate with a Geordie accent competes against a skilled Eastern European whose accent doesn’t give away their social class in Poland or Romania they often lose out. We were always ok because of our American accents - they couldn’t tell our social class just from how we speak. They knew we had “proper” educations though. The accents only revealed that we were American. In many BBC productions using all British actors, American characters frequently speak with a southern drawl because they find it easier to imitate. British actors who can sound like “ accent less” American TV commentators are rare - Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Kenneth Branagh and a few others don’t rely on sounding like they are from Texas or Alabama to play an American. We socialized enough with what we would call upper middle class Brits to occasionally be appalled by some of the dinner party conversations. They don’t hide their prejudices very often in such settings.
Love the story about Boris not being allowed to vote without a photo ID.
I don't know if it's true, but I have read that the US southern accents derive in the first place from British pronunciations They're just a slower version of the posh Brit accent of a couple of centuries ago. I listened to a youtube of speeded up South Carolina speech and it sounded remarkably BBC.
DeleteSupposedly this is how English sounds to non-English speakers. You can sure hear that Germanic undergirding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU2wkD-gbzI&t=136s&pp=ygUqaG93IGVuZ2xpc2ggc291bmRzIHRvIG5vbi1lbmdsaXNoIHNwZWFrZXJz
DeleteMy great-grandmother was from Thirsk, so here's Yorkie. It's unintelligible, but always vaguely threatening and scary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssbixk3bI9k
DeleteI am remembering that there was a lot of Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights.
DeleteWe found that the accent in Cornwall was as impossible for us to understand as speaking with someone in a country like Finland would hav been.We couldn’t understand a word.
ReplyDeleteKatherine, there is a small island in the Chesapeake Bay where the native born speak a form of English that is allegedly like Elizabethan English sounded. According to this article it does sound a bit southern.,
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/smith-island
But they don’t sound at all like current posh Brit accents, usually referred to as a “ cut glass” accent.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteInteresting article about the UK elections at Politico
ReplyDeletehttps://www.politico.eu/article/britain-uk-election-keir-starmer-labour-party-conservative-party-british-politics-voter-disillusionment/