In the UK, we vote by constituency. A party could actually come second in term of votes nationally but still win more constituencies, and thus have more MPs (as happened in 1951 and in February 1974). This has historically been a problem for Labour: They get lots of votes in safe seats, with MPs winning 60% of the vote or more, but then they lose more narrowly elsewhere, leading to lots of Labour votes translating into not a lot of Labour MPs.
The second factor is that the left vote tends to be ‘split’ in the UK. If you have a constituency where the parties standing are:
Conservative
Green
Labour
Lib Dem
Reform
You have a situation where the ‘left’ vote might split three ways (to Lab, LD and Green), but the ‘right’ vote splits only two ways (to Con and Reform). So, you could get a result like:
Con: 33%
Lab: 32%
Lib Dem: 13%
Green: 12%
Reform: 10%
In that scenario, the majority of the voters (57%) have voted for left-leaning parties, and only a third have voted Conservative – but the Conservatives would win the seat.
There are a lot of constituencies where the outcome looks broadly like what I’ve described. That’s why I’m saying that the best way to beat the Tories is almost always to vote Labour. Of course, people might have other reasons they don’t want to vote Labour (I certainly don’t agree with everything they do, that would be weird), but if the priority is ‘get the Tories out’, the answer is to vote Labour.
Okay, I see now, for some reason my mind completely skipped elections for individual MPs and thought only about the full parliament. I’ve wondered why, when people seem to loathe the Tory PMs who have been coming through the revolving door for the past several years, why people keep voting them in as a majority, but now it makes perfect sense. This is how even a parliamentary system with multiple parties gets wrecked, FPTP voting is always the wrong answer. Sorry for being dense and overlooking what should be an obvious answer.
In the UK, we vote by constituency. A party could actually come second in term of votes nationally but still win more constituencies, and thus have more MPs (as happened in 1951 and in February 1974). This has historically been a problem for Labour: They get lots of votes in safe seats, with MPs winning 60% of the vote or more, but then they lose more narrowly elsewhere, leading to lots of Labour votes translating into not a lot of Labour MPs.
The second factor is that the left vote tends to be ‘split’ in the UK. If you have a constituency where the parties standing are:
You have a situation where the ‘left’ vote might split three ways (to Lab, LD and Green), but the ‘right’ vote splits only two ways (to Con and Reform). So, you could get a result like:
In that scenario, the majority of the voters (57%) have voted for left-leaning parties, and only a third have voted Conservative – but the Conservatives would win the seat.
There are a lot of constituencies where the outcome looks broadly like what I’ve described. That’s why I’m saying that the best way to beat the Tories is almost always to vote Labour. Of course, people might have other reasons they don’t want to vote Labour (I certainly don’t agree with everything they do, that would be weird), but if the priority is ‘get the Tories out’, the answer is to vote Labour.
Okay, I see now, for some reason my mind completely skipped elections for individual MPs and thought only about the full parliament. I’ve wondered why, when people seem to loathe the Tory PMs who have been coming through the revolving door for the past several years, why people keep voting them in as a majority, but now it makes perfect sense. This is how even a parliamentary system with multiple parties gets wrecked, FPTP voting is always the wrong answer. Sorry for being dense and overlooking what should be an obvious answer.