General Election 2024

LibDems up to 72 as they take the Inverness and Skye seat from the SNP, the final seat to declare.

Are there more of these?

The fifth one is closest to what I'm interested in, but only because it highlights why this is not a resolved question (and why the SNP is an important part of the puzzle).

You can see that the collapse in Tory vote is not correlated with Labour's increase regionally, except in Scotland (ish). Again, we need to look at the constituency level to see what's happening. At least two options:

1) The big-brain Starmer hypothesis: there's a handful of safe Labour seats where their share dropped (but they still won) and a number of former Tory seats that they increased their vote in and won.
2) The Corbyn-would-have-won-too hypothesis: the Tories lost votes to Reform (except in Scotland) and Labour won those seats on splits without there needing to be/having been a massive change in votes.

Both would explain that plot.

Again, I think we'll see both happened at the local level.

https://archive.ph/AtHZy

Tom Calver claiming that 83k voters were the difference between Labour getting a majority or not in the end

The Corbyn-would-have-won-too

Is anyone interested in this hypothesis?

Apparently only 7 independents had been elected as MPs to Westminster since 1950 in general elections.

5 did it this time around and a couple more were very close

Is this a real question?

Firstly - the evidence is half the country voted for parties that have limited support for these outcomes.

Citation needed.

Thanks. Was hoping for more leader be outcomes

not quite ‘standing still’ but his view is they had “modest” advances and “labour didn’t win, tories lost” https://x.com/DailyPolitik/status/1809060596064637172 & https://x.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1809082936047686016

I saw someone claiming yesterday that you could walk from Lowestoft to Lands End without entering a Conservative held constituency. I don't think that' true, as you can't get through Devon without crossing one, but it's still pretty phenomenal.

Amazing this stuff gets out. 5 seconds to look at the map on the BBC website shows both the Devon block and a blue wall across the South of Scotland (since it's only two constituencies and they're both Conservative).

Going via the borders is a convoluted route from Lowestoft

Erm…

Ha. My brain read Land's End to John O'Groats.

Amazing this stuff gets out. 5 seconds to read the actual text properly and I wouldn't like as much of a twat...

I agree it's a modest advance in terms of votes and that the Tories lost and this created the electoral space for a Labour win. But Labour clearly did win, and by a landslide - I don't think you can argue with a factual result!

You'd have to get a boat to get around the Tory constituencies on your way to Lowestoft.

A small one would do it though...

(Cruella.gif)

Yeah, I started to think of Baron Samedi or someone from Coco.

That or Dazzle Camouflage.

If every Reform voter had voted Tory the result would have been Con 303, Lab 268.

Alternatively if you (very crudely) take Labour's vote share from 2019 and the other parties' vote share from this year, Labour would have got 328.

From that 5 minutes of spreadsheeting I'm quite happy to conclude Starmer is a lucky bystander during a collapse in the Tory vote and nothing he did had any tangible effect on Labour's vote share.

Is this using national level data?

Constituency vote share data.

Nice - do you have the data for 2019 results linked? If so can you share?

As the inquest gathered pace this weekend, it was all already too much for one minister who lost their seat, who was opting to disappear for the time being and not think about politics at all. “There will be lots of takes,” he said. “Almost all wrong.”