General Election 2024

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10009/

Should be in here for 24, 19 will be around in the site.

How are you going to account for boundary changes? See if it goes to output area then build up ? Or do you have a conversion for 2019 wards to constituency etc and so on?

Final seat declared following recount, Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, Lib Dem taking them to 72

deleted as can't get link to work

It wasn’t presented as a neutral source. In politics they don’t really exist outside of polling, and even then it’s a bit of a reach.

His point is not a bad one given the various donations to Streeting for example, but we’ll see I suppose.

Link doesn't work

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

This seems to be based on the very simplistic (and rather unlikely) assumption that all movement of votes was just from the Tories to Reform.

Well yes, the clue is in the statement "if every Reform voter had voted Tory".

The point of the thought experiment, that some people seem to be missing, is that even if every Reform vote counted for the Tory in that constituency the Tories still wouldn't have won enough seats to form a majority Government (303 is less than the 326 required).

So the Tories didn't do this badly purely because of Reform splitting their vote, the Tories completely shit the bed on their own too.

That's where you went with it, not the OP:

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.

Distance travelled is not a definitive measure of effort required to achieve it, as anybody cycling through Croydon can testify. "Your pedalling is having no tangible effect." "If I wasn't pedalling, I'd be going backwards!".

Starmer isn't a radical. He's a methodical, evidence based, detail-oriented politician who's constantly accused of being boring, but who will hopefully be competent. The stall he set out was pretty much 'vote for me and I'll take the drama out of politics'.

Rather surprised I haven't seen the phrase 'steer calmer' bandied about

In people’s experience- would you say that a Centre-Right voter, say someone in the Gaule/Stewart mold would also admire Tommy Robinson, or would that be a good demarcation between centre-right and far-right?

I'd argue that right/left are fairly meaningless.. the graph is probably more useful.

The ones you mention, no, they wouldn't. Listening to Tory MPs opining in the early hours of Friday morning, though, there were some real nutjobs who considered themselves centre-right - don't think many other people would see them that way.

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

If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.

We have a FPTP system with two main parties, for one to turn the tables the incumbent has to perform poorly. Reform is a symptom of the sickness within the Tory party.

Thank you for sharing this. I really hope things start to head in that direction now.

I disagree - the people I am talking to declare themselves “true conservatives” and “centre right”, whilst also espousing a lot of US far right views and idolising Tommy Robinson. They’re putting themselves on the graph in the wrong place.

This is worth a read:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b082962e-69ef-4c9a-8f43-ec3703839820?shareToken=3dd14b33c19259bf25aac6e0736b27f9

The far right are trying to normalise themselves, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. Expect to see much more of it:

A new Reform UK MP has vowed to donate his salary to charity

Rupert Lowe, who was elected to Nigel Farage's party in Great Yarmouth, said his “entire net MP salary” would go to charities and worthy causes in the seaside town

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1809318563427299629

In a sense they are conservatives, but only in the worst possible sense. Can’t remember who said it, but there’s the adage that Conservatism is only one thing — a belief that there should be an in group that the law protects and does not bind, and an out group that the law binds but does not protect.

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

If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.

Just 36% of people who voted Reform say they would've voted Tory if Reform hadn't been standing. The Ref+Con= >Lab narrative doesn't work.

I didn't say Reform voters would have voted Tory, I know most of them aren't conservatives.

But Reform has come about as a result of 14 years of Tory government and the climate they created - Brexit, loss of trust in politicians and so on.

When asked the other day to define his type of 'conservative' Stewart said something about tradition, monarchy and decentralised power.

listened to Peter Hitchens asked to define what conservatism meant to him the other day and he said similar, love of the family unit, love of country, love of our history and traditions, state having minimal influence in people's lives day to day etc.

I don't think that fits the Tommy Robinson fans mold who aren't socially conservative, think there are a lot of right wing people who aren't conservative but voted for them as had no other viable option previously under a two party system

I didn't say Reform voters would have voted Tory, I know most of them aren't conservatives.

Yeah, I was adding weight to your point.

Sorry, misread. I am admittedly defensive after a lot of recent conversations with Green voting, Corbyn supporting friends which I've found a bit frustrating but let's not get into that!

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Nice - that looks like it has the exact data I wanted and it's already linked!

@Chalfie - I was just going to roughly align (i.e., ignore boundaries!). Not much more I can do without way more complex modelling which would take (me) a very long time! I just want to see some rough numbers to satisfy my own curiosity.

Luckily the above data has already done something for this.

Anyway, if anyone cares, here’s a bit of playing around. There’s likely to be errors here but I’m not too worried. warning: this is self-indulgent as fuck, and a really basic analysis done over lunch

Did labour lose most of its votes in labour seats

Labour was more likely to lose votes in seats it previously held (their strategy). In all seats they lost votes in: 143 were previously labour, 80 tory, 2 PC.

What about actual proportion of voters?

Average loss in a previously held labour seat was 11.6%, and in a tory seat it was 4.3%

So even where they lost votes in tory seats, it was less severe.

Was this a Labour win or a Tory loss?

This is the harder question.

Labour would have only won 10 tory seats if we were to compare them to them against the 2019 tories. But that's not meaningful because Labour was targetting tory voters (and potentially quite successfully based on the above). So:

What about vote split? Does the 2019 tory vote look anything like the 2024 tory+reform vote?

If all reform vote came from the tories (we know it didn't, but..) combing 2024 tory and reform vote would be roughly equal to the 2019 tory vote. It's not. In most cases the tories lost more votes than reform got (on average they lost 5% more than the combined total of the two).

The places where the combined vote went up, interestingly, were largely previous labour seats (69 lab, 16 con, 1 libdem). Again, this is possible evidence of labour strategically ignoring safe seats (but it's not a particularly nice thing to see, and probably one of the more worrying things).

Seats which previously had a tory and increased their right-wing vote were:

[1] "Ashfield" "Birmingham Northfield"
[3] "Chelsea and Fulham" "Clacton"
[5] "Darlington" "Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme"
[7] "Harrow East" "Hyndburn"
[9] "Keighley and Ilkley" "Redcar"
[11] "Rother Valley" "Spen Valley"
[13] "Tipton and Wednesbury" "West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine"
[15] "Clwyd North" "Ynys Môn"

(This would be an easy thing to fact check if someone wants to see if I made any errors! I can’t be bothered).

What if we adjust the number of reform votes going to the Tories

This is slightly different from above as this is only looking at previously held tory seats.

If we give tories all reform vote, labour still gains 47, and tories hold 135. This would put
Tories at 256 and labour 277 (hung parliament).

If we give tories 50% of reform vote if flips. Labour gains 112 and tories keep 70, which means tories at 191 and labour 342 (a small majority)

At 1/3 it's 132 and 50. Tories 171 and labour 362.

That's only part of the story (previously held tory seats). What about previous labour seats?

Labour would have lost 9 seats to the right if combined. 0 seats if we give the tories 50% of reform vote. So if we give the tories all reform vote it’s 265 tory and 268 labour. This is the other worrying thing. A united right continues to be a strong force (not really a surprise, but again, the share of seats minimises the reality of this threat).

Overall

This super basic analysis supports claims that the labour strategy worked, but not universally. I'd say they "won" a majority of their seats from the tories, but a substantial number were “lost” by tories. I would not call it a labour strategy blowout by any means, but I also wouldn't say there’s evidence labour would have done just as well by sitting on their hands.

Basically, it's a bit both (which honestly, it was always going to be).

I’m happy (this is my conclusion, I’m not trying to convince anyone else of anything) to say that labour would have won this election without reform running, but in no way would the majority look anything like it does (duh). In that sense, reform gifted labour the result it got. I think it’s very likely it would have been a hung parliament if reform stood down again.

Edit

Actually one more thing. It's not a surprise, but, statistically, an increase in reform vote increases the odds of a labour win. An increase in tory vote statistically lowers the odds of a labour win. As a control libdems aren't statistically significant (which is actually interesting in terms of the two parties nod-and-wink electoral strategy).

Blair arguing (in favour of Starmer's majority) that anyone who votes for a third party implicitly gives a mandate to the party that wins. More evidence that this electoral system is broken, and that Labour are not going to change it.

However, people voted for disparate parties knowing full well that doing so would give Labour a big majority. The last throw of the Tory dice was to call upon the electorate not to give Labour a landslide and to explain precisely how this might happen. The advice was ignored, and we have to conclude deliberately.