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Guys, stop complaining. You're all too dumb (sorry not well informed enough) to really understand the grown-up politics that's taking place. And anyway, this was all a clever trap which only the dumbest MPs fell for - they only have themselves to blame (ignore the fact that, by all reports, a large portion of the PLP is quite angry with how Starmer and the whips handled the situation). Also, by voting for the amendment, they have somehow now made it harder for the policy to be changed in the future! They're the real villains.

In any case, we need to give Starmer time. It's only his first King's Speech! This one is about growing the economy, not growing food for starving children.

And there it is.

CORBYN!

Canada did pretty well to get to the semis, was funny to see Jesse Marsch get so angry in that game.

It's nuts!

Obvs that means it's coming home (to Canada) in two years. Home advantaged, etc..

It is an island nation.

Lot's of naval gazing and accurately describing the failings of the football in the press (they played pretty poorly for the most part. You don't ignore that). I and the people I watched games with had a fun time though. Zero toxicity! Horses for courses.

This tournament has been so toxic.

It really hasn't. This thread has been though. I've had to avoid it during any matches.

Don't pretend. You've gone full centrist dad and are one step away from being a "respectable Tory". You're basically doing a reverse Ben.

Totally. Loads of people I know voted green because they couldn't stomach labour or (correctly) knew their vote was meaningless, so wanted to boost the progressive vote proportion. And I'm sure loads of tories stayed at home (as you suggested). People are likely fatigued by all the politics and are dropping out. And perhaps there's a cohort of young people who didn't engage because there was no one for them to engage with. Loads of options.

Key thing - as you said - is that it's not clear cut. Blame voters at your peril.

^ and that too!

My feeling is that it's not clear cut.

Think about the following scenarios:

Life long small-c conservative who can't bare to vote for the last cunts
Starmer hating leftist who doesn't live in Walthamstow or Islington North
Time poor semi-engaged who's been told Labour will win in their seat

All eg of people who might not vote for a range of reasons, and who's decision not to vote is effectively a vote in itself.

This. Can be seen as an indictment of those who were running as much as those who had the opportunity to vote (although spoiling would be the better option personally).

I've not read the thread, but be you're right about raw counts if that's the case.

But you're wrong about the the arrow plot. That's as meaningless for similar reasons.

Definitely agree with this!

"In lieu of any hacks actually doing their fucking job"

I'm not sure if it's a time thing or not, but been really little actual analysis. Academics and polling firms will be on it eventually.

Interesting. I looked at all seats as a block, not as a ranked list.

A mandate is a very fluffy concept, so I'll say Labour absolutely have the legitimate right to govern (obviously legally, but also in terms of having a mandate from the people). They won (thankfully!). But I think it's problematic to claim that the size of their win is, in actual fact, representative of the wishes of the electorate because they knew that their votes wouldn't be counted, and therefore, are de facto votes for Labour. I don't think that's, strictly speaking, a particularly democratic perspective.

Tempted to do a bare arms joke but will leave that for someone else.

lol. oops.

Yes, things change but because many people will use the argument to that it's been like this since Christ was a lad, often they don't change.

I'm not sure I follow this.

I do think Blair has a reasonable point; it isn't hard to understand FPTP and if you want to do a protest vote that's cool, but you'll get what you get.

I'm not sure this is about protest votes. It's the position that any vote that isn't for an expected winner (the presumed knowledge of which is already a democratically problematic premise) is also an implicit vote for the winner. It's intellectual gymnastics to support Labour's mandate.

Agreed, but it's no more broken than it's been since 1707 or thereabouts.

This is the logic that supports the right to bare arms in the US. Things change.

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.

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).

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

Is this using national level data?

Is this a real question?

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.

Yup, potentially complex when looking at 650 instances. Doesn't mean don't do it! And if there's an error in the methodology it can be pointed out and corrected. I'm not sure if speculative is the right word, but I get what you mean. But all survey/polling analysis has these limitations. We can never know the causes or things at the individual level. The social world is complex.

The key thing from my perspective is that I'm not looking for confirm anything! I want to see whether the claims being made (on both ends) are justified in the data.

And seats where greens won or reform Lib Dem’s?

It's the same thing. You can look at those as well. The question isn't about them though. But the data I want could be used to investigate questions around those parties as well.

Look at the link @greentricky just posted (thanks!). The second figure is essentially what I want to see. It shows movement/change from Tory to Reform and Labour. Cool - I also want to see this at a constituency level - that can offer some insights into the impact of that movement/change. The national level is interesting, but it doesn't answer the question: did this result in a split on the right that got Labour in, or was there enough movement from other parties to Labour to overcome any split.

That is, I want to see the second figure for each constituency not just the national level. I'm not trying to "confirm" anything.

It feels like you are spitting left and right and that any vote here must have come from here because the numbers align?

I don't know what this means. I've already said that we don't know individual voter behaviour. Every analysis is like this.That doesn't mean we don't use aggregated data.

Eh? What am I trying to confirm? I honesty think you'll find cases where Labour have increased their vote share and cases where Reform have split the vote.

The hypothesis is this: Labour increased it's vote share in seats that previously were Tory.

We can test that really easily by just comparing 2024 vs 2019. (Has labour's percentage gone up in seats previous Tory).

However, we know that 2024 and 2019 are not comparable because Brexit stood down in 2019. Therefore we have to account for that change. This is why you need to include Reform in any calculation.

I'm a bit lost as to what you think I'm actually interested in.

Surely quite a few more permutations here.

Hence:

More could be done after that, but we'd have an idea of what was happening already with that information.

.

Not very convinced that anything very meaningful comes from it.

Why? Possible I'm missing something but it seems like pretty low hanging fruit in terms of a very simple overview of voting behaviour that accounts for Reform.