Was the election fair?

A member of my family has just discovered that the UK’s first-past-the-post election system brings anomalous results for small parties – at least it does if you compare votes cast nationally with the number of seats won. It may be no coincidence that this individual has gone from supporting one of the main parties – which benefit from first-past-the-post – to backing a much smaller party, which lose out from it. Notwithstanding that, the question they raise is, was this election result fair?

Certainly, the raw comparison between the seat share and vote share percentages suggest that the outcome isn’t fair (note that I have included here only the non-Northern Ireland seats as the unusual politics of that place would add confusion, not least because the listed parties mostly do not campaign there; the Speaker of the House of Commons, whose seat is traditionally not contested by other parties – though no one seems to have told the Greens – is included here as an Independent):

	Seats	Seat share	Votes	Vote share	Votes per seat
Labour	411	65.0%	9,704,655	34.5%	23,612
Conservative	121	19.1%	6,826,758	24.3%	56,419
LibDems	72	11.4%	3,519,199	12.5%	48,878
SNP	9	1.4%	724,758	2.6%	80,529
Reform UK	5	0.8%	4,117,221	14.6%	823,444
Green	4	0.6%	1,943,265	6.9%	485,816
Plaid Cymru	4	0.6%	194,811	0.7%	48,703
Independent	6	0.9%	564,243	2.0%	94,041

The votes per seat numbers are perhaps the most striking statistic, what might be called ‘vote efficiency’. Labour clearly benefited disproportionately on this measure, and Reform and the Greens (whose manifesto was happily leavened generously with the language of fairness) were the parties that most lost out. There’s no doubt though that both of those parties were delighted by their tally of MPs and will certainly rate that level of parliamentary representation a major success.

But considering votes on a national basis mistakes what’s going on in a first-past-the-post constituency system – and it’s worth remembering that the form of British elections long predates the invention of national political parties, let alone their regimented form of more recent years. First-past-the-post is all about delivering the single MP chosen by the constituency, and that means localised voting strength is rewarded and national performance isn’t.

That’s why it’s worth considering the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru performance, whose results strongly outperform those of the other small parties – true even though it was a very poor election result for the SNP. Each of these parties benefit from fighting elections not on a UK-nationwide basis but within their own nations – Scotland and Wales respectively. Plaid’s votes were shared across only the 32 Welsh constituencies, the SNP’s across the 57 Scottish ones. The parties with the lowest ‘vote efficiency’ – votes per seat gained – are the two parties that stood candidates nationally but really had only a very limited number of constituencies where they were realistically competing to win.

Local concentration is why, for once, first-past-the-post seems to have suited the Liberal Democrats – traditionally a smaller party that has fared badly under it, and has argued strongly for proportional representation (arguing that it was needed for fairness reasons, not for their own political advantage). Again, the LibDems happily headlined their manifesto For a Fair Deal – though the fairness language is slightly less universal across their document than it is in the Greens’. The LibDems had a vote efficiency remarkably similar to Plaid Cymru’s, because its votes too were largely concentrated in constituencies where they were competing to win (particularly in the Southwest of England). A large part of that effect was because of tactical voting, with both Labour and LibDem supporters lending the other party their votes in constituencies where the other had the best chance of beating the Conservatives. Labour too was therefore a beneficiary of votes cast tactically in reflection of the apparently widespread desire to oust the Conservatives.

And that’s really the story of this election: it was more about voting against rather than voting for. Just as with the French election a few days later, the clearest message from the electorate was what they did not want rather than what they did. In France, opinion pollsters were shocked when the National Rally (the rebadged, and perhaps reformed, National Front) was beaten into third place – having placed first in the first round a week before, and in the prior European election. Some in the country will no doubt complain at unfairness through manipulation of the candidates left standing following the first round (more three-party contests than usual survived that first round as high turnout made it more likely that third placed individuals met the required threshold of 12.5% electoral support; there were then 48 hours in which candidates could choose to stay and compete in the second round, and many were withdrawn), so that there was a decision simply between the National Rally and a not-the-National-Rally candidate. Yet in many ways, this seems simply to have been an adjustment making the tactical voting decision more clear. The turnout, 66%, and the strength of the support for the not-the-National-Rally candidates, is suggestive that actually the electorate welcomed this clarity and were very willing to vote tactically and oppose the National Rally, voting against something rather than voting for.

Voting against, as well as helping Labour in its contest with the Conservatives – both directly and in the way Reform votes were mainly taken direct from Conservative candidates – also harmed them. In a number of constituencies there was clearly a strong protest vote in relation to the Labour leadership’s stance on the conflict in Gaza. Setting aside the unusual situation of former party leader Jeremy Corbyn retaining his seat against the official Labour candidate, there were four seats won from Labour by Independents, apparently all related to concerns about the approach to the issue of Palestine. In still further seats, independents took votes from Labour, in some cases clearly allowing incumbent Conservatives to survive (not that Sir Iain Duncan Smith, for example, seemed willing to acknowledge that on the night).

It would be welcome of course to have a politics where people are inspired to vote for something rather than simply to vote against. But it does seem that voters understand their electoral systems pretty well and know how to deploy them to get the results they want – even if those results are more about what they don’t want.

That seems fair.

But perhaps it is fair in spite of the electoral system, not because of it. The election results, particularly the vote efficiency statistics, suggest that something isn’t right, and that something will need to be addressed over time. Proponents of proportional representation will need to find a response to the importance placed on genuine constituency representation by the many who continue to favour first-past-the-post, the personal connection between MPs and their locality, and their individual constituents. That’s why something like the modified d’Honte system seems most likely to gain traction (there was an odd moment sometime in the night’s coverage when a Reform representative referenced modified d’Honte and was told by the presenter it wasn’t a good time of night to start discussing such things). It’s already used in the UK – for the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the London Assembly – and seems to lead to reasonably fair outcomes, with constituencies electing candidates on a first-past-the-post basis and then other seats filled in a way that ensures the whole elected body is more fully and fairly representative of the weight of votes overall.

For fairness’s sake, something needs to change – and change is also needed because the mindset and approach of the electorate has changed. It seems that mindset can no longer be crammed into the tight election box of first-past-the-post.

Historically one benefit of the UK’s first-past-the-post system has been seen to be the clarity of the results it gives. It’s hard to say that isn’t true of this result, given Labour’s huge majority. But historically that clarity tends to have arisen because of the small number of realistic options between which the electorate could choose. It wasn’t quite a binary choice, but it did sometimes seem that way. The real lesson of this election has to be that the electorate is now much more open-minded about its choices and that five parties that campaign nationally have a genuine chance of winning seats, and a further two are competitive in the 10% and 5% of seats in which they respectively fight. If even independents can win seats, and upset the results in other seats, it’s clear that the electorate’s perceptions of the election process have changed. The electorate’s desires have fragmented, and even with first-past-the-post strongly favouring the larger parties, the electorate has rallied effectively behind other options in many cases.

That fragmentation of desires will need at some point to be reflected in some change to the electoral system. The current system will find itself less able over time to respond to the actual wishes of the electorate, which are clearly very different from the more binary world of the past. While this does seem a result that fairly reflects the wishes of the electorate – for removal of the incumbents, a vote against rather than a whole-hearted vote for – it does seem that soon only some proportional system will be able to capture fairly the wishes of the British people.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a wholly personal endeavour.

Real Hope, Real Change, Manifesto for a Fairer, Greener Country, Green Party

For a Fair Deal, Manifesto 2024, Liberal Democrats