The most unfair election delivered a fair result

Never has a party won a landslide on so few votes but, hey, it was Labour's turn

He just had to go

I refrained from instant pontification about the general election result.  In many ways it was a foregone conclusion: Tories out! SNP out!  I didn’t need to crow about having forecast the inevitable. However, the sheer scale of the nationalists’ defeat in Scotland surprised even me. Being reduced to nine MPs is a shock from which the SNP will take many years to recover, even if its Salmondite nemesis, Alba, had an even worse one.

Bungee-jumping

The UK result was pretty much what was expected in terms of Labour’s majority, though no one saw the bungee-jumping Liberal Democrats bouncing back with 72 MPs.  Ed Davey’s “kindness” crew had their best result since the Liberal Democrat party was created in 1988.  Indeed, no version of Liberal Party has won that many seats for over a hundred years. No one quite knows what to make of that.

Nor can I quite get my head around the fact that Sir Keir Starmer managed to win 412 seats, and a 174 seat majority, on only 34% of rhe popular vote.  That’s less than the disgraced Jeremy Corbyn attracted in 2017. It’s only 2% above 2019, which was Labour’s worst result since 1935. Indeed, as Professor John Curtice noted, if it hadn’t been for Scotland, Labour’s vote wouldn’t have risen at all.

In 1997, under Tony Blair, Labour won an almost identical majority on 43% of the vote. That was attacked as unfair by supporters of electoral reform. Countless commentators and academics said it was simply undemocratic to get a 179 seat majority in the Commons on less than half the votes cast.  The Jenkins Report of 1998, commissioned by Labour, agreed and called for an additional member system. 

Those academic advocates of Fair Voting have been strangely silent this time round, even though the mismatch between votes and seats is far greater than in 1997.  In fact, I can’t remember hearing the case for the First Past the Post voting system (FPTP) being so loudly canvassed by the liberal left in over thirty years of writing about politics. The reasons for this remarkable ideological volte-face are not hard to divine.