Following the most boring election perhaps witnessed in a generation you might have seen headlines that Labour had won by a landslide. Now while this is partly true it ignores a few key facts, facts that show the United Kingdom is not a democracy.
In fact despite getting 63 percent of the available seats in parliament Labour got just under 1/3rd of the popular vote, with that total dropping far lower when voter turnout is taken into the account. This has not only made this the largest gap between vote shares and seats in history, but is also making many now see just how undemocratic the country is.
How many seats do each party have?
The Labour Party now have the biggest majority not just in their history, but also the largest in almost 200 years, while the Conservative Party have their lowest. This has equated to a massive 431 out for 650 available seats, the kind of numbers that would make some dictators blush.
The Conservative Party on the other hand have just 121 seats. Other actors in the election such as the Liberal Democrats received 71 seats while both the Reform Party and the Green Party got just 4 seats each.
Were an alien to visit earth and be told that the United Kingdom was a functioning democracy he/she/they might assume that Labour got 63 percent of the vote, while the tiny Reform and Green parties got 1 percent each. Alas this is very far from what actually happened.
And this is because the United Kingdom users a system called first past the past whereby whoever wins in a constituency – which consists of a small geographic area wins the seat. Conversely this means that every vote that did not “win” is thus a wasted vote.
This has on occasion meant a party winning the popular vote, but not getting into government, but now more often than not sees huge majorities (as in the last two elections) with no basis in what people actually voted for.
How much does a seat cost?
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is by showing just how much a seat “cost” as in how many votes it took to get the seat.
For the Labour Party their 63% of seats came from just 34% of total votes cast. And as for the Conservatives they got 24% of the votes, but 19% of seats meaning they came in at a value of 0.8 votes per seat. Ironically it was the Liberal Democrats, a party so often screwed over by first past the post who had the most “just “result, with an almost even 12 percent of the vote and 11 percent of the seats.
It is after this though that the wheels truly fall of the bike, with the (actually) left-wing Green Party getting 7% of votes and 1% of seats, while the right-wing Reform Party of Nigel Farage received 14 % of the vote and a crazy 1% of seats.
For sone surreal context this meant that a seat for Labour, who received 9.6 million votes (1/6th) of the population cost them 22,273 votes. For the Reform Party each seat they got cost closer to 1 million votes, while for the Greens it was around 500,000. Ten points for anyone who can spot the dictatorialness of this.
And much as I loathe to say it, but it also meant that far from a it meaning a resounding shift to the left, in fact the combined Conservative and Reform Party vote was actually 2 percent higher than labour received.
This is not democracy and you are being lied to
As the saying goes 73 percent of all statistics are made up, so we will fall back from bamboozlement by number and instead share one fact most people would most likely not know. In the 2017 election Labour received 12,878,460 votes. In 2024 the party got 9.6 million. That means that over 3 million more people voted for “crazy” Jeremy Corbyn than Sir Keir Starmer.
Of course the people in power will blame voter apathy, or 3rd parties, or whatever else they can to justify their existence, but this is a stat that those in power do not want the masses to ever know. It is also potential proof that said voter apathy might not have occurred had Labour had an actual left-wing leader and platform, rather than a vanilla platform led by a dull dime store Cameron rip-off.
The sad conclusion? The United Kingdom is extremely far from being a democracy, instead being a system that protects two Neo-liberalist sides of the same coin. Therefore not only is the United Kingdom not democratic, but for the vast majority of people your vote is meaningless, regardless of what you are told.
Hopefully as more people come to realize this the closer we will come to electoral reform and the further we will shift from embarking on imperialist wars to spread our broken system.