The Democratic Implications of the 2024 Labour Landslide

The 2024 General Election in the UK has brought an end to 14 years of Conservative government, ushering in a Labour regime with a landslide election victory. Of the 650 seats in the UK Parliament, the Labour Party has won 412, with the Conservatives on 121, and the Liberal Democrats on 71, on a turnout of 60%.[i] This represents the largest majority in the UK Parliament since the New Labour victory in 1997. However, the result has troubling implications both for the UK’s First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral system and the prospects for reform, and will also shape the legitimacy of the new government’s major policy and constitutional reform proposals.

FPTP and the 2024 General Election Results

Under FPTP in the UK, Members of Parliament are elected in 650 single-member constituencies across the country. These are winner-takes-all contests: the candidate with the most votes will win the seat, even if they fall short of an overall majority. In the 2024 General Election, this has produced the following results:

Table 1: UK General Election Results 2024

The table above indicates some startling results. The total number of votes won by Labour is smaller than in the 2019 General Election by around half a million,[ii] yet this translated in 2024 to more than double the number of seats. Reform UK won the third-highest number of popular votes yet rank only joint seventh-highest (including the grouping of Independent MPs) in terms of seat share. Indeed, its vote share across the UK was higher than that of the Liberal Democrats, which won more than 14 times the number of seats. To gain any one seat, the Green Party needed over 20 times as many votes as Labour did for their respective seats, and Reform UK required almost 35 times as many votes. This indicates significant disparities in respect of the practical impact of individual votes under the current FPTP system in the UK.

The data above verifies the pre-election predictions that this contest would produce one of the most disproportionate Parliaments in the history of the UK. FPTP has proven itself unsuitable to translating citizens’ preferences into legislative representation in what has become a genuine multi-party landscape. This reduces the extent to which the UK’s representative democratic system can be considered genuine popular self-government, the principle at the heart of modern democracy. Against this background, the case for reform is overwhelming.

Alternatives to FPTP

Amongst the alternatives, two forms of proportional representation emerge as potential candidates. The first is the nationwide system of proportional representation (PR) used in countries such as the Netherlands and Israel. Under this form of PR, the entire country acts as a ‘nationwide’ constituency, with seats in the legislature allocated in proportion to the number of votes cast for each party using either the d’Hondt or Saint-Lague formulas. Some such systems have a minimum overall threshold of votes which parties must reach to win a seat. This is designed to protect against the fragmentation of legislatures that would otherwise result from the representation of several small parties.[iii] However, a ‘nationwide’ constituency is not an appropriate hypothetical framework for any UK-wide election. Where the PR constituency is ‘nationwide’, all the political parties on the ballot paper must be nationwide political parties. This is because neither the d’Hondt nor the Saint-Lague systems for allocating seats are designed to differentiate between regional and national parties; this must instead be done when designing the constituencies for a PR system. The UK has several regional parties: the Scottish National Party only contests seats in Scotland, Plaid Cymru only contests seats in Wales, and Northern Ireland has its own political parties not found elsewhere in the UK (including Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party). Were the UK analysed as a ‘nationwide’ constituency using the d’Hondt formula and the number of votes actually cast for each party in the 2024 election, the following results might hypothetically be produced:[iv]

Table 2: UK General Election Results 2024 – on ‘nationwide’ party list PR system

With 326 seats required for an overall majority, a coalition would be required, with the most likely option being one between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Parties (356 seats) producing a narrow majority. This would amount to 54.7% of the total seats in the UK Parliament on 52.7% of the popular vote, thus producing a considerably more proportionate outcome. Because the ‘nationwide’ constituency requires, in practice, a certain threshold of votes in order to secure a single seat, it is unlikely that any Independent candidates would be elected. However, it is unwise to draw major conclusions from this analysis, because it treats the SNP, Plaid Cymru and all the Northern Irish parties as if they were national parties.

Given this, a preferable hypothetical model is a regional party list PR system, in which there are multiple large constituencies (as in countries such as Denmark and Finland). If the UK’s four constituent territories – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – were adopted as constituencies, with the same number of seats as each is allocated currently in the UK Parliament, the following projections would result (assuming a 1% minimum threshold and allocation on the d’Hondt formula). For these purposes, it has been assumed that voters would vote as they did in the 2024 General Election, though it is acknowledged that both voting choices and party campaigning choices were influenced by the FPTP system actually in force.

England (543 seats)

Table 3: UK General Elections Results (England only) – on ‘regional’ party list PR system

Note that the 5 Independent candidates who won seats under the FPTP system did not individually have enough votes to secure a seat on this regional party list PR system. With regional constituencies, the Workers Party of Britain (which won no seats on FPTP and would have won 2 seats on the ‘nationwide’ model in Table 2), would win no seats.

Scotland (57 seats)

Table 4: UK General Elections Results (Scotland only) – on ‘regional’ party list PR system

This PR projection demonstrates the extent of the disproportionality in Scotland under the FPTP, especially as between Labour and the SNP: on reasonably similar vote shares, Labour won more than 4 times the number of seats as the SNP, whereas the numbers on the PR projection are much closer.

Wales (32 seats)

Table 5: UK General Elections Results (Wales only) – on ‘regional’ party list PR system

In some regard, Wales appears even more disproportionate than England and Scotland based on these projections: under FPTP, the Conservatives and Reform UK did not win a single seat between them, despite having a vote share almost equal to that of Labour’s. PR for the Westminster seats in Wales would produce a much more proportionate pattern of representation.

Northern Ireland (18 seats)

Table 6: UK General Elections Results (Northern Ireland only) – on ‘regional’ party list PR system

Note that the 1 Independent candidate who won a seat under the FPTP system did not individually have enough votes to secure a seat on this regional party list PR system.

Total

Table 7: UK General Elections Results (combined) – on ‘regional’ party list PR system

These projections for a regional PR system would also result in no party having an overall majority in the UK Parliament. The most likely government would be formed by a coalition between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party (total 348 seats) at the very least; it is plausible that if asked, the SNP and/or Plaid Cymru might also join. This government would have a narrow majority over an opposition principally composed of the Conservatives and Reform UK. Crucially, on this regional PR system, there are no significant discrepancies between vote share and seat share, with Labour the most over-represented party in the House of Commons. This means that citizens’ preferences are likely to be much better translated into policy decisions made by the government. However, the necessity for coalition government at the UK level brings with it an increased risk of government collapse in the middle of a parliamentary term. This has been seen most recently in both Scotland and Wales: earlier this year, the SNP’s confidence-and-supply agreement with the Green Party for the Scottish Parliament ended,[v] whilst Plaid Cymru also ended a co-operation deal with Welsh Labour for the Senedd.[vi] This experience suggests that a shift to a regional PR system in the UK would not be without its challenges. However, it might usefully encourage cross-party collaboration and alliances to ensure that any coalition that does arise is maintained throughout the parliamentary term.

Implications for Major Policy and Constitutional Change

In the UK, the conventional view is that Government’s legitimacy to pursue policy change and constitutional reform stems from the extent of the majority it has in the House of Commons. This is a claim to the legitimacy afforded by a majoritarian conception of democracy, though one rooted in the ability of elected representatives to represent the entirety of the people and bring their wisdom to bear on collective issues. This is distinct from a justification rooted in a broader idea of popular consensus. The extent of Labour’s FPTP majority and its disproportionality damages the case for regarding the new Government’s majority as sufficient legitimation for its major policy proposals: the vote share indicates that Labour’s majority represents approximately one-third of the popular consensus. Given this, major changes ought to be seen as more justified if they stem from either cross-party political support (most likely given by the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party), or the introduction of participatory mechanisms such as citizens’ assemblies and deliberative mini-publics.[vii]

The Prospects for Electoral Reform

Ordinarily, a large majority in the House of Commons might be thought to provide a firm basis for policy change in any area, including on electoral reform. However, there are two aspects of the present circumstances and options for reform that suggest otherwise. First, the figures above indicate that were the 2024 Labour government to bring forward proposals to change the electoral system to PR with regional constituencies, there is a very strong likelihood that it would lose its overall majority at the subsequent election, shifts in public opinion notwithstanding. This means that there is little electoral incentive for Labour to introduce this change, at least not without a guarantee of support from the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party of England and Wales, both of which pledged in their manifestos for the 2024 General Election to implement a form of proportional representation.

Second, the regional PR system chosen above is not without its own issues: it would leave England without any form of local democratic representation above council level, an anomaly not shared with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which would retain their devolved governments and parliaments. This more tenuous link between citizens and their representatives in the UK’s largest constituent territory may in fact further erode citizen trust in politics, unless more robust local government is introduced in England. This would nevertheless require much more extensive constitutional reform than a mere change to the electoral system, which is likely to be even more difficult to realise in practice.

Conclusions

The results of the 2024 General Elections are a cause for concern when evaluating the current health of the UK’s democracy. Its FPTP electoral system has delivered its most disproportionate results in history, creating a strong case for electoral reform. However, enacting reforms is likely to be difficult in practice, given the lack of electoral incentives to do so and the problems associated with introducing a regional PR system in a territory where there is no regional level of government. The nature of the Labour majority produced in the 2024 General Election is also such that the majority in Parliament alone is no longer convincing justification for bringing forward major policy reforms or constitutional changes; instead, cross-party consensus and/or alternative forms of democratic representation must be sought.

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[i] ‘UK General Election 2024 Results’, BBC News, 6 July 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2024/uk/results.

[ii] ‘Election 2019: UK Results’, BBC News, 13 December 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2019/results.

[iii] Simon Hix, Ron Johnston, and Iain McLean, ‘Choosing an Electoral System’ (London: British Academy Policy Centre, 2010), 17.

[iv] The projected seats were calculated using an election calculus simulator: see ‘Election Calculus Simulator Based on the Modified D’Hondt Method’, ICON.cat, accessed 5 July 2024, https://icon.cat/util/elections#google_vignette.

[v] ‘SNP’s Power-Sharing Deal with the Scottish Greens Collapses’, BBC News, 25 April 2024, sec. Scotland politics, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-68895400.

[vi] ‘Vaughan Gething: Plaid Cymru Ends Labour Senedd Co-Operation Deal’, BBC News, 17 May 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce5l86e0veeo.

[vii] Oran Doyle and Rachael Walsh, ‘Constitutional Amendment and Public Will Formation: Deliberative Mini-Publics as a Tool for Consensus Democracy’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 20, no. 1 (2022): 399.