[HPsquared]

Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority.

The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.

[pjc50]

The same is true of many different pairs of parties! It's been a long time since any winner had over 50% of the popular vote.

2024: 33%

2019: 43.6%

2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!)

2015: 36.9%

2010: 36.1%

2005: 35.2%

2001: 40.7%

1997: 43.2%

1992: 41.9%

The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.

[HPsquared]

Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.

[foldr]

If you have more than two parties then the winning party may have less than 50% of the votes. That's just how the math works out.

Somewhat ironically, given your arguments, UK voters decisively rejected a plan to change the voting system to a more proportional one in a 2011 referendum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

[pjc50]

Yes, but: the winning party having less than 50% of the votes still feels incredibly undemocratic, as you get a situation where a majority of the voters picked a different choice.

Proportional systems give an outcome where a majority of voters voted for at least one of the parties in the winning coalition. Coalitions become explicit rather than internal to parties. The internationalist/isolationist split in the Conservative party that they were desperately trying to put off would have happened much earlier.

The referendum failed because only the LDs really supported it. I note that all sorts of devolved assemblies, councils, and (former) Euro elections used different systems.

[belorn]

Why does it feel undemocratic? I have always felt that party politics are undemocratic since my voting system (Sweden) translate to voting persons into seats in parliament. Political parties and coalitions are just systems added on top of that system that get translated into people in seats. Votes in parliament are counted per person, not per party or block, and people can vote against party line.

[foldr]

I would support a move to a more proportional system, but I think it's an exaggeration to describe the present system as 'incredibly undemocratic' (especially given that a clear majority of the voting population chose to keep this system in a democratic referendum not very long ago). There's plenty to criticise about the UK at present, but HN sometimes goes off the rails on this topic. I suspect that a post describing the USA as 'incredibly undemocratic' would get shorter shrift – even though the electoral college is arguably an order of magnitude more bonkers than the UK system.

Edit: I'd also add that the UK is astonishingly democratic in some respects. It is remarkable that Brexit was implemented merely because a majority voted for it. There are few countries where such important decisions of national policy would be put to a popular referendum in this way and then implemented faithfully. (I was very firmly opposed to Brexit, FWIW.)

[throw646577]

It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.

Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.

If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.

(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)

[pessimizer]

> It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.

The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.

[throw646577]

The party that has got a plurality of the vote runs the government, in fact. Same as in the USA this time, eh?

But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essential to the process. They just speed it up.

A big chunk of why we have a Labour government this time round is Tory constituencies deciding to tactically vote Lib Dem because a Labour candidate would be less likely to gain a majority, after all. One has to assume that the people who did that meant to do it.

> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.

I dispute this concept; it's a convenient hopeful fiction being sold by hucksters and grifters. You only have to look, for example, at polls saying a majority of Leave voters would now support closer ties with Europe to resolve problems caused by Brexit. What happened is simple: people chose to have a functional government, which neither the Tories of 2024 or Reform could possibly offer. Reform is probably a generation or more away from being able to do that, and who knows if the Tories can reassemble around something mainstream before then.

[HPsquared]

What happens in practice is, parties do control the government. There are these things called "whips". Also, voters watch national media and mostly vote based on the leadership, stated manifesto etc of each party at the national level.

[youngtaff]

> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.

The electorate didn’t lurch further right… some went right others went left

[monooso]

> In any other system they wouldn't have won…

I can think of at least one other system where they would.

[vogon_laureate]

The Online Safety Act came into being under a Conservative government.

[youngtaff]

Not sure what your point is bit Labour, LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid combined got way more votes than Tories + Reform

[HPsquared]

Now that's a good point. They would need to actually debate things if parliament had this composition.

[pas]

Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)?

We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)

Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)

[throw646577]

Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)

[pjc50]

The Scottish and Welsh assemblies use AMS. The NI assembly uses STV. You can see how this produces completely different results from the Westminster elections held in those areas.

Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.