The bizarre 2024 election Part II – How Reform is so unrepresented in Parliament

How did the LibDems get 14 times the number of seats of Reform UK, the party that beat them easily in vote share?

Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2024

Facts4EU continues its Christmas review of the most unusual election result in British history

In Part I we looked at the current over-representation in Parliament of the Labour Party, compared to the Conservatives. In Part II today we look at the parties which came third and fourth: Reform UK and the LibDems, respectively.

We are presenting this review ahead of our new and exciting series of reports, benchmarking the performance of the new Government across the key measures that affect us all in our daily lives.

The general election results of Reform UK and the LibDems below are so extraordinary, we have had to show these in graphical form to highlight the large democratic deficit in 2024 produced by the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system.

Reform UK beat the LibDems across the country and were then beaten by them in Parliament, due to the electoral system

As if the historically bad results for the two main parties we highlighted yesterday weren’t enough, we now turn to the parties which came third and fourth. Reform UK comfortably won third place in terms of votes. It achieved the third-highest vote share at 14.3% with 4.1m votes, only 2.7m behind the Conservatives. Reform also showed the highest percentage increase (12.3%) in vote share of any party in the 2024 General Election.

The LibDems came fourth by vote share, on 12.2%. They trailed Reform UK by 2% (almost 600,000 votes). Despite being significantly less popular than Reform, the LibDems won an astonishing 72 seats, 14 TIMES (67 seats) that of Reform UK.

This is so hard to understand and believe, we have produced a summary and a graphical representation.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

The national vote and individual MPs

Our figures below provide the overall number of votes for each party at national level, divided by the overall number of their MPs who were elected. We refer to these as ‘National party votes, per MP’. This is not an official term but it describes what we are trying to show.

As everyone knows, we live in a parliamentary representative democracy. We vote for a candidate to represent us in our own constituency. Allegedly we don’t vote for a party, although in reality many do, because many of us wouldn’t know our local MP from Adam or Eve.

© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2024 - click to enlarge

[Data source : Facts4EU analysis based on the reports to Parliament by the Returning Officer for each constituency.]

PLEASE NOTE : We are only including the four main UK national political parties. We have not included the Greens as they are now three separate parties in England & Wales, Scotland, and N.I..

A graphical representation of this situation

Seen behind each party leader below is an illustration of the numbers of national voters for their party, per seat won. This shows graphically how certain parties – especially Labour – won a very large number of seats with a disproportionately low number of votes nationally.

© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2024

[Data source : Facts4EU analysis based on the reports to Parliament by the Returning Officer for each constituency.]

Nigel Farage's Reform UK required 35 TIMES the number of national votes for each MP gained, than Sir Keir's Labour Party needed.

Is Reform’s rise just a ‘flash in the pan’, or will it change the political landscape of the UK?

Older readers will recall the breakaway ‘centrist’ Labour group in the early 1980s known as the SDP. Launched to much fanfare, the media got very excited that the ‘Gang of Four’ : Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, and Bill Rodgers was going to cause some kind of tectonic shift in British politics. In the event, they slowly sank and formally merged with the Liberal Party in 1988 and were never really talked about again.

Reform does seem very different. Firstly they have some pedigree. It could be said that its parents are the Brexit Party and its grandparents were UKIP. Secondly it should be remembered that Nigel Farage has already won two UK national elections : those for the European Parliament in 2014 and again in 2019. The Brexit Party of which he was leader in this latter election trounced all the other major parties to win easily, sending the most MEPs to Brussels. This does seem to put Reform UK into a wholly different category to that of the SDP.

The other key differentiator is the continuing and seemingly inexorable rise in their popularity with the public, if not with the mainstream media. This has been shown in two ways.

  • Their increase in popularity in the polls and in the general election
  • Their fast-growing membership

Reform UK now have a live membership tracker on their website, showing the latter openly. The Conservatives have 131,680. At the time of writing Reform UK are on 128,969. It seems inevitable that Reform will overtake the Conservatives within days.

Coming up…. Facts4EU.Org’s ‘Government Trackers’

Given all that we have published across these two reports about the General Election on 04 July 2024, the Facts4EU.Org think-tank feel that after the final part on Monday it will be time to produce our 'Facts4EU Government Trackers' to monitor some of the key measures and policies of the current government. We will focus firstly on the economy, with ‘at-a-glance’ charts showing the country’s economic health since it was elected, on the key facts which affect us all.

We will them move on and add a ‘Facts4EU Immigration Tracker’. Not to be missed!

Observations

Who will be "the main parties", come the next election?

Throughout this four-part mini-series we have referred to “the two main parties”. With the rapid advance of Reform UK, however, we may soon be talking about “the three main parties”. Or we might even be talking about “the two main parties”, but where the identities of the two parties in question have changed.

As ever, Facts4EU remains non-partisan. We comment on party politics when it relates to our core principles of independence, sovereignty, democracy and freedom. In the case of these four reports, the issue of democracy stands out starkly. At the heart of this is the notion of ‘representation’. There are no surprises when it comes to our ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system producing skewed results, but on this occasion the disconnect between the popular vote and the results in terms of seats is the worst we have ever seen.

It doesn’t matter which party one holds a torch for, nor what one might think of certain other parties and their policies, it is in no-one’s interests for the results of a general election to alienate a significant part of the electorate.

Sadly, when looking across at the rest of Europe, their various forms of proportional representation frequently produce political chaos, as we have seen most notably in the last six months in France. President Macron is now on his third Prime Minister since their July elections, and it doesn’t seem likely that this latest PM will be any more successful in forming a stable government than the previous two.

Facts4EU.Org’s new and ground-breaking ‘benchmarking reports’

The best that can be said is that the current state of affairs in the United Kingdom is likely to sort itself out in the next few years, when the next general election comes around. In the meantime, we are launching our ground-breaking set of 'Facts4EU Government Trackers'. These will follow a standard ‘dashboard’ format, allowing readers to judge for themselves very quickly how the country is doing on some key measures which affect us all.

These will include the economy, inflation, household finances, employment and unemployment, wages, debt, housing, and real GDP per head. All these will be benchmarked from when the government came into power. We will then do the same for immigration. You do NOT want to miss these!

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NOTICE : Facts4EU has now scaled back to publishing 5 days-a-week

For nine years we have worked seven days-a-week. As far as we are aware we are the only organisation of our type to have done this. We are grateful to those of our readers who have made donations but sadly the level of our funding is now such that we must make it stretch for as long as we can. This means team members taking other paid work and reducing our output to five days-a-week.

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[ Sources: House of Commons Library | Electoral Commission ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Fri 27 Dec 2024

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