Critics of first past the post will feel emboldened to agitate for electoral reform more than ever after this election. Might there be reason for concern when Labour wins a landslide number of seats with the lowest vote share for a governing party since the First World War? And Labour lost some of its 2019 base – perhaps around a quarter. Seven to ten per cent of it went green, six to eight per cent to the Liberal Democrats, three or four per cent to Reform. This loss is bigger than the fifth of its base the party shed between 2017 and 2019.
In raw totals, more than a million votes left Labour between 2019 and 2024 for parties on the centre to centre-left. That equates to 3-4 percentage points.
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