Keir Starmer hails 'sunlight of hope' as Britain wakes up to Labour landslide | Hacker News Reader

Keir Starmer hails 'sunlight of hope' as Britain wakes up to Labour landslide

theguardian.com

8 pointstomduncalf15 comments

It is a landslide in term of seats but not votes.

Outside of Scotland the number of votes Labour received has not increased since Corbyn, which is actually quite a poor result for Starmer in the circumstances.

So Starmer did not win. The Conservatives lost badly. People did not vote Conservative and that handed a victory by default to Labour. Numbers instead point to votes moving towards Reform UK, the Lib Dems, and the Greens.

Obviously the Guardian is spinning the result.

Turns out its seats that actually matter for who is in government.

Which of course runs counter to the democratic ideal that the composition of legislative bodies should reflect the will of the populace.

But maybe not as much as say, the unelected House of Lords or Royal Assent.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/campaigns/elected-house-...

I didn't endorse the system. I'm just pointing out how it works.

Doesn't create much enthusiasm for those in power to persue proportional representation.

The point really is that Labour could very easily find themselves with a vote share in the low 20s next time around if they’re not careful.

The other point is that Parliament is not representative of the people: Labour has close to two thirds of the seats but got barely a third of our votes. This sort of thing has happened before, of course, but this is a particularly blatant example.

Yes. I think I read they got about 34% share of the vote yesterday, which is less than when Thatcher was elected in 1979 and only 5 percentage points more than when Cameron was elected in 2010 (29%) [not exactly impressive after "14 years of Tory nightmare"]. So there is almost no relation between share of vote and outcome in seats at this point...

The spin by Starmer and the Guardian is that they are claiming the people have given Labour an overwhelming mandate, but they really haven't. What they've done is to tell the Tories to eff off, which is very different.

On a related note, Reform UK has got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems and end up with 4 MPs vs 71 for the Lib Dems...

As long as they do things that the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid, Greens and long tail of "left/progressive" candidates agree with then they have the support of a majority of votes (they only need Lib-Dem and Green for over 50%) and will get an overwhelming number of MPs supporting their motions.

They don't need to do that, due to the flawed system, but it seems likely in most cases.

There was a lot of tactical voting which might sway things. I wanted Labour to win, but voted Lib Dem as my constituency is between them and the Tories.

I wonder which there were more of: voters who preferred Labour tactically voting for other parties or voters who preferred other parties tactically voting for Labour. Do you have data on that question?

Tactical voting probably occurred where the Lib Dems won. But overall I doubt that tactical voting means that Labour preference is underestimated: After all, Labour won in 412 seats and their share of vote has remained the same overall. With so many seats, if people really wanted them their share of the vote would have significantly increased compared to 2019.

> Tactical voting probably occurred where the Lib Dems won.

I suspect this is true to a greater extent in more marginal constituencies and to a lesser extent in less marginal constituencies

Single Transferable Vote: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems/types-of-...

Previously Labor and Conservative parties plotted against it, along with the newspapers.

This election definitively showed the need for electoral reform.

Reform have got more votes nationally than the Lib Dems bit get 5 MPs vs 71 for the Lib Dems. Only 34% voted Labour who now have an overwhelming majority. Whatever one might think of this party or that party the outcome of the election is clearly not representative of public opinion.

On the other hand people are every attached to having their MP in their constituency so a level of distortion will remain no matter what but it could be much reduced, indeed.

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