The 2019 UK Election – a Different Angle.

The 2019 UK election was teed up to enable or not Brexit, the most enormous constitutional change in the lifetimes of UK citizens. 45.79 million people were registered to vote. 33% of them stayed away. As usual in UK general elections, non-voter was the largest electoral bloc.

Only 21.5% voted for Labour, a miserable runners-up result that sends them back to Westminster powerless. They knew the risks, the dire popularity rating of their leader and the ever favourable polls for Johnson. Two points:

a) the exact same percentage share in 2005 gave Labour a 66 seat majority with 720,000 fewer votes. Abandon reason and embrace irony and pain all who pledge alliance with FPTP!

b) this site wrote in 2017 that Labour would have to lose a fourth consecutive election before bringing itself round to supporting PR.

So zero sympathy for Labour from us. There’s every chance they’re still too obstinate to learn. Nor probably do they yet appreciate as four-time losers how close they are to political irrelevance.

Smaller parties than Labour gained altogether 15.9% of the electorate’s support, bouncing back fairly well from a nadir last time. The ‘massive return to two-party politics’ claim made a good soundbite in 2017 but turns out to have been mostly wishful thinking by FPTP shills.

Small party support included 670,000 votes for Leave parties. The winner of the FPTP 2019 round of the lottery was of course the Tory Party with 29.4%. It had morphed itself into the big hitter for the Brexit cause. FPTP 2019 gave it an 80 seat outright majority. But, a passing detail perhaps worth a mention. It attracted only 340,000 more votes compared to 2017 when eight seats short of a majority it had to bung the DUP £1 billion to get it over the line.

The reality we arrive at via these many paths of twisted logic and reason is the one where the UK, total population 67 million, will now be leaving the EU with the express support of 14.64 million of its citizens. Put another way, in the direct context of the ballot, 69.2% of the electorate did not vote to leave the EU. Critics will dispute this as bending the statistics but we won’t let them write off cheaply the suppression of turnout that comes with FPTP. We provide plenty of evidence for that effect elsewhere on this site. Nor can they deny the fact that just among those who voted, a majority of 54% voted against Leave parties.

The only route that Brexit minority had available to force what they wanted through was the FPTP electoral system. The Tory Party knew that and how to hold out at all costs against the second referendum that would have kept us in the EU. An assortment of opposition bench MPs hooked into some baffling belief in a higher moral and political calling and gave the Tories a crucial leg-up. The country has been burrowing away these last four years – meaning England to all intents and purposes – and now the rabbit hole has opened wide.

What’s worse for this website, the last minute manifesto the Tories pasted together – by which time all the signs were it was not going to end up anything less than the largest party – includes their commitment to retaining FPTP. No surprise but it’s on page 48 nestled beside worrying things they’re proposing to do with the constitution. As the drafts were being circulated, the buzz must have been ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’.

So reform of the electoral system should not be ruled out. It’s just that it won’t be in the direction of PR with fair votes, but to make FPTP even less representative of the will of the electorate than it already is. Moves like that are of a sort that should naturally have been expected to flow from a populist, hard-right administration. They will pan out much in keeping with the scenario predicted on this site a few months back. Some of the detail has panned out unexpectedly but the grim generality is primed ready to go. See Part 1 here.

This website, like the opposition parties, probably needs to have a rethink about its own purpose and relevance over the next five or ten years. That’s a subject for another post. For the time being, we invite you to click the link here to check the raw facts of the 2019 election:  Chart and Table

It’s been eighteen months since 555 & Counting was updated. The main explanation is things cropping up to hinder plans and create delays. That’s topical! All the same, the untypical voting pattern in 2017, out of alignment with the UK’s four previous elections, did have an influence in knocking us slightly off course. As did the Brexit imbroglio, too omnipresent to be prevented from silencing all arguments needing to be advanced for electoral reform.

The myth abounded even among eminent scholars that UK politics had bounced back to rude health. They claimed 2017 to be a massive return to two-party politics and ‘a big turn out’. Both were statistically untrue, as this website was pointing out in 2017 (see last para here) and (fourth para here). But real facts find traction in the public mind hard to come by. Factoids, truisms and positive sounding spins always get in the way.

As if to prove the point, I recently spoke to one of the country’s most celebrated and sought after election analysts after he’d given a presentation. He seemed slightly irritated that an evidently unqualified non-entity had stepped up to present him with the reality of those parliamentary seat distribution statistics. He dismissed them with disdainful waves of the hand and a comment something like ‘Oh, you always get that.’ Afterwards, I thought, had he been pressed or tired, he could have invited me to email him with the data.

This is the up-date of our European general election participation table that records the impressive improvement by Spain in its election held at the end of April 2019:

Sweden and Italy held elections in 2018. It’s doubtful even young readers will live to see the UK achieve Sweden’s 87.2%. But when comparing ourselves to the three European economies roughly our size, including Italy, we fall well short of them.

Now we fall well short of Spain too. If our 2017 election had seen the same turnout rate as Spain’s this year, an additional 3.3 million Brits would have gone to the polls. We continue to accumulate evidence that first-past-the-post electoral systems suppress turnout. The US uses it and their last election got a turnout of 55.5%. The most powerful head of state in the world was elected with the support of about one in four of his electorate. Something can’t be right, can it?

Our FPTP Turnout table analyses turnout rates in countries across the world that still hold to first-past-the-post systems. Forgive the spoiler but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the turnout rates are not at all impressive.

The limitations and warts of first-past-the-post have become all too apparent as well during the Brexit deadlock. It has made it clearer to a wider audience that our two-party system is demonstrably in deep malaise. Electoral reform is now even more urgent. We’ll go into what should be learnt from Brexit in more detail in subsequent posts on this website.