An official data-set of the British 2024 general election results has finally been released and they have some interesting readings, namely how close things were for some of the parties. Looking over the figures it is plausible Starmer’s 170-seat majority government could end up being a single-term administration, but the Conservatives would be hard-pressed to get an overall majority at the next election.
Serious trouble for SNP
By any measure getting only nine seats was awful for the SNP and I wondered whether being able to run a proper campaign might have made a difference, as FPTP often has cliff-edges where only a small difference in votes can make a big difference in seats. I had not expected them down to single-figures so not having the handicap of a shoe-string campaign budget may have got those extra votes needed to hang on in more constituencies. Below is a cumulative plot of sorts based on percentage majority in seats the SNP held or lost.
It does not look good. With a good portion of their former seats having 8+ percent majorities I doubt they could have done sufficiently better vote-wise to be significantly better seat-wise, but they were dangerously close to being worse off. Five of their remaining seats had majorities under 5% of which two were under 250 votes so they were not far off a Westminster parliamentary party being the smallest since 1992.
Labour’s support mile wide & inch deep
I suspect it is a Conservative this heading paraphrases but it is basically true. While it is subjective what sort of majority can be considered a close call a direct 5% swing will knock over a 10% majority, and with the usual caveats about swings being non-uniform across the country this would be enough for Labour to lose 85 seats and hence lose their parliamentary majority.
Labour only got a third of the nation-wide vote which in itself should be a cause for concern for them, and while their support was “efficent” it means next time round they will have to actively defend seats they would have normally taken for granted.
Going after the Reform vote
In the graph above the purple crosses are the percentage vote the Reform party got and at first glance this makes trying to “win back” this support a sane strategy for the Conservative party. Trouble is while this is dead-simple way of depriving Labour of their majority it is not one for getting a majority themselves, particularly as a significant portion of Reform’s vote is actually from Labour. Them courting Reform in some way is a given but it is no magic bullet. It is more stark with Conservative-LibDem seats:
Taking the Reform vote will easily win back the 20 seats to the left but beyond that it starts to become a dubious strategy. The 20 seats to the left of the chart are ones the LibDems were very lucky to get but the ones to the right look like they will stay with the party for quite some time to come.