On July 5, 2024, London, England, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria Starmer addressed Labor Party campaigners and events at 10 Downing Street after the election results were announced. People pay their respects.
Toby Melville | Reuters
LONDON – Britain’s Labor Party won an overwhelming majority of seats in Parliament in the British general election, but a quirk of the British electoral system meant it received only 34% of the total vote.
The results showed that the opposition Labor Party won 412 of the 650 seats in the parliament, with only two seats remaining yet to be announced. This equated to about 63% of the total seats, but Labor won only 34% of the total “popular vote”, while the Conservatives won almost 24%.
Meanwhile, smaller parties including the centrist Liberal Democrats, the right-wing Reform Party and the Greens won nearly 43% of the popular vote but less than 18% of available seats.
This is thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post system, in which voters choose just one candidate from local lists in each of the country’s 650 constituencies. The person with the most votes in each constituency is elected to the House of Commons, the UK’s house of Commons. The party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons usually forms the new government, and its leader becomes Prime Minister.
Unlike other voting systems, there is no second round and no ranking of first- and second-choice candidates, meaning it is difficult for smaller parties to convert more popular votes into parliamentary seats.
Gabriella Dickens, a G7 economist at AXA Investment Managers, said in a note released on Friday that the election “marks a warning sign for the political system because More than a third of the popular vote resulted in an overwhelming majority.
She pointed out that the voter turnout in this election was only 60%. It was the second-lowest turnout since 1918, after 2001. Voter turnout dropped to 59.4%. Dickens said turnout was down 7.6% compared to 2019, indicating a “broader political disconnect”.
“The size of Labour’s majority is largely a result of the peculiarities of our voting system and the interaction of the split vote and the SNP (collapse), rather than a resurgence in Labour’s popularity,” she said.
Nonetheless, Dickens added, “the vote has shifted more generally to the left”.
“If a Labor government can stay in power over the next five years and deliver a recovery in growth, investment and real personal incomes, they should be in a good position … to see real improvement going forward,” she said.
Meanwhile, Rob Wood, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said investors will need to “think carefully about vote shares, the consequences of right-wing reforms and how voters’ willingness to change political allegiances translates into policy.”
Nigel Farage’s Reform Party won 14% of the vote and only four seats.
Wood said: “Normally a majority like Labour’s would guarantee more than one term of government. But given the dynamics of the vote, Mr Starmer’s majority is not as secure as it would normally be.”
He said Labor “may need to adopt policy changes quickly to demonstrate they can deliver the changes they have promised.”
— CNBC’s Jenni Reid and Holly Ellyatt contributed to this report.
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