UK Labour landslide comes at expense of smaller party representation
Recasts, adds details
By Andrew MacAskill and Paul Sandle
LONDON, July 5 (Reuters) -Keir Starmer's Labour won one of the largest parliamentary majorities with the second lowest share of the vote of any winning party in modern British history, underscoring how the electoral system favours established parties over smaller ones.
With 648 of the 650 seats in parliament's House of Commons declared on Friday, Labour won 412 seats with 9.7 million votes, while the Conservative Party's vote collapsed, giving it 121 seats with 6.8 million votes.
Nigel Farage's populist right-wing Reform UK party scooped more than 4 million votes, many from former Conservative voters, but only won four seats, while the centrist Liberal Democrats won 71 seats off 3.5 million votes.
The Green party won a record four seats with 1.9 million votes and the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein secured 7 seats off just 211,000 votes.
Together, Britain's smaller parties won more than 40% of the vote in Thursday's election, but secured just 17% of seats in parliament.
Unlike countries that use a form of proportional representation - a system that often leads to coalition governments of several parties — Britain's first-past-the-post system typically results in a clear majority for a single party.
Darren Hughes, chief executive of campaign group the Electoral Reform Society, said: "We have just witnessed the most disproportional election on record in terms of votes people cast translating into seats in parliament."
He said the system no longer reflected the way the country was voting and was producing volatile results.
Many British politicians have long lauded its system, saying it creates two large parties that are "broad churches" - essentially coalitions in themselves - that can lock out any far right or extreme-left parties and provide stable government.
Smaller parties disagree and the results of Thursday's election are likely to reignite the debate around the system's fairness.
"It is definitely unfair to smaller parties, who have not built up a sufficient concentration of support in particular places," said Karl Pike, lecturer in public policy at London's Queen Mary University and a former adviser to the Labour Party.
"The outcomes are somewhat skewed and personally I don't love first-past-the-post and it is hard to defend the outcomes in lots of places."
'POLITICAL SANDCASTLE'
Farage, who won his first seat in Britain's parliament in the Clacton-on-Sea constituency, said first-past-the-post was a "very demanding problem for smaller parties".
For France's National Assembly, whose election is concluding on Sunday, and which opinion polls predict the far-right National Rally will win most seats but not an absolute majority, a two-round voting system is used which means winning candidates normally have the support of an absolute majority of voters in each of the 577 constituencies.
In elections for Germany's Bundestag, people vote twice, once for a representative for their constituency and once for a party. Half the lawmakers in the house are constituency representatives while the other half come from party lists in each of Germany's 16 states.
Britain held a referendum in 2011 on changing its electoral system in order to placate the Liberal Democrats, who were in a coalition government with the Conservatives. But the proposed reform was comprehensively defeated.
Labour has won a landslide bigger than that achieved by former prime ministers Clement Attlee in 1945 or Margaret Thatcher in 1983.
But James Kanagasooriam, a board member of the centre-right think-tank Onward, said Labour had won a "political sandcastle" that could easily be swept away by voters switching loyalties.
Labour's share of the national vote at this election at 33.7% was only 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2019 when the party had its worst election result since 1935.
The party's vote share on Thursday was also smaller than the 40% achieved by leftwing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in his 2017 election defeat.
However, any change to the system is unlikely to be on the agenda of a party that has just achieved power under the existing rules.
The lack of a more representative system deters some voters.
"There was no point voting small parties because they're not going to come into power anyway," said Aff Ladha, who runs a market stall in Southall. "So I decided not to vote this year."
Reporting by Andrew MacAskill and Paul Sandle; Editing by Janet Lawrence
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