The fourth of July marks one year since the General Election of 2024. That election saw the most disproportional outcome in United Kingdom (UK) electoral history, with Labour winning a landslide House of Commons majority of 172 seats, based on just over one-third (33.7%) of votes across the UK.
Twelve months on from such a landmark general election, how does the political landscape look? Well, our argument that we urgently need proportional representation has only strengthened, in an intervening period that has seen continued political volatility.
2024, the most disproportional election in British history
The 2024 general election was remarkable in a number of ways…
- It was the first time that four political parties (Labour; Conservatives; Reform UK; Liberal Democrats) received over 10% of the votes cast and a fifth (Green Party) received over 5% of votes, a record high for them.
- The proportion of votes that went to parties (and independent candidates) other than Labour and the Conservatives was 6%. This is a record high in the period since the dawn of universal suffrage in the 1920s.
- Labour and the Conservatives were the top two parties in fewer than half of constituencies (306 out of 650 seats). This compares to 432 out of 659 seats at the 1997 general election.
- The winning candidate received fewer than half the votes in 554 constituencies (85% of all seats).
- The winning candidate received fewer than 40% of votes in 266 constituencies (41% of all seats).
- Turnout fell to a near-record low of 9%, only narrowly above the record low of 59.4% recorded at the general election of 2021.
All of which led us to argue that the First Past The Post (FPTP) system used for UK general elections is now out of step with how people are expressing their electoral preferences, in an age of multi-party politics. In 2024, FPTP produced a parliament that least reflects how the public voted, during the era of universal suffrage.
The 2025 Local Elections told a similar story
Results from the English local elections of May 2025 again emphasised how our politics is now in a multi-party era and that FPTP continues to deliver perverse outcomes…
- For the first time in the history of English local elections, since universal suffrage, a party other than Labour or the Conservatives won the most votes and the most seats. Reform UK won 40.5% of council seats up for election, with 30.6% of votes cast.
- Every year since the early 1980s, Professor Sir John Curtice and fellow election experts have been producing a Projected National Share (PNS), which uses local election results to project vote shares as if voting had taken place across the UK. In 2025, for the first time, a party other than Labour or the Conservatives (Reform UK) came top in the PNS calculation.
- It was also the first time that five parties scored higher than 10% on the PNS calculation (Reform UK: 30%; Labour: 20%; Liberal Democrats: 17%; Conservatives: 15%; Green Party: 11%).
- The use of FPTP for English council elections led to some highly disproportional outcomes at council-level, like what we saw at the 2024 General Election. For example, in Kent, Reform UK received 4% of council seats, with just 36.2% of votes. Whilst in Lancashire, they got 63.1% of seats, from 35.5% of votes. Meanwhile, in Cambridgeshire, the Liberal Democrats achieved an overall majority on the council (50.8% of seats), from just 27.5% of votes.
- In the Truro Moresk & Taverne division of Cornwall Council, the Liberal Democrats candidate was elected with just 18.9% of votes cast.
Public support for change is building, and the pressure is mounting
A recent YouGov MRP poll also reinforced how the electoral landscape has continued to shift since the 2024 General Election.
The poll indicates the following…
- Five parties each have the support of over 10% of the electorate.
- The party with the highest projected vote share (Reform UK) is backed by only around a quarter of voters (26%).
- The combined support for Labour and the Conservatives has slumped even further from the historic low of the general election, standing at just 41% (Labour: 23%; Conservatives: 18%) in the YouGov poll.
- The seat projections in the poll show Reform UK getting 271 MPs (41.7% of all MPs), with just 26% of votes, whereas the Green Party is projected to get just 7 MPs (1% of all MPs), with 11% of votes.
Such data provides more evidence that FPTP, designed for a two-party system, no longer works for our politics as it exists in the 2020s.
People are expressing support for a variety of different parties and they deserve to have those preferences properly reflected, across all levels of government – from their local councils to their representatives at Westminster.
The public themselves realise this, with a record three-fifths of people (60%), now backing a shift to a PR system for UK general elections, according to data from the latest British Social Attitudes survey.
The case for fair votes has never been clearer. From the record-breaking disproportionality of the 2024 General Election to the continued distortion of local election outcomes in 2025, First Past the Post is failing a multi-party Britain.
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