The outcome of the British parliamentary elections makes a power comparison between the political parties virtually impossible due to the district system (‘winner takes it all’). Although the shift of dozens of additional parliamentary seats is widely described as a ‘great victory’ for the Conservatives, their gain on a national percentage scale is barely one percent.
Compared to the 2017 election result, the Tories increased by about half a million additional voters from 42.4% to 43.6%. Actually, Boris Johnson did not gain more votes, but the Conservatives gained seats. And actually, the Conservatives gained seats because Labour and Corbyn lost votes due to their unpopularity.
Anti-EU fanatic Nigel Farage was quick to partly credit that Tory victory to himself: his Brexit Party did not compete with its own candidate in nearly 400 of the 650 constituencies. In constituencies where the Brexit Party did compete, their candidates sometimes received 15 or 20 percent of the local votes (but despite this, they were never the largest and never won a seat.)
The Brexit Party votes came at the expense of both Labour and Conservatives, according to the first figures per district. On a national scale, Brexit obtained about 650,000 votes, just under 2 percent. Farage now uses the reversal as logic: where Brexit did not compete, true Brexiteers could only vote for Boris Johnson and helped secure him a renewed premiership.
The opposite basically applies to Labour’s election result. Labour fell compared to 2017 (barely two years ago) from 40.0% to 32.2%, a large loss of nearly eight percent. Corbyn was also party leader during the 2017 election. The 32.2% now achieved does not deviate much from the 35% with which Labour won the elections in 2005. Moreover, that 32.2% is higher than the results from 2010 and 2015.
But because the Conservatives held on to their voter base and Labour lost many voters, in several dozen districts where the differences were small in 2017, the Conservatives now surpassed the Labour candidate and took first (and only!) place.
For the Liberal Democrats, the results are even more bitter: the Lib Dems made considerable gains on a national percentage scale. They rose four percent from 7.4% to 11.5% of the votes obtained. But despite this, they were not the largest in a single district where they were leading: precisely in the district of party leader Jo Swinson. The SNP’s gain in Scotland, with 13 extra seats now at 48, mostly came at the expense of Conservative districts but also a few Labour seats.
For a precise comparison of the relative British political power balances, we have to wait for the publication of voting results per district, compared to two years ago, calculated on a national percentage scale. But it is already clear that it is not the case that millions of British Labour voters switched to the Conservatives. The eight percent of non-Labour voters partially moved to the SNP, partly to the Lib Dems, voted in ‘Labourland’ also for Brexit, and also for Conservatives.