Immediate thoughts at the July 2024 UK general election result.
After 14 years of poisonous Tory rule I think we’re allowed to celebrate the result and look forward to a Labour govt that will not only face opposition from the right, but also from a much strengthened progressive side including 4 Green MPs. But: this result offers very little guarantee that the UK’s progressive turn will last longer than the current parliamentary term and progressives should worry about that from Day 1. Here’s my reasons for being more worried than excited today:
Labour’s reported ‘landslide’ victory isn’t backed up by significant gains in the vote share. The voting system is giving the party 64% of the seats based on 35% of the vote. The landslide is almost exclusively owed to the breakdown of votes for other parties. A shaky base for power.
My broad sense is that a proportion of those who voted for Labour didn’t do so out of excitement or enthusiasm, but because they disliked other parties more. It feels like this was actively embraced by Labour during the campaign, making themselves look ‘bland but competent’.
Perfect storm
Labour (and Lib Dems) benefited a lot from the vote split between Tories and Reform, which meant that for once there was little harm from the vote split on the progressive side – but that split also became more pronounced with Greens and independents winning more votes.
The ‘safe seat’ appears to be a rapidly evaporating phenomenon. The average size of majorities of elected MPs seems to have shrunk by quite a bit, while it looks like the average swing (the proportion of voters that has voted for a different party compared to the previous election) has increased a lot. This means that nearly every constituency will be a marginal seat next time.
All of this suggests to me that the reported size of Labour’s election win betrays the underlying reality of a volatile electorate that hasn’t voted for Labour en masse, and that may just as easily turn to different parties the next time around. This was a perfect storm, you won’t get it twice.
The UK isn’t immune to the populist and nationalist tendencies that are dominating politics elsewhere in Europe. The 2016 Referendum exposed this already, and the vote share for Reform UK in yesterday’s election is an ominous sign.
It’s looking plausible that the Conservatives will conclude that their way back to political relevance involves adopting the rhetoric of Reform UK, becoming a full-on anti-immigration party with little concern for climate or the rights of minorities.
What this will mean for the shape of the right-wing opposition is unclear. But progressives would be wise to prepare for the worst: that the Tories and Reform merge into a single populist force that presents itself as the only alternative to Starmer’s govt in 4-5 years’ time.
Fair votes now
That’s the time progressives have to turn this accident of the voting system into a project that inspires enough hope and confidence for people to get behind it. And the key to that may well be in restoring people’s sense of agency – that they can be part of change, however small at first.
Such an agenda will only work if it is underpinned by a serious effort to make the democratic system fair, transparent and effective. Indeed, that would mean getting electoral reform done. The election result adds to the case for that, even if Labour have been beneficiaries of first-past-the-post (FPTP) this time.
Introducing a proportional system now would not only help restore a sense of agency and trust among voters. It would also remove the risk that the next FPTP accident would see the extreme right getting a parliamentary majority on less than a third of the vote.
The irony is that today’s FPTP accident has given Labour the key to making electoral reform happen. There are many in the party who are in favour. Allies in other parties and organisations will work with them. The odds may be against them. Yet, the case for change can’t be resisted forever.
Remco van der Stoep 
A most curious election result
Something extraordinary happened in yesterday’s provincial elections in the Netherlands. It wasn’t a landslide of any sort; in fact the right-wing liberals of the VVD held on to their lead. Neither was there a new populist movement – and the Netherlands have seen rather a few over the past 15 years – that took the provincial parliaments by storm. What was remarkable, and I believe unprecedented, is that none of the parties secured more than one-sixth of the vote.
That’s right. Overall the VVD secured the biggest number of seats in these elections with just shy of 16 percent of the vote. Five other parties each polled between 10 and 15 percent nationally. The combined vote share of the three most successful parties in these elections fails to even hit 45 percent. Indeed in ten of the Netherlands’ 12 provinces, a minimum of four parties are needed to form a majority government.
The fragmentation of the political landscape in the Netherlands has been a gradual process, punctured by various shock results. The country’s undiluted proportional representation system has accommodated a tradition of political diversity, with new parties finding few obstacles on their way into parliaments. Often the political lifespan of such new parties has been short, particularly if they ran on a single-issue ticket. Having said that, some parties that made their entry into politics in my lifetime have become part of the fabric of Dutch politics with representation at all levels.
While the rise of new political parties is one aspect of a two-sided story, the decimation of formerly dominant parties is the other. In the general election of 1989, the christian-democrats (CDA) and social-democrats (PvdA) together obtained more than two-thirds of the vote. Yesterday’s result puts them on less than 25 percent combined. Oddly, this has not forced these former giants into the political margins. It would still only take a minor swing one way or the other for CDA or PvdA to be the Dutch voters’ top choice again – for what that is worth of course.
The 75 seats in the Dutch senate, which will be allocated on the basis of yesterday’s election results, will be divided between 12 political parties. Progressive liberals (D66), socialists (SP) and anti-immigration populists (PVV) will be present in similar numbers to VVD, CDA and PvdA. Other groups will include the animal rights party, the 50-plus party for senior citizens and two religiously-guided parties of protestant signature.
It will be worth keeping an eye on Dutch politics in the next few years. While the Netherlands have a long history of multi-party democracy, the balance of power has never been as delicate as it is now. Could this fragmentation be a blessing in disguise and result in greater representation of the electorate’s diverse priorities in decision-making, or will it expose the limitations of proportional representation?
Should the political parties fail to devise a credible way of working together constructively, how will voters respond: what would a vote against fragmentation look like?
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Posted in Blog, Commentary, Democracy, Netherlands
Tagged #ps15, CDA, coalition, democracy, elections, Netherlands, politics, PR, proportional representation, PvdA, VVD