Some thoughts on how the voting system severely distorted the election outcome in Scotland

If the UK really is going to ludicrously persist with first-past-the-post in an increasingly multi-party system and with increasingly perverse outcomes, I would suggest there's a special responsibility on the media to explain to viewers, listeners and readers that there is a disconnect between how people actually vote and the election results that are produced, and also to explain the reason that is happening.  Robert McKenzie, who was one of the resident psephologists along with David Butler for the BBC's election results shows between the 1950s and 1979, was extremely good at doing that - he would just bluntly say "these results are nothing like how people voted, here is what the result would have been if we had a proportional system like every other country in western Europe".  Nobody is really filling that role now, except maybe for John Curtice, but he only appeared very sparingly on the results show.  

As you know, I wrote constituency profiles for The National over the course of the campaign, and almost on a daily basis I would sit down, look at another central belt constituency, and say to myself "ah, it's yet another one of those", in other words a constituency where the SNP were around twenty points ahead of Labour in 2019 and thus would lose the seat this time even if Labour were a few points behind the SNP nationally.  If Labour were a few points ahead of the SNP, which is what was actually happening, all of those seats would go, and by quite some distance, and it would look like a bloodbath even though that didn't reflect how people actually voted.  

If there have been a few half-hearted attempts in the media to explain this inbuilt advantage for Labour and to put the result in its proper perspective, they haven't been anything like sufficient.  So that's partly the topic for my piece in The National analysing the election outcome, and entitled "For every six Scottish Labour voters, there were five for SNP".  I'm not sure if it's on the main part of the website, but you can certainly find it in the print edition or in the digital edition (page 26) if you're a subscriber.

When I wrote it, I was trying to squeeze in a few introductory points about the wider UK result, but if I'd left those points in I wouldn't have had much room left for anything else, so once again, as a sort of "DVD extra", here is the part I cut out...

"The one-third of UK voters who actually voted Labour in this general election must be congratulated on getting the government they voted for.  The two-thirds of people who did not vote Labour were, however, not quite so fortunate.  This is a familiar objection to the legitimacy of first-past-the-post election results that has been heard since the 1970s when the share of the vote for the winning party typically started drifting well below 50%, so we know from past precedent that the problem will be shoved under the carpet by the new government, the official opposition and much of the media.  

But nevertheless 34% is yet another new all-time low for the winning vote share, and it must raise the question of where the cut-off point lies, beyond which it would not be possible to maintain the fiction that the will of the people is being enacted.  Commentators presumably wouldn't be able to claim with a straight face that Starmer had an overwhelming landslide mandate if he'd won it on 25% of the vote, so there must be a magic figure somewhere in the narrow band between 25% and 34% where the perverse effects of the electoral system become acceptable in polite society.

Another fiction that is skating on very thin ice is the notion that the changes Keir Starmer made to the Labour party, and his ruthless treatment of MPs and candidates who had ideological disagreements with him, were necessary to rebuild the trust and support of voters.  In fact, although Labour has undoubtedly changed out of all recognition since Jeremy Corbyn's period as leader, that hasn't happened in a way that has made the party any more popular.  Starmer's 34% vote share is six percentage points lower than the one achieved by Corbyn in his first general election in 2017, and is very similar to the 32% result in 2019 that was supposedly so intolerable that it was used to justify Corbyn's expulsion from the party.  As Professor John Curtice has been at pains to point out, Labour's support actually fell in Wales and remained more or less static in England, with the modest GB-wide boost being caused only by the recovery in Scotland.  Starmer's apologists have accordingly shifted their ground, arguing that Labour's shift to the right was never intended to increase vote share, but was instead aimed at playing the voting system and ensuring the most efficient geographical distribution of support.  But that just makes clear to voters that it was never actually about them, and that they were mere bystanders in the process of government selection."