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Jeremy Corbyn describes his victory as “a good majority”.
He did not, in fact, win a majority, although he got very close. 49.2%
Majority just means a larger number. The word has nothing to do with above 50%.
It is just used so in parliament because all non government seats can vote against the government, so to have the largest voting block you must have more then any other group.
As that is not the case in a constituency election, 1 vote over each other party is a referred to as a majority.
No, majority means 50%. The term for the largest number is “plurality”.
According to that same Wikipedia link you shared:
sometimes called a “relative majority” in British English
Which has been simplified to just majority in the normal parlance in political coverage in the UK (see BBC, Sky News etc. in their coverage, they all use majority to mean relative majority when reporting on GE election results)
In first past the post elections “a majority of X” means the winner got X more votes than the second place. Words can have multiple ways of being used.
In the parliament, yes. But there is no such concept in a seat. There majority can only be the dictionary def. As 50% makes no difference to the seats’ winner under fptp. Only who has the most votes.
And the dictionary def has no relation to 50%. Because it is an English term, not as political one. Heck, even in parliament, it’s a more media term to help explain who has the ability to control votes.
“A plurality vote (in North American English) or relative majority (in British English)[1] describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive more than half of all votes cast.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plurality
-
(countable) A number or part of a whole which is greater than any other number or part, but not necessarily a majority.
-
(countable) A number of votes for a single candidate or position which is greater than the number of votes gained by any other single candidate or position voted for, but which is less than a majority of valid votes cast. Synonym: relative majority
-
(countable) A margin by which a number exceeds another number, especially of votes.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/majority
- More than half (50%) of some group.
-
It’s a Tory wipeout in Wales!
CON: 0 (-12)
Love to see it.
The parties’ share of the vote and other statistics (source: The Daily Telegraph)
Starting the day and seeing Rees snob, grant schnapps and penny mordor are out.
Feels like a good start to the day
Oh and Liz snubbed
There are some very close run seats out there, how close do they have to be to do a recount?
A recount is called if one of the sides requires one. Obviously if you only had a difference of 10 votes, it’d be daft not to demand recount, but technically it only happens if a candidate requests one.
Remember the votes are technically recounted already. They are counted three times, by three separate people, who don’t know what the other two people have found as results, so they cannot be influenced by their number. If all three people get the same answer, the count is probably correct, discounting incredibly bad luck, which is statistically unlikely.
If a recount is requested then three new people perform the task just to discount the possibility of collusion.
Ree Smog is out! I repeat, Ree Smog is out!
Yes, despite many leftists decrying Labour’s centreward shift, I think this is a good result. This result was helped by that shift in no small part.
Starmer is very well spoken and his morning after speech does well to inspire confidence.
Countdown to Smog reappearing as a Reform candidate?
This is clearly a great result, but I think that given the popular vote, that it’s important to accept that this election was anti-tory, not pro-labour.
Labour have five years to make a substantial tangible change in people’s lives or we may very well find ourselves back where we left off or even worse.
Top hat wanker! Truss lost too, this is amazing.
Oh good, so now Truss can now piss off too the US and moan about the apparent conspiracy that was against her all she likes, and it won’t inconvenience her constituents anymore.
And of course no one in the US will really care, because will have no idea who the hell she is.
Is she that head of lettuce who killed the queen?
Yeah. She has convinced herself that her complete failure is a result of a grand conspiracy. This conspiracy requires some of the most uncharitable and profit driven people in the world, to be bleeding heart liberals, which is why no one believes it.
Apparently a bunch of venture capitalists, economists and fellow politicians decided that, rather than making vast sums of money under her “brilliant” scheme, it was instead better to crash the economy just despite her.
73 in Keir Starmer’s electorate voted “for more than one candidate”. I’d love to see what those ballots looked like. Or to speak with those voters. Was it a change of mind that they thought they could just cross out? Did they think they were doing an IRV vote? Approval voting? Was it just a deliberate nonsense protest vote?
Truss is out! Defeated by Labour candidate Terry Jermy by only 630 votes.
The fact it was even close is ridiculous. She’s the most terrible MP and PM we’ve ever had and yet she got a large number of people to vote for her.
There’s something in the water over there.
One of the safest Tory seats
Am I calculating this correctly that it’s now been nearly 4 hours since polls closed? How have we only heard 2% of results? You don’t even have preferences to distribute.
It’s pretty much on time compared to previous elections.
But how is it so slow? We’d have far more results than that in Australia, despite a much more complicated process where we have to do the first count just like this, and then additionally distribute preferences. And then also count the Senate results.
Does your electoral commission just not hire enough people?
Possibly, I think it might actually involve a lot of volunteers.
I do love the trend of Returning Officers wearing silly hats.
I believe most of those are mayors in their official garb.
i mean, it’s both, it’s britain.
Fucking everything on its most official capacity looks as stupid as possible. The courts, the soldiers, mayors, etc.
First Past the Post, everybody:
That’s:
- Conservatives: 19.5% of seats from 22.9% of the vote
- Labour: 63.7% of seats from 35.2% of the vote
- LibDems: 10.5% of seats from 11.3% of the vote
- Reform: 0.6% of seats from 14.5% of the vote
- SNP: 1.2% of seats from 2.5% of the vote
- Others: 4% of seats from 13.6% of the vote
The two largest parties got less than 60% of the national vote but over 80% of seats. FPTP is preventing us from being what we are: a multi party democracy.
“The conservatives and lib dems look pretty proportional to me. 10/10 voting system” /s
And the depressing thing is that it will never change because the only parties with the power to change it benefit from the current system.
You came so close in 2011. I wonder what could have happened if Clegg had stuck to his guns and insisted on a referendum on a proportional system, to remove the “progressive no” (to borrow a term from a recent Australian constitutional referendum) argument against the reform.
The Lib Dems got so excited about being granted a referendum that they forgot to take it seriously.
AV was a terrible system and arguably worse than FPTP. It’s a more complicated system for people to vote in, and would potentially lead to even more disproportionate results.
and arguably worse than FPTP
Sorry but no. Absolutely no. The only downside is the ability to use it as an excuse not to upgrade to a proportional system in the future.
More complicated? Yeah, I guess. But not enough to actually matter. Not unless you think British people are just exceptionally stupid compared to Australians.
More disproportionate results? Impossible. They’re both single-winner systems. The key difference is that FPTP allows a plurality to win while IRV requires a majority. It might create a situation where it seems less proportionate, but that’s only because you reduce strategic voting so people are voting their true beliefs, so candidates that weren’t going to win under either system end up getting more votes under IRV. But the ultimate result is that the candidate who wins in each electorate is the one who had the most support.
The British were given the choice and voted against proportional representation. They deserve the duopoly and everything that flows from that e.g. terrible healthcare, the illegal war in Iraq, royals, pointless and expensive aircraft carriers. They chose to leave the only institution that is defending their basic freedoms. These bigoted Dunning Kruger morons cannot be told.
What an utterly moronic stance that stems totally from your complete lack of understanding of what was actually offered.
Proportional representation was never on the table, what was offered was single transferable vote, which would keep the first past the post system but add the option to transfer your vote to another candidate if your preferred candidate lost. There was never proportional representation stop with the false narrative.
Instant Runoff was on the table in the 2011 referendum. Very similar to STV, but generally STV is what’s referred to in a multi-winner situation. Australia uses STV in the Senate, as does the Irish Dáil. IRV is what Australia uses in the House of Representatives, and a few areas of the US, like Maine. STV actually is a proportional (or at least quasi-proportional) system, unlike IRV.
But you’re right that unfortunately proportional representation has never been on the table in the UK. I don’t agree with the guy’s more recent takes on comedy and “free speech”, but I have great respect for the fact that this is something John Cleese has been on about since 1987. And again in 1998. And most recently in 2018.
The reason a lot of people voted against it was that there was a concern that if it was implemented the government would consider themselves to have taken action and would just shut down any talk about proportional representation by arguing that we already had it. Even though we wouldn’t have.
The theory was that by not voting for the weak source option the idea of proportional representation could be floated at a later date, and to be honest I actually agree with the analysis.
Not an unreasonable concern, to be honest. In politics there is often a balance to be struck between “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”, and “not allowing a weak compromise option that’s just not good enough to pass because it’s ever so slightly better than the status quo”.
We use IRV for our House of Representatives, which is by far the more politically significant chamber, and it sucks. Our most recent federal election saw just 4 Greens MPs elected after an absolute record performance for them (their previous best was 1). That’s 2.7% of seats from their over 12% of first-preference votes (not to mention votes for closely-aligned minor parties like Animal Justice Party). Labor (yes…we spell it the American way in this one specific context, for some reason) got 51.3% of seats from 32.6% of the first preference votes.
But on the other hand, it is better than FPTP. Enormously better. Those 4 Greens seats would probably be 0 with FPTP, because who would vote for them? They first got into Parliament thanks to receiving preferences, and many of the new seats they won in 2022 were dangerously tight. I know even as an ardent Greens supporter, I would never have voted for the Greens under FPTP, because I’d be terrified of increasing the chance that the conservative LNP won instead of Labor.
If I were voting in the UK in a referendum like the 2011 one, I don’t know how I would vote. Probably yes, but the threat of stalling any progress to an even better system is strong enough it’s hard to blame people who vote no on that grounds.
What’s wrong with Pointless? It beats the shit out of most game shows.
Pointless is a fucking great premise for a game.
But whoever the poll to determine the points makes me sometimes feel utterly insane watching the show. When they don’t know obscure Australian towns as well as me, that’s one thing, and not very surprising. But when major Disney Renaissance films, or some other thing that to me is part of the most fundamental 21st century culture, scores in the low 20s, it makes it very hard to relate to the show.
If the polling was done by an audience more representative of the general population in terms of age, instead of clearly skewing very old, it would be greatly to the show’s benefit.
Let’s hope polling standards maintain their upwards trajectory.
The British were given the choice and voted against proportional representation. They deserve the duopoly and everything that flows from that e.g. terrible healthcare, the illegal war in Iraq,
And time travelling powers apparently 🤣🤣😂.
🤡
I think it’s a bad day to be criticising first past the post. Labour stole a bunch of seats from Farage with his kill-the-NHS policies, a turd who oughtn’t to be allowed to attend D-day celebrations, given that he stands against almost everything that we fought the war for. Not sorry one bit for that disproportionality.
Every day is a good day to criticise FPTP.
A proportional system would have been to Reform’s benefit, but it would also have been to the Green’s and SNP’s.
IRV would have actually been to Labour’s benefit in the two seats I randomly happened to notice. Though I’m sure there would also be some seats where it would’ve benefited the Tories.
But I think the most important thing is that belief in a better electoral system should not depend on which party world benefit. It should be about creating a more democratic outcome. And what we saw yesterday really highlighted how deeply undemocratic the UK is.
Could have had a Labour, LibDem, Green coalition with a helping of SNP with broader positive policies (actual policies, which are currently lacking from Labour) a strong mandate. Instead we have a Labour landslide on a thin voting base. Better than the last lot for sure, but this system is so in need of a reform.
UKIP still exists? Wat?
I do like that Farage tries to call himself “centre-right”.
On the other hand, I unironically do like that he calls out how shit FPTP is.
The one thing i can agree with reform on is electoral reform. unfortunately all the racism, homophonia and general goose-stepping made it so i couldn’t vote for him.
Plus lib dems are better placed to actually make it happen.
unfortunately i was one of the absolute tools that voted no on the AV vote back in 2010ish
Honestly I can hardly blame you. It was set up to fail the moment Clegg agreed to let it be about IRV instead of a proportional system. That meant it was under assault from both sides which meant it never had a chance.
Toot-toot, moog got the boot!
From the Wikipedia article:
wp:2024 United Kingdom general election
is the,
UK general election 2024: live results in full
As of 02:56 UTC, 5 July 2024,
Labour: 168
Conservative: 28
Lib-Dem: 18
As of 04:03 UTC, 5 July 2024,
(7:03 AM EEST/MSK/TRT, 5 July 2024,
5:03 AM BST, 5 July 2024)
12:03 AM EDT, 5 July 2024,
9:03 PM PDT, 4 July 2024)
Labour: 326
Conservative: 70
Lib-Dem: 44
Green: 1
As of 05:41 UTC, 5 July 2024,
(8:41 AM EEST/MSK/TRT, 5 July 2024,
6:41 AM BST, 5 July 2024)
1:41 AM EDT, 5 July 2024,
10:41 PM PDT, 4 July 2024)
Labour: 401
Conservative: 107
Lib-Dem: 66
SNP: 7
Sinn Féin: 7
Green: 4
It’s subtle, but see if you can tell what party she represents. (lower third graphic unrelated)
Greens?
How could you possibly tell‽
It was a lot of deduction, induction and good old reduction.
