I made a spreadsheet to investigate further, going back to the 1979 general election so far.
The most frustrating part is that the popular vote for left of centre parties has exceeded the popular vote for right of centre parties every single time, except in 2015 where the electorate voted right more than left by about 2%. For every single one of the 9 other general elections, the left outvoted the right by percentages varying from 9% to over 33%. For the first Tony Blair vote, the left vote about doubled the right vote.
And yet, for these 10 general elections, the main left of centre party got in 3 times. That’s the left winning the popular vote 9 times and getting in 3 times…
The left need to outnumber the right by over 25% to get in. Anything less and the right get in.
As for the seat to popular vote proportions, it’s not as clear cut in favour of the right as it seemed from the past few elections. Yes, every time the right’s seats were disproportionately more than indicated by the popular vote, they got in, but the 3 times the left got in, their seats were disproportionately more than indicated by the popular vote. This could be for many possible reasons ranging from the sinister to the quite innocent. It may just be that there are some seats that swing either way that don’t need many votes to win compared to the rest of the country, and when the right wins them they get in and when the left wins them they get in. It could be gerrymandering, it could be outright fraud. I’d need to go into far more detail to figure that one out.
But what’s clear either way is that this democracy is broken. At least you can argue that whenever the top right party got in, their votes were more than those for the top left party, which indicates at least a superficially functional system in spite of all the issues going on underneath.
There has been an electoral reform referendum, but the right led a much more successful campaign basically arguing that the FPTP system is simple and works + there’s no problem with it, and the alternative on offer was the “alternative vote”, which they framed as overly complicated. Basically they appealed to stupidity and won with more than twice as many votes.
I’ll address this over on the other thread then.