Why do people think Labour did worse in this election than the last one?

[andrewducker]

I'm seeing a fair bit of discussion of the election which assumes that Labour lost seats to the Conservatives, and did worse than in 2010, and that's why they lost.

So far as I can see, that's not what happened at all. Let's ignore Scotland/Wales/NI and look at what happened in England (using the BBC results here.

The Lib-Dems lost 37 seats. Labour are up 15, Conservatives are up 21. And as they'd only been 20 seats off of a majority in 2010, that was enough to win them the election.

Labour's vote share in England actually increased by 3.6%, larger than the Conservative increase (1.4%) - but that didn't matter, because the Conservatives (a) grabbed more of the Lib-Dem/Tory swing seats and (b) were an awful lot closer to winning in the first place.

(Labour's defeat to the SNP is an entirely different matter, of course.)

Comments

[liv]

I think mainly because the Murdoch press is really pissed off with Labour, so they've been reporting the election as a "disaster" for Labour, even before polling, let alone when there was a somewhat unexpected Conservative majority. Even if people don't directly believe what they read it kind of creates a general impression.