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I agree that the terminology isn't useful. It's also not consistent (e.g. in the US surplus votes beyond those needed to elect a candidate are sometimes counted as wasted). And, if we want PR, we need to focus on proportionality above and beyond other "nice to haves".

STV is a non-starter. It would require enormous constituencies of upwards of 400,000 people and, unless people rank party lists, mean that voters have to rank enormous numbers of candidates. Also, it wouldn't get buy-in from political elites since they'd lost leverage over candidates.

The next election could see them do even worse. If Reform push them into third place, they might win even fewer seats compared to their vote. So my question to you as a proponent of FPTP and a Conservative would be why shouldn't Conservatives merit representation in that case?

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Jack Bailey | Just Use MMP

For instance, the Conservatives felt the brunt of FPTP at the 2024 general election. They won about 19% of the seats (121) in Great Britain despite winning about 24.4% of the vote. Under a Mixed Member Proportional system, they might have won ≈30 more. jack-bailey.co.uk/writing/just...

jack-bailey.co.uk

Mixed-Member Proportional Representation is the UK's path of least resistance.

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Chris Prosser @caprosser.com · 29/09/2026

This argument misses the point. Almost no one argues that wasted votes aren't counted in a procedural sense. They argue that they don't result in representation and that this is bad since it excludes minority viewpoints from our politics. And this is something that Conservatives should be wary of.

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Reposted by Jack Bailey

Critics of proportional representation: 'Yes, yes, I know that in reality politics under first-pass-the-post has been chaotic for the last decade, but in theory it provides stable two-party government, and that's what matters'.* * Not actually true in theory either.

Screenshot of newspaper article saying: 'Critics of proportional representation have said it would lead to a more chaotic form of government, with unstable coalitions and an inability to pass legislation.'

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Really loved this episode!

Reposted by Jack Bailey

Sick of work this Monday lunchtime? Or perhaps hungover from one too many on the first night of Labour Conference? If so, distract yourself with ✨ 𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗠𝗥𝗣 𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ✨ Full interactive at: jack-bailey.co.uk/ward2024

Screenshot showing interactive ward level MRP estimates at the 2024 UK general election.

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Catching up with the Labour Conference speeches and spotted this little zinger in @heidialexander.bsky.social’s speech. It has that nice quality of being new but still feeling like you’ve heard it before.

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Fun politics fact: Until 2019, Australia had a division called "Batman" while the UK still has a ward called "Gotham", both of which are apparently Labour territory 🦇

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Thanks, glad you like it! There are lots of cases, so probably also a lot more edge cases too. On Knightsbridge etc., I'd also note that the error bars on these estimates are quite wide, so would be consistent with a Conservative win.

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Does this ward track? I don't know the area very well and wasn't sure about it!

Totally possible that some wards are a little off, but the fact that I live in a Green ward that goes Labour at general elections suggests you might be onto something!

Yes, it should be because those wards are nested within constituencies where Reform didn't field a candidate. If you find any where that is not the case, let me know!

Hopefully this will also be of use to local parties. I'm sure they have a good idea of what their local wards look like, but this should provide them with some extra info. Might be important when it comes to navigating fragmentation too!

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To be fair, I have some great MRP ideas where compute is the limiting factor!

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I was considering doing output areas but the prediction stage of this took long enough. Turns out that if you go from 632 constituencies to 8,000 wards your computer has to work for a lot longer!

As far as I know, these data don't exist in the public domain. So please do with them as you wish (with attribution 😉), let me know if you come up with anything cool, or if you find anything weird that you think I need to fix.

I'm sure that there's a lot more that you could do with these data, so I've made a CSV file of all of the estimates available on GitHub for you to download and work with: github.com/jackobailey/...

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Likewise, you can click on the party names in the bottom left to see their vote share across Great Britain as a whole.

Clicking on different wards shows the corresponding MRP estimates. You can also search by name if you have a specific place in mind.

To produce these estimates, I used MRP to combine Wave 29 of the @britishelectionstudy.com with ward-level census data. Specifically, age group, sex, ethnicity, religion, education, housing tenure, socio-economic class, and economic activity, plus constituency-level election results.

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The latter is harder and requires actually thinking through the problem, so it’s not on the table. But it is also why the current government probably wont go down as a major reforming government outside of devolution.

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Totally. A related issue is that politicos seem incapable of thinking outside of our existing frameworks. Eg you can raise taxes by tweaking tax bands or you can do root and branch reform and come up with a better way of doing things.

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To top it off, they simply haven’t had the luxury of time either. If you’re Labour, you had 5 years to overhaul the party, prepare for an election, and come up with a clear governing philosophy. Understandably, they prioritised the first two but now they’re left retrofitting a vision to their plans.

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I think fragmentation and our recent political instability plays a part too. Both Labour and the Tories have undergone a series of major internal ideological shifts and the think tanks they rely on to do much of the heavy lifting now have pretty short life spans.

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But cladding was an issue all over the country post-Grenfell though. Eg I have a friend in Manchester who struggled to sell his flat because of it

Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 27/09/2026

🇬🇧 UK Poll of Polls: 27 September 2026 26% 🌹 Labour 23% ➡️ Reform 20% 🌳 Conservative 11% 🐥 Lib Dem 10% 🍃 Green 6% 👽 Other 3% ✖️ SNP

Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 27/09/2026

I’d add that using an index as an outcome is probably bad too. Ideally, you want to know what causes what, not that one predictor causes some unknown mish mash of changes in a grab bag of concepts.

I would welcome more diversity in politics, but a focus on material issues rooted in this sort of sentimentality about who counts as working class is a death sentence for Labour. As @jamesdaustin.bsky.social says, you can't hold your own voters in contempt then begrudge them for not voting for you.

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For all his faults, Blair understood that this sentimentality is toxic for Labour's prospects and it is what made him so effective. You have to reinvent social democracy anew again and again and again, rather than hanker for the politics of yesteryear if you want to win and make lasting change.

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This passage strikes me as misplaced conservatism. The *Labour* Labour Party of Harold Wilson legalised homosexuality by passing the Sexual Offences Act 1967. I'm sure many thought that a sort of "hyper-progressive drift" in the 60s, but few now would doubt that it was the right thing to do.

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As for "two tribes go to war", it reminds me of Merkel on Putin & war: "Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this." Parties resort to culture war crap because it's all that they have. Labour's not the only party that needs to work out what it's for.

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Another acknowledgement that Labour hasn't worked out how to communicate. Yes, but this is downstream of the fact that it hasn't worked out what it thinks. It's policy platform is basically a greatest hits of Labour past: nationalise, regulate, tweak.

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This is why the obsession with US politics can be strategically dangerous too: the US is the global hegemony and *does* have the means to shape economic reality. The UK does not have the same room for manoeuvre, not even within its own borders.

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On economics and immigration, we should worry that the present resembles the 1930s more than post-material politics. And the government needs to reckon with the fact that conditions are outside of its control. There's not much it can do if Putin invades Ukraine or Trump bombs Iran.

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Take Manchester's Victoria Baths. It has an exhibition showing how working people used to visit to bathe together in rooms full of bath tubs and launder their clothes in communal washing machines. This is a solved issue: homes now have washing facilities and people can think about other things.

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