We have completed an analysis of the election results in a different post. This post is specifically about what our campaign achieved. To read a full analysis of the data please click here.
Thursday was a day to celebrate. The end of 14 years of a miserable government with so much suffering, corruption, denial and delay around the enormous challenges of the 21st Century.
This time Labour has run a focused and efficient campaign and have secured a historic victory. After the defeat of 2019, this victory was hard fought and hard won. We welcome them into government and look forward to working with a new Labour administration to begin the work of democratic, social and economic renewal. It is an awesome responsibility in an age of unprecedented economic and political volatility.
We celebrate, too, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party who’ve both made huge gains and have flipped seats in parts of the country they never thought possible. Progressive party discipline and perseverance saw wins from Portsmouth to Suffolk to Herefordshire.
At Compass, we’re excited to work beyond tribal boundaries to find progressive answers to the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Together, they will become the most progressive Parliament the UK has ever elected.
We set out to make this an election campaign to change elections forever. After our progressive alliance campaign of 2017, we planted seeds, investing in a network of local organisers, which has borne fruit at this election.
Our incredible community of local groups endorsed 41 candidates – and won 35 (85%) of the races they worked in. Those endorsements were not lip service or just lending our logo to boost tactical voting. Our groups have been out campaigning on the ground and delivered more than 100,000 leaflets in our key constituencies.
That’s not a number that our team ever thought to reach for as a goal – but thanks to the work of around 120 Compass members and hundreds more volunteers in those groups we achieved it.
They’ve been assisted by a team of 7 members of staff at Compass HQ, who’ve travelled out to meet them. From a Quaker house in Harrogate with honey dripping from the ceiling, to a backroom nightclub in Keynsham – we had incredible fun meeting people and organising to make change in the place they lived.
Nationally, our vote swap had swappers from 425 different constituencies – 65% of the whole country. We were swapping to support 95 critical seats, and we swapped hundreds of votes in:
- Lewes
- Westmorland and Lonsdale
- Morecambe and Lunesdale
- Truro and Falmouth
- Derbyshire Dales
- Ely and East Cambridgeshire
- Loughborough
- Brighton Pavilion
- North East Somerset and Hanham
We were humbled and inspired by the support, labour, and enthusiasm of our members and supporters in helping with this. Over the course of the campaign, we called and texted over 5,000 of our base to drum up support for these candidates, with the help of a volunteer team of 54 that helped us call and text our supporters, that helped us coordinate the campaign, made memes, crunched numbers, and shared the word around with key allies.
Across the media, in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Byline Times, the Mirror and The i, we haven’t just made the case for a new politics, we have practised it.
This patient, relational work has secured big wins for progressive candidates who back PR. We must now build on those relationships locally and nationally to push our political agenda to build a much more equal and sustainable society, and critically the democratic reforms that will enable more transformative policies to be enacted.
This starts with proportional representation. The election looks like the most distorted in history: Labour won 63% of the seats on 33.9%% of the vote. And turnout has plummeted.
It is hard, if not impossible, to govern with consent, legitimacy and purpose when our democracy is so distorted.
Despite the voting system, the two main parties got just 58% of the vote between them – the lowest on record. It’s obvious we live in a multi-party democracy straining to break free from a system built for two.
These results prove what we have always said – that there is a big progressive majority in this country, waiting to win not via the smallest possible target but with the biggest possible dreams.
At the same time, under this system, we’ve just elected the most PR-supporting Parliament ever in UK history. At some point, those two realities must meet – and that can only mean one thing: change.
Last week, little of that transformation was possible. Now it’s up to us.
Take action today by signing this petition to demand that 2024 is the last election distorted by First Past the Post.