Hello and welcome to a special UK election edition of The Crunch. Both Nick and Josh are on holidays this week, but we’ve been bookmarking and screenshotting all the UK election graphics we’ve seen.
But first … why are Australian houses so cold in winter?
Spoiler: it’s because they’re poorly insulated or otherwise energy inefficient. But we wanted to know how widespread the issues were, so Josh crunched the numbers to get an estimate of how many homes are rated 1.8 stars or below:
Research has found that Australia’s energy standards are about 55% worse than comparable countries and climate zones. Many European countries require something similar to an Australian eight-star rating.
Read more here.
Heaps of charts from the UK election
In case you missed it, the UK held an election, and the ruling party of 14 years – the Conservatives – lost by a wide margin to the Labour party. Here’s a list in no particular order of great, interesting and otherwise notable election graphics!
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Everyone loves cartograms (and holograms)
I (Nick) love cartograms. As a discerning reader of The Crunch, you probably love cartograms too! Which is why it’s exciting to see that in the UK election results at least, cartograms are mainstream.
For the uninitiated, a cartogram is a map which replaces the usual spatial representation of an area with either the same areas where the size is adjusted by another variable, or a geometric shape of a set size for each area.
These are great for political results maps as it normalises the contribution of each electoral area to the overall total, and fixes the “land doesn’t vote” issue of large, sparsely populated areas (a particular issue in Australia).
The BBC and Sky News used a hexagonal map, as did the Guardian (which also has a lovely transition between traditional boundaries and the hex map). Sky News also had giant holographic images of Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak looming over their map occasionally, for some reason. This is not however even close to the weirdest election night TV graphic.
The FT bucked the hexagon trend and opted for a square cartogram (also with a traditional option), which worked very nicely in print with the addition of small triangles to indicate the incumbent.
The Economist combined both the traditional electoral boundaries with circles for each seat, which helps to orient readers to the regular geography of the country, but this is a trade-off as it makes it harder to compare the circles together as contiguous whole.
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First past the post? More like worst past the post, am I right?!
According to the Electoral Reform Society, this election was “one of the most disproportionate results in recent history”. Labour won 63% of seats from only 33.8% of the vote.
This disparity between the vote proportion, and the proportion of seats won, is neatly shown here by my UK colleague Michael Goodier:
And here’s another chart showing the disparity between seats and votes for elections since 1945.
The result has renewed calls for switching to a system of proportional representation (or just a suggestion from an Australian, maybe also consider preferential voting?).
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The rise of minor parties
Part of the reason Labour was able to win so many seats without a significant increase in vote share is due to the amount of voters turning away from the Conservatives to smaller parties like Reform, the Green party and the Lib Dems.
The increase of votes for Reform in particular appears to have cost the Conservatives a number of seats, according to this analysis from Bloomberg.
This map shows the gain in vote share for Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, as well as the seat winner:
There’s another interesting map in the piece which suggests that Reform was the biggest “spoiler” in nearly 140 seats.
There are some more great charts on this topic in Michael’s piece I linked earlier, including this line chart showing the rise in the vote share for smaller parties:
Another trend is the rise in votes for pro-Palestine independent candidates, who took votes away from Labour resulting in at least four seats won.
Elsewhere, Focaldata has an interesting analysis based on their survey work which looks at demographic voting patterns. According to their work, Labour gained votes with people over 40, but went backwards on 2019 with voters under 40. Meanwhile, the Conservatives only won the vote at the national level with people aged over 64, and the Greens picked up votes with young people.
If you’ve seen any other particularly interesting charts, please email us back at
thecrunch@theguardian.com and we may feature it in the next edition.
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