[00:00:00] Hi everyone. Long time no see. I haven't uploaded a video in a long time for a few reasons really. I've been on holiday. I didn't really know the direction that I wanted to go with with my channel and my English teaching business. I've had COVID. Other things have just got in the way but from now on I hope to be consistent with uploading.

[00:00:22] I'm sure every YouTuber or person who makes videos or content has said that once in their life. life. So hopefully after this video I get a little bit more consistent. We'll see. Since my last upload we have had an election in the United Kingdom and lots of my students ask me about politics in the UK and politics in England and they want to know more especially since the election and because of the election we have a new government.

[00:00:49] A new party is in power for the first time in 14 years in the UK. So I'm pretty happy about it. Most people in the country are pretty happy about it. I thought I'd use this video to explain what's happened. Let's have a look at some data. Let's have a look at what basically happened earlier this month.

[00:01:10] Okay, so let's have a look at this website to begin with. UK general election results in full. Labour wins in landslide. So Labour is a party. Maybe if we go down we might be able to have a look here. So the main two parties in the United Kingdom, uh, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Uh, the leaders of these parties is a man called Keir Starmer is the new prime minister and the leader of the Labour Party and the leader he has resigned after the election defeat of the Conservative Party and the old prime minister of the UK is a man called Rishi Sunak.

[00:01:50] So I think it was on the 5th of July. We had an election in the UK and. The government of the last 14 years lost big time. We have 650 seats in Parliament in the UK and we have 650 constituencies, which means areas or regions in the United Kingdom. And in each constituency or region, we have one person who is elected as the member of Parliament or sometimes called the MP.

[00:02:23] We have 650 people representing the entirety of the United Kingdom. To become a government, you need to have a majority of seats within parliament. If there are 650 seats, you need 326 seats for a majority. And the Labour Party won big time. They won 412 seats. So they have a big majority. Any new laws or bills they want to introduce into Parliament and change the law in the United Kingdom.

[00:02:52] They just need the majority or Parliament to say yes. And because they have a big majority, it's. It gives them a lot of power to do whatever they want. It's not like in the United States where it's very difficult to make laws and make changes because of the different, uh, like people in power or the groups of power or the division of power.

[00:03:14] Because sometimes there is like a Republican house and a Democrat Senate, and they just block each other. And people can't really do what they want to do when they're, when they're present. In the UK, you have a lot of power. If you become, uh, The government, and you have a big majority, so the Labor Party and Kier has a big majority, and they can do whatever the hell they want to do.

[00:04:31] As you can see, they won 214 more seats than they did last in the last election in 2019. And the conservatives basically lost 252 seats. So they lost big time. Labor one big, the conservatives lost a pretty big as well.

[00:04:56] I'm going to switch over to this website here, and we can have a look at this data because it's very interesting. If we have a look. What we've just been looking at is seat share. So these are the different parties within the UK, and maybe we'll have a look at vote share, actually. So the biggest parties in terms of the amount of people that voted for them as a percentage are the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, Reform UK, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, the Scottish National Party, and some other smaller parties like the DUP, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin.

[00:05:34] Some of these parties here, you can't actually vote for some of these parties in England, including the Scottish National Party, because these are, uh, parties that represent people in Northern Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, for example, and they usually are wanting independence from the United Kingdom. So the labor party is the biggest party by 34%.

[00:05:55] So as you can see, no one won a majority in terms of the actual vote share. Uh, labor won 34 percent of the votes, which is not a majority of people. So even though they won 63 percent of the seats in parliament, they only won 34 percent of the actual votes. So this is a very undemocratic system. It's very unrepresentative.

[00:06:22] The conservative party is actually quite close 24 and 19. But what is interesting is Reform UK and the green party. So Reform UK is a very right wing party and they stole a lot. Well, they didn't steal. They took a lot of conservative votes because those people. We're very interested in immigration and some other policies, but mostly immigration.

[00:06:45] And they thought the conservative party has done a bad job in immigration. Immigration levels are too high. They think so. They voted for Reform UK and the leader of Reform UK is a man called Nigel Farage, and he basically made Brexit happen. But how did they win 14 percent of the votes, but only receive 1 percent of the seats?

[00:07:06] They got five seats in total. I will show you. So the, this is the vote for my constituency that I voted in the Shrewsbury constituency. This is a town in England and this is where my family live. And this is basically the results in the 2024 election for Shrewsbury. Uh, the Labour Party got 44 percent of the votes.

[00:07:30] The Conservatives got 22, 000. Reform UK, 14 percent of the votes. Same as the UK average actually, uh, Liberal Democrats got 13%, Greens got 4. 6%, English Democrats 0. 5%, and an independent candidate, James Gollins, got 0. 3%. Julia Buckley, who is is in the labor party who got 44 percent of the vote becomes the MP.

[00:07:56] And she represents everybody in Shrewsbury. Now, everyone that voted for the conservative party, 22%, everybody that voted for Reform party and every other party, their votes just gets. Basically, it's worth nothing. Forget about the people that don't, didn't vote in, in Shrewsbury, or in the entirety of the UK, but most of the Shrewsbury population is not represented fairly, because only 44.5 percent of people voted for this lady to represent us. However, that's not even a majority of people. So all the people that voted for different parties are Are not being represented in Parliament by their representative. That can explain why Reform UK had so much of the vote share, 14%, but hardly won any seats, only five.

[00:08:45] Because they're not a mainstream party, they represent the very political and far right in the United Kingdom. They won second and third place in most constituents. They only came first in five. Let's say a political party in the UK. comes in second place in every single constituency in the UK. Well, if that was the case and they didn't win any of them, they weren't first place in any of them.

[00:09:10] They wouldn't have a single seat in parliament, which is crazy. So it really rewards the winners and is called first past the post, like a race. It's the first one to pass the finishing line gets the seat. And that's why the Conservative Party and the Labour Party do so well because it's a two party system.

[00:09:30] These parties, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are the biggest parties in the UK, and it usually rewards them pretty well. The voting system is unlikely to change in the UK anytime soon because this system benefits these two parties. And these two parties are the only two parties that are That are in power.

[00:09:50] So why would they change it? Let's have a look at a little bit more data now, um, and see how Britain voted in the 2024 general election. We'll first look at age and which age groups voted for particular parties. I think it's pretty obvious to see that the Labour Party is popular. Basically, we're the younger people over older people, and it's peaking in the 30 to 39 age group.

[00:10:16] And as you can see, the Conservative Party is more popular with older people. So, generally, the younger you are, the more likely you are to vote Labour or the Green Party. The older you are, the more likely you are to vote the Conservative Party or Reform UK. However, this is pretty much 9 15%, 9 19 percent actually, not too big.

[00:10:41] If you look at the Green Party though, they are very popular amongst 18 24 year olds, that's no surprise. How do men and women vote? Any difference between these? Uh, not really with Labour, pretty equal. Lib Dems, pretty equal. Green Party, pretty equal. Reform UK, men are way better. A little bit more likely to vote Reform than women and conservative, pretty equal as well.

[00:11:05] So no huge differences between men and women. The education level, this could be interesting. Um, G low education, medium education, or high education. If you Labour voters, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote labor Lib Dem. Let's have a look. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Lib Dem.

[00:11:24] Green, the same. Reform, people with less educational qualifications are more likely to vote Reform. Conservative, the same, but not as drastic as Reform UK.