The UK Election: 6. How Important Are Marginal Seats?

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Hello, and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming, and my day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast, Newscast, which is available on BBC Sounds.

But I've been covering elections my whole career at the BBC.

My first one was in 2005, which means this year is my sixth general election.

And some of my most vivid memories of politics overall are from election campaigns.

Today, we're going to look at the concept of a marginal seat.

These are constituencies where the sitting MP won by just a handful of votes, or maybe a bit more than that, and only a few votes changing hands can lead to another party winning that seat.

So let's dive in.

to the marginals.

And to help us do the diving, we're joined by my colleague Peter Barnes, who's senior elections and political analyst at the BBC.

Hello, Peter.

Hi, Adam.

I remember the days when you were the person whispering into David Dimbleby's ear on election night.

This constituency is that, and this number means this.

I have done that job, and for other presenters as well, that's always a highlight, actually.

I love doing that bit of election coverage.

And you love a spreadsheet?

I do, yeah.

Or multiple spreadsheets, in fact.

Yeah.

And also with us is BBC political correspondent Alex Versyth.

Hello again, Alex.

Hello, Adam.

And I suppose you get to rely on Peter's data and then apply it out in the real world when you're on the campaign trail and actually visiting places.

Yeah, rely, rely, stroke, heavily, lean on Peter's data.

In fact, I can confess I've had a sneak peek at Peter's spreadsheets for this election, so I can't promise that I can crunch the numbers in quite the same way he can, but he is one of the most informative, instructive, and useful people in the BBC during an election campaign.

It's like an episode of This Is Your Life.

Right, let's get into the actual facts and figures now.

So, Peter, what is a marginal seat?

Okay, there isn't an official definition, but typically we take it to be seats where the winning party is 10% or less ahead of the second-place party.

And in rural votes, that normally works out at about 5,000 votes.

So anything that's that majority or smaller, I'd call a marginal.

And I suppose you go for a percentage, first of all, because actually, even though constituencies are meant to be the same size, there is some variation in the size.

Yeah, at this election, actually, they're nearly all pretty much the same size because we've had these boundary changes to equalize them.

But historically, they have been quite big variations between the size of constituencies.

And the other thing to say is that in some, turnout is much higher than in others.

So a 10%

majority where there's a very high turnout will be a different number from where it's a very small turnout.

Okay.

Everyone who speaks to in British politics who thinks about this stuff and studies it and crunches the data says, ooh, the definition of a marginal has changed this year.

Why are they saying that?

Well, I don't know if it's the definition of a marginal that's changed.

The parts of the country where the marginals are at this election is perhaps a bit different from how it's been historically.

And quite a lot of that is to do with the result of the 2019 election where the Conservative Party did particularly well in parts of the country they'd previously not done so well.

You may only have

lent us your vote and you may not think of yourself as a natural Tory.

So they obviously took some of those seats but others became more marginal whereas previously they'd on the whole been quite safe Labour seats.

Your hand may have five

over the ballot paper as before you put your cross in the Conservative box.

And again, there have been other shifts, particularly in some bits of the south of England, where seats that used to be very safe Conservative seats have now become more marginal, either because of demographic change or because of astitutional change.

And so there are some sort of new marginals in the south which are either Labour Conservative marginals or Lib Dem Conservative marginals.

So the pattern has shifted of where exactly they are.

Yeah, I think the other way of approaching this election and looking at it when it comes to understanding the marginals is that actually it might not be the marginals alone that determine the outcome of this election.

You know, there are other elections that you can look at where those marginals have been absolutely crucial.

Heading into this election, because of where Labour was sitting after 2019, they cannot win an outright majority on marginals alone.

They have to go further than that.

So I think that's kind of changed the approach.

It doesn't mean the marginals don't matter.

Of course, they absolutely matter.

But they are not going to be the only deciding factor in this election.

It's not enough just for Labour to win the marginals to win a majority.

I totally agree with that.

If you look at most of the recent elections and look at the seats that changed hands, at least between Labour and the Conservatives, it's nearly always a majority of marginal seats, the ones that changed hands.

But as Alex says, if Labour have any chance of winning an overall majority, and obviously the opinion polls do look quite positive for them at the moment, they cannot rely on just winning marginals.

That would give them about 50 gains.

They need about 125 gains.

In fact, they need 125 gains just to win any sort of majority.

Okay, give us some names and places.

Maybe, for example, like the most marginal seat.

Well, after the boundary changes, which do complicate things a little bit, the most marginal seat in the country is now Warrington South.

It's a particularly complicated one because it was won by the Conservatives in 2019, but now has a very small notional Labour majority.

That's the estimate of what would have happened there last time had these new boundaries been in place.

But overall, I would say, at least in England and Wales, the marginal seats are very concentrated, particularly in the northwest, Greater Manchester and Lancashire, also West Yorkshire and North Wales.

So it's seats like Burnley, Labour's number one target, both the seats in Bury, seats in Bolton, there's a place like Hindburn, and then across North Wales.

Nearly all of the seats across the top of Wales were won by the Conservatives in 2019, and Labour now will be targeting their sort of top Labour targets.

They're some of the marginal seats.

Of course, and we've mentioned the boundary changes.

I mean, it's worth just saying why this has happened and what it's all about.

So, at regular points, there is a review of the way that the United United Kingdom's divvied up into parliamentary constituencies and they've just undertaken this exercise and so this election will be fought on new boundaries and the reason for it is to take into account population shifts and changes and to effectively even out the number of people that are in each constituency across the UK.

It has materially changed some seats in this election.

I mean really changed the makeup of some seats because the way that you do it in the simplest terms is you kind of carve up the country into constituencies and what it might mean is that you're taking in a different urban conurbation or a a much more rural area with a different demographic which can completely change the nature of a seat and in this election I think there are some key seats where the boundary changes might have a material effect on the expected outcome.

Yeah and we saw the impact of that at the start of this general election campaign because you saw people who'd been MPs in one place having to go and become candidates in a completely different place in the UK because their old seat had vanished under these boundary changes.

And you also saw, because of course the campaign was called with relative short notice before people were in it and caught some people off guard, what the parties had to do was finalise their candidate selections for each seat.

And you saw a bit of a fight in some parties as they were going through that process to try and get to what they might consider at this point the safer seats because, you know, they want to make sure they stand the best chance of winning.

So again, it just shows why these technical terms like marginals and safe seats that we throw around have a very real world impact politically.

I suppose the opposite of a marginal is a safe seat.

And I don't know, maybe that's a false comparison.

But I mean, how do you explain what a safe seat is?

You're right.

It is it is the opposite.

And historically, we, you know, sort of a similar rule of thumb is typically we'd have said something with a majority above 20 percentage points is fairly safe.

Anything above 30, 40 percentage points for your majority, getting towards extremely safe territory.

And it's very, very rare for those seats to change hands.

It's not totally unheard of.

In 2015, the SNP did win some seats, particularly from Labour that had previously had huge majorities.

It's fascinating because this notion of safe seats, I think there's increasingly been a question about when you can really call a seat a nailed-on safe seat, and I think that has been changing over a period of time.

I think there are a couple of things that are fairly instrumental in this.

The 2019 election, the old traditional geography, the political geography of the country was upended to some degree.

So, you know, things look very different.

And of course, a big part of that was this axis of Brexit that kind of ran up and down the country.

So the red wall has become a shorthand for that swathe of seats that were largely across the Midlands and the north of England, that were traditional Labour seats, often in kind of post-industrial areas where Labour had typically done very well over a long period of time.

That at the 2019 election fell to the Conservatives and largely there were seats that had voted to leave during the EU referendum.

The symbolism being obvious, the Red Wall fell, that kind of solid Labour barrier that stretched from actually parts of Wales across the Midlands and to the north of England.

And there's another thing just to throw in the mix.

There has been this slow, steady increase of the presence of smaller parties, and that has been increasing.

And again, that can have an impact on particularly a safe seat.

When is a safe seat, not a safe seat, and of course, also potentially in a marginal where the margins are so narrow, smaller parties can make a real difference.

Peter, tactical voting.

What is the kind of political science definition of what tactical voting is?

Well, tactical voting is when people don't vote for their favoured party overall.

They vote for a party that they think has a chance of winning in their constituency.

So very typically, there's somebody you want to get out of your constituency.

You don't like the party that currently has the MP.

Now, your favoured party might have absolutely no chance there.

So you vote for somebody you think has got a chance of ousting the person you want to get rid of.

And tactical voting is kind of the bottom-up version of that.

Electoral pacts between political parties is the top-down version of that, kind of.

Yeah, I mean, parties don't often like to talk about the fact they're going to enter into an electoral pact because they want to get out there and promote their own message.

But it has happened in the past.

And if you think back to 2019, there were a couple of electoral pacts actually.

There was one under, I think, the banner of the Remain Alliance, which was the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, and Plaid Cymru, who agreed that they wouldn't stand against each other in certain seats to give the Remain vote as it was then, because, of course, it wasn't a Brexit referendum, but Brexit was a central tenet of the general election campaign.

They wanted to give that sort of residual remain voters something to rally round.

And on the other side of the argument, the famous electoral pact in 2019 was when Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, as it was then, stood aside for the Conservative Party in certain seats as well.

So that's when the parties they decide between them that they're going to make way for another candidate to get a desired outcome in a seat.

But the tactical voting is more something that comes from the ground up.

And I think when you speak to the parties in this campaign, all of them are saying that they're not looking at electoral pacts or entering into electoral pacts.

But quietly, what some of the parties acknowledge is that voters are pretty savvy when it comes to tactical voting and that is likely to happen without the instruction of the party or any formal electoral pact.

And in fact, what the parties do is point to by-elections over the course of the last couple of years where we have seen tactical voting in evidence.

And one of the ones that we can point to is North Shropshire, where there you would have thought the typical opposition to the then Conservative held seat would have been Labour.

A lot of people didn't really give them a cat in hell's chance of winning this seat.

It's been Conservative for 200 years.

But in actual fact, the Liberal Democrats won that seat, and that was largely attributed to tactical voting because the Liberal Democrats managed to position themselves as the opposition to the Conservative Party.

And the Labour Party quietly, almost implicitly, let that happen.

And I think it is largely just speaking to voters around here because people wanted to send a pretty clear message to the government.

But that wasn't a formal electoral pact, that was voters cottoning on to something that they could do to achieve a desired outcome.

It was kind of tactical voting in action.

And I think the parties are thinking that in some seats that may happen this time round without formal electoral pacts or kind of top-down instruction.

The one part of the country where the parties do coordinate one another is Northern Ireland, where, for example, Sinn Féin aren't putting up candidates in four of the constituencies, and both the DUP and TUV have stood aside on behalf of the UP and one constituency.

So in Northern Ireland, there's always been this history of parties either agreeing to put a joint candidate or some of them standing aside so the others have a better chance.

Particularly, you know, the unionist parties might stand aside for one another and the nationalist parties might stand aside for one another.

But in Britain this time, there's no sign of it.

Peter, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Alex, thanks to you too.

It's a pleasure as ever.

And that's all for this episode.

On our next one, we're going to be talking more about polling, what it can tell us, and maybe what it misses out.

And you can find the rest of this series on BBC Sounds.

Just search understand the UK election.

We'll have everything from what goes into a manifesto to how much we can predict how people will vote all the way through to what happens on election day itself.

And if you'd like to see a full list of candidates for any constituency in the UK, that is available now on the BBC News websites.

Bye.

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