CROYDON COMMENTARY: After his second election campaign in five months, PETER UNDERWOOD, who stood for the Green Party in Croydon East, reflects on how the number of votes cast ought to be a warning to the two larger parties
We knew there would be some shifting around in Croydon following the boundary review that increased Croydon’s constituencies from three to four (or, strictly, three-and-a-half, as we share one with Lambeth).
At first glance, it may appear that not a lot has changed: Croydon has one Conservative MP in the south of the borough and the rest of its MPs are Labour.
Un-Reformed: four of the five Croydon East candidates turned up for the declaration, with Peter Underwood (third from left) alongside Labour’s new MP, Natasha Irons
But politics has never been just about who wins the seat. Far more interesting information is about what effect the result will have on those MPs and how it might influence what happens next in both national and local politics.
Across the four Croydon constituencies, Croydon South, Croydon East, Croydon West and Streatham and Croydon North, Labour got a total of 79,829 votes, 45.4% of all the votes cast in Croydon. This was 3.8 percentage points down on what they achieved in 2019.
The Conservatives polled 43,187 votes, 24.7%. This was down 10.5 points since 2019.
The Green Party got 18,436 votes (including 7,629 in Streatham and Croydon North, where our candidate, Scott Ainslie, finished second) for 10.5% of the borough’s votes – up 7.4 percentage points on five years ago.
The Liberal Democrats got 16,645 for 9.5% of the Croydon vote (down by 0.8).
And Reform got 14,153 votes, or 8% of the vote.
Labour will be celebrating that they are now the new government, having won the election.
But getting only one-third (33.7%) of the national vote but nearly two-thirds of the MPs shows how broken our election system is. It has already been described as “the most disproportionate election in British history”.
I suspect the calls for electoral changes will only get louder now.
Disproportionate: 34% of the votes, two-thirds of all seats
In Croydon, even though Labour won three of the seats, their overall vote is down.
Labour’s increase in votes in Croydon South masks the significant drop in the party’s vote in the three other seats. After all the celebration champagne has been drunk, Labour will have to deal with the hangover of realising that they are actually less popular than they were. And despite throwing everything they had at trying to win Croydon South, they still failed.
For the Conservatives, holding on to Croydon South was one of the few bright spots – locally and nationally.
From reading the body language at the Croydon count in the early hours of Friday morning, Chris Philp may want put some effort into winning over his own local Conservatives, as it felt to me they were cheering for the Party, not the candidate.
The Conservatives knew they were going to have a really bad election, and after how they have behaved in government for the last 14 years I think they thoroughly deserved it. But an extra worry for Conservatives in Croydon is that even though they lost votes in every seat, their biggest drops were in areas where they used to be strongest – losing around 7,000 votes in both Croydon South and Croydon East, much of which used to be Croydon Central, where Gavin Barwell was MP until 2017.
Survival sheet: how Chris Philp held on in Croydon South
The General Election results suggest that at the local elections in 2026, the Conservatives will not only lose the Mayor but will also struggle to hold on to a lot of their councillors.
The Green Party had a very good night, nationally gaining nearly 2million votes. The broken election system meant we still only got four MPs elected – but four is far better than one. In Croydon, our vote went up in every seat.
This election felt very different from a Green perspective. In conversations with local people, it was clear that voting Green is no longer seen as a “protest vote” or a “wasted vote”. More people are seeing Green politics as a genuine alternative to the old parties and this was reflected in the votes across Croydon. We not only finished third overall but we also had a bigger increase in vote share than any other party.
For the Liberal Democrats it was a mixed night. They gained lots more MPs nationally, including regaining the two seats in Sutton, but failed to have any real impact on the general public. The LibDem gains appear to be due to the collapse of the Conservative vote rather than any increase in voting LibDem – their share of the national vote only went up by 0.6 percentage points.
Locally, the LibDems were up in two seats and down in two, and overall their vote dropped.
Like the Conservatives, their biggest drops appear to be in areas where they used to be strongest. It may be a worry for their one Croydon councillor that Streatham and Croydon North is where they saw their biggest drop in votes.
For Reform, their yo-yo election performance was on an up this time. Perhaps not surprising given the endless media coverage given to the millionaire public schoolboys who run their limited company. Thankfully their impact in Croydon is not that significant and their increase in vote share here is well below the national figure.
Again, this is probably not surprising given that most of their candidates couldn’t be bothered to do anything during the campaign and didn’t even turn up to the election count – I still have no idea what the candidate listed on the ballot paper for my constituency even looks like.
Reform did get five MPs elected, and based on my experience of how their predecessors behaved in the European Parliament, I feel sorry for their constituents and the rest of us. Brexit MEPs did no useful work whatsoever and were only interested in picking up their expenses cheques and making racist speeches for their social media followers. I fear we are now in for years of the same.
Nowhere to be seen: Galloway dodged the Rochdale count
I think it is worth mentioning the “others”. The biggest share of this vote was for the three Workers Party of Great Britain candidates (they didn’t stand in Croydon East).
Now that their leader, George Galloway, didn’t get re-elected in Rochdale (he didn’t even bother showing up for the count), I suspect that this party will go the way of Galloway’s previous ego trips and fade into nonexistence. What’s left may be reborn under a new name for the next time Galloway thinks he can con people into voting for him. If you genuinely believe in changing the system for the better, then following a nasty egomaniac isn’t the best way to go.
For the other small and local parties, just turning up at elections and expecting lots of people to vote for you will never work, even if you have the backing of millionaires and gullible media, like Reform).
I would also say that you need to think about how the behaviour of members of your party comes across to the public. I’m a strong believer in annoying the powerful people who don’t deserve the power that they have, but if your supporters are annoying the people you want to vote for you, then you are never going to get very far.
Of course, there was an odd twist on July 4, election day, when I and Croydon Greens had our Twitter/X accounts suspended, without any prior warning.
Over the years, I’ve reported accounts for the most offensive and abusive posts and always get told that they won’t be suspended.
So for both me and the local party account to be suspended on election day feels like something very dodgy is going on. As at this morning, my account, which has 5,000 followers, remains suspended, still without explanation.
I do want to say a huge thank you to everyone who voted for me and for the Greens across Croydon. I am planning to have a bit of a rest to recover from the campaign but I will be back soon working to try to make Croydon better and happier and I hope to see lots of you doing the same.
Read more: It’s not about my personal power or glory. It’s about principles
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Peter Underwood, pictured right, was the Green Party candidate in Croydon East, where he polled 4,097 votes to finish fourth
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I do agree that on statistical analysis you can argue that historically this result was the most disproportionate in history. However, we need to be careful if we want to ditch the crude first past the post system of unintended consquences. If we used a simple proportional representation system, say, that alloted political parties parliamentary seats according to their proportion of the national votes, the reform party would become the equivalent of the Alternative For Germany (AfD), the hard right party that is now a player to be reckoned with in the German national parliament – the Bundestag. Not only is the hard right entitled to airtime in the national press and TV but fascist extremists have become emboldened to seriously physically assault centrist and green candidates for recent local elections. In France, we see the frightening result of the first run off for the Bicameral, the French parliament where National Rally (RN) came first. The National Rally is merely a sanitised version of the old French National Front, headed by Marine Le Pen. This frightening prospect has caused the New Popular Front, a left wing political alliance, to co-operate with the Macron centrists to try to avoid Marine Le Pen’s party to be the biggest party in the French parliament after the 2nd vote tomorrow. There have been 30 documented assasults by thugs on French politicians who are on the left or centrist. Just to reinfoce the point, two days ago the BBC reported that 8 black families have been forced out of their homes in the Ballycraig estate, Anrtim, Northen Ireland. Anti-immigration posters were put up on the estate and black crosses were paint-sprayed onto their front windows, sometimes followed-up with arson attacks. With a simple first past the post system and the rise in the Reform party in this country racist acts of violence and intimidation will follow as night follows day. The racist thugs in this country will become emboldened if Farage;s party becomes a parliamentary political powerhouse. I do have sympathy for the Green Party who undoubtedly get the short end of the stick under our current first past the post national voting system. But until advocates can assure me that their alternative will not give rise to the hard right becoming a player to be reckoned with in parliament, I am not repared to take risk of the adverse consequences to the lives of BAME communities in this country.
Fascism exploits people who feel they not being listened to and who’s problems are being ignored by the system. So you don’t fight fascism by rigging the system against them, you fight fascism by being more democratic.
Part of that is changing our election system but it must go way beyond that to change the whole system so that it works for people, not just to benefit the those who are rich and powerful. We need to decentralise power so that decisions are made at the lowest level possible and by the people most affected.
Despite the headlines in our biased media, it is important to note that the fascists only got a third of the vote in France and only around half that in the UK. The vast majority of people are opposed to fascism.
If we keep our current broken system it makes it easier for fascists to continue exploiting people who are being ignored and they will continue to grow. If we move to a fairer system then we not only fight fascism, we also help create a better democracy that works for everyone.
First past the post delivered us an increasingly right-wing Conservative party that gave birth to UKIP which has grown into the neo-fascist Reform.
FPTP isn’t preventing or acting as a brake on extremism, it’s nurturing it (with a lot of help from Murdoch and Putin)
As a fellow election analysis “anorak” Peter, can I ask what was the assumption made in the calculations in terms of excluding voters in Streatham that voted in the Streatham and Croydon North seat to create the Croydon scores you give? Streatham slightly more than half the seat in terms of voters.
The Streatham and Croydon North figures have been included in full, so these are the figures for all four constituencies. I looked at taking just half of the results from that constituency but it wasn’t very scientific and, while the numbers moved slightly, it made no real difference to the main points of my analysis.
Excluding Lambeth voters proportionately gives clean Croydon Borough numbers as follows:
Labour 67,284 votes 44.02% vote share down 4.74%
Conservatives 40,310 votes 26.37% vote share down 11.55%
Greens 14,316 votes 9.37% vote share up 6.63%
Liberal Democrats 13,928 votes 9.11% vote share up 0.09%
Brexit/Reform 13,076 votes 8.55% vote share up 7.46%
Others 3,951 votes 2.58% vote share up 2.11%
Peter, I think, as you say, that it’s a very real concern that First Past the Post has delivered such an unrepresentative national result between seats won and vote share secured. This undermines faith in representative democracy that populist hate-filled politicians will exploit. Pollsters got the Labour vote share numbers very wrong.
There may have been a “Croydon effect” on the Labour vote that has its roots in the poor Labour governance, the council bankruptcy & the association of that party with the hacking of Inside Croydon. However, Labour had a large number of vote share falls in Greater London. The new Labour MP for Croydon East described concerns about the bankrupted council and local Labour party governance as “a load of nothing.”
Andrew, this is a story as old as time and really doesn’t need rehashing once again….unless you want to add sour grapes to the mixture, a la Farage, and just stir the pot a bit. The alternative to first past the post, one form or another of proportional representation, always leads to a splintered government, aeons of bickering, compromise, legislative constipation and no more satisfaction for the smallest parties. Some feel smug, having done the “right” thing but it never achieves more than that. Our form of democracy is imperfect but its the best form of imperfect we are ever going to get. Even serial egotists, stirrers and party hoppers like the inestimable and detestable George Galloway, understand and accept this.
Imperfect it certainly is, but first past the post ensures we effectively have a two party state. And that’s not healthy
It’s interesting to note that Labour’s votes in Croydon were down on 2019. This is also the national picture. Starmer’s Labour won fewer votes than the Labour Party under Corbyn in either the 2017 or 2019 General Elections.
One feature of the election which is not referred to specifically in Peter’s analysis is “the Gaza effect”. Nationally 5 Independents were elected as MPs primarily on the issue of Gaza. 5 Labour candidates, including 2 members of the Shadow Cabinet, were defeated on this issue.
All over the country, including in Croydon, peoole are horrified by the scenes we see day after day on our TV screens. The bombing and destruction is unconscionable. It has led to killing of 40,000 people in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children. Meanwhile Labour and the Tories are continuing to back US policy, which many of us see as enabling a genocide to take place.
In Croydon there were a number of candidates calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and justice for the Palestinians. Included among these candidates were those of the Green Party, including Peter. I think this is very much to their credit.
I would be interested to hear Peter’s views regards the reversal of the Streatham LTNs, was this an example of decentralised local voices making policy and thus to be approved of?
I would be interested to read your views on what should be done about once quiet back streets being turned into dangerous polluted rat runs and the absence of any democratic process in that unwelcome shift.
Now that the road works that caused the temporary jams in Streatham have been completed, and elections are out of the way, the Streatham Wells LTN is ready to be put back in
I worked the 2010 election in Tower Hamlets and Galloway, soundly beaten by Rushanara Ali in Bethnall Green and Bow was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Maybe, in Rochdale at least, Gaza wasn’t on the ballot after all?
I have wondered if halving the number of constituencies and returning First AND Second past the post (maybe the First getting two Commons votes?) would make the biggest improvement with the least change?
Roughly 70% of voters would have an MP that they voted for, and each MP would have a local Opposition to keep them honest.