This is basically true for all centrist neoliberal parties. They don't do anything so nobody really wants to vote for them, but if the other guy is bad enough they win anyway. See it all over.
The way I see it, the GOP and the Tories are the "default" and whenever a crisis is brewing they will intentionally lose and let the "left" party that's in practice, totally dead and irrelevant since the 80s soak up the blame and make the default party look good.
The only reason Labour won this election is right wing infighting.
If Reform UK did not exist, the Conservatives would take those votes and have 37% of the vote to Labour's 34%.
Don't suppose that we can shill for ranked choice voting in the UK by saying that FPTP took "the country's favorite ideology" out of power?
The issue is that the fascists are currently popular in this space through Reform. Any pushing against the current fptp system gives them votes because there's no moderate alternative offering it.
If we didn't have FPTP, the Conservatives wouldn't have been in power in the first place. They didn't have a majority of the votes in any of the last 4 elections.
I literally had to write an essay on different voting systems in middle school and realized even at like fourteen that first-past-the-post is an idiotic clearly undemocratic system
Look no further than the discrepancy between # of votes vs. number of seats for Lib Dem vs. SNP
We have exactly the same issue in Canada with NDP vs. Bloc . Parties with regional support are artificially propped up, whereas parties with diffuse national suppose get little to no recognition at all.