Our partisan lean metric shows you how different the voting patterns in a county, region or nation are compared to the UK as a whole. It is simply the difference between a party’s vote at UK level less there vote share in a county, region or nation. For example, in Derbyshire in 2024 Labour won 40% of the vote compared to 34% nationwide giving Derbyshire a Labour lean of 6%.
We have plotted the partisan lean for Labour and the Conservatives for the six most recent elections below. The way to read these charts is as follow:
- The top left quadrant shows counties where Labour do well and the Conservatives badly;
- The bottom right quadrant shows counties where the Conservatives do well and Labour badly;
- The bottom left quadrant shows counties where they both do badly; and
- The top right quadrant shows counties where they both do well;
Two obvious trends stand out. Firstly, the move of Scotland from top left to bottom left, as the rise of the SNP took many seats away from Labour territory. Secondly the move of London away from the middle and in to the Labour quadrant.
We have also included a table at the bottom with all the data back to 1955.