Times letters: Labour win is triumph for first past the post

• General election 2024 results map and charts

Sir, Last night’s result was a welcome one for our country. No doubt Reform will complain about the unfairness of our election system. However, it is worth reflecting that their 14.3 per cent of the vote is only 1.7 points higher than Ukip’s 12.5 per cent in 2015. Granted they have returned more MPs (four) than they did in 2015 (one) but their seat representation is tiny even when compared with the Liberal Democrats’ most recent haul of 71 seats on 12 per cent of the vote.

Reform have discovered something that the Lib Dems have known for years: there are no prizes for coming second or third in a constituency election. So, empty rhetoric such as “we are coming for Labour” is still empty.
Dr Anthony Harris
Trumpington, Cambs

Sir, Since the Liberal Democrats have done so well by the first-past-the-post voting they abhor, will they still seek the proportional representation they have previously desired? This will be advantageous to all parties seeking to be represented by the millions of voters whose ballot now counts for nothing.
Richard English
Poundbury, Dorset

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Sir, With our general election over, it seems that our political system, however flawed, does have its merits. Consider the United States, where there seems to be no way of making a clearly failing president stand down and the constitution is supervised by a partisan Supreme Court; France, which faces deadlock with a president from a centrist party and either a hung parliament or one controlled by a party from the hard right; and the Netherlands, where it took nearly a year to agree on a new prime minister. This can happen where proportional representation is used. To paraphrase Churchill, perhaps our form of democracy is the worst except all those other forms that have been tried.
Gordon Elliot
Burford, Oxon

Sir, The election results make me more thankful than ever before that we have not gone down the road to proportional representation.
Susan Hamlyn
London W5

Sir, The biggest story of the general election is the low turnout. After the 84 per cent turnout in 1950, general election turnouts declined gently but were usually above 75 per cent and were never below 72 per cent until 1997 (71 per cent). After the abysmal 2001 turnout of 59 per cent, probably explained by the result being a foregone conclusion, the next five general elections had turnouts below 70 per cent. Despite Labour Party triumphalism this year’s result was not a foregone conclusion, as the success of the Lib Dems, and to a lesser extent Greens and Reform, demonstrate. What the 2024 turnout of about 60 per cent shows is the extent to which voters have lost interest in the two main parties and it is arguable that this is not the fault of the voters but due to the two main parties’ failure to be at all interesting.
Arnold Harvey
London N16

Sir, A number of observers regard the UK as having lurched to the left while other countries have moved to the extreme right. That might be true of governments but it is not necessarily true of the electorates. Early reports make clear that the combined votes for the Conservatives and Reform comfortably exceed those for the Labour Party.
Jennifer Skilbeck
London W11

Sir, It cannot be right that the prime minister decides the date of an election and its duration. This gives an inbuilt advantage to the government of the time. If it had been a three-week campaign the Reform Party would never have happened. It simply would not have been able to move that fast. We must encourage voters to vote and we need to incentivise the process through a plan which takes voting online and, if need be, by post. Far too many people were unable to vote by post even though they were registered.
Derek Wyatt, Labour MP, 1997-2010
Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Sir, After the widely expected catastrophic defeat of the Conservatives it is the activist members of the party who need to do the most soul-searching. The responsibility for this long-anticipated debacle lies squarely, not so much with Conservative MPs, many of whom are now paying the price, nor with Rishi Sunak’s largely successful rescue of the Tory government from incompetence and chaos. Rather, the responsibility lies with the deeply flawed judgment of those party members who elected two deeply flawed party leaders, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, for whom a majority of their MPs, knowing their flaws, did not vote. Not only was this a recipe for political chaos within the parliamentary party, for which the country is still rightly furious, but Johnson and Truss proved themselves in post to be seriously incompetent. It is this deeply flawed judgment of party members that has been rightly condemned by the electorate, and from which they now need to learn the real lessons, or face oblivion.
The Rev Canon Charles Jenkin
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Sir, If six words could explain the collapse of the Conservative vote, they might be, “Bring your own booze”, and “Liz Truss”.
Stephen Shaw
Newthorpe, Notts

Loss of Latin Mass

Sir, As a fellow ordinary Catholic, who attends the new Mass at a church which also celebrates the old Latin Mass, I do not recognise the unpleasant picture of traditionalists painted by Annabel Smith (letter, Jul 5). I have found them courteous, friendly and as full of Christian charity as their co-religionists. Ms Smith says “Each to his or her own”, and that was precisely Pope Benedict’s solution: one Roman rite with two forms, the old and the new, each to be used freely. Pope Francis has abandoned this tolerance. By restricting ever more severely use of the Tridentine rite, he is creating divisions where none existed and pushing those whose spiritual life has been formed by the Old Ways into the arms of the Lefebvrists. The good people I see on Sundays coming from the earlier Mass are being hurt for no reason.
Francis Bown
London E3

Sir, All is not lost for the Latin Mass (Thunderer, Jul 3). It is very much alive as Requiems performed in concert halls. In the past three years I have sung Verdi’s Requiem, Mozart’s, Bach’s B minor Mass, and in October I will be singing Fauré’s. At two recent funerals I led, sections of Fauré’s Requiem were played at intervals throughout the service, bringing comfort to the mourners.
Canon Brian Stevenson
West Peckham, Kent

Captain Tom legacy

Sir, We would like to make an important point of clarification to readers such as Judy Anthony (letter, Jul 5). Captain Sir Tom Moore set up a Just Giving page that raised £38.9 million which went directly to the NHS Charities Together Covid-19 Urgent Appeal. These funds do not form part of the Charity Commission’s investigation (news, Jul 4) and were raised before the formation of the wholly separate Captain Tom Foundation. The donations have reached the length and breadth of the UK and continue to have a long-lasting impact for thousands of NHS staff, patients and communities at a time of immense challenge for the NHS. We report full and transparent progress on our website (nhscharitiestogether.co.uk).
Ellie Orton, CEO, Lord Crisp, patron, NHS Charities Together

Hurricane hardship

Sir, Hurricane Beryl, which has swept across the Caribbean (news, Jul 4), is a reminder that extreme weather is getting worse, hitting the same places more often, and lasting longer. People are losing their homes again and again. Communities don’t have time to recover from one crisis before the next one hits. ShelterBox, a disaster relief charity, is sending a team to the area but with extreme weather becoming more severe we have had to change the way we work to meet demand. We urge leaders to rethink their approach, too. It’s time to prioritise recovery, preparation and rebuilding alongside the immediate relief response.
Sanj Srikanthan
CEO, ShelterBox

In praise of carers

Sir, I was moved by Helen Rumbelow’s article (Times2, Jul 4) about the live-in care that Cory Leadbeater gave to Joan Didion. The last two years of my mother’s life were made bearable by the love and support of her extraordinary live-in carer. To look after a stranger in such a way is remarkable. She stood with us as part of the family at my mother’s funeral and we remain close friends. I hope that the new government will cherish and support the many thousands of carers around the country who sacrifice so much to ease the burden of the old, the infirm and the dying.
Rich M Hughes
London SW13

Hairy moments

Sir, Having been bearded since 1979, I take issue with Andrew Bacon’s assertion (letter, Jul 5) that a beard indicates a man’s “total lack of interest in how they look and complete laziness”. Far from being lazy, we are free to get on with other things: by saving a minimum of five minutes a day I have so far added at least 57 days to my productive life. True, I don’t spend much time looking at myself in the mirror, but I have yet to hear anyone say that I look scruffy.
Simon Tonking
Abbots Bromley, Staffs

Sir, Sporting a beard is definitely a sign of a man willing to settle down (news, Jul 4). A beard reveals where a man has been (as fragrance lingers) and what he has had for lunch.
Nicky Levy
Thatcham, Berks

Sir, Regardless of the quality of grooming, most men look better with half their faces covered.
Jo Farrington
Reading

Drink for England

Sir, Matt Chorley’s election night drinking game (Times2, Jul 4) can also be applied to other pursuits. At the start of Euro 2024, encouraged by the hype surrounding England, I decided to take a sip each time the team scored a goal. I ended the evening disappointed and thirsty.

For the next game I changed the rules: I would enjoy a generous sip each time an England player passed the ball back to his goalkeeper. Not only was my thirst assuaged, I was also suitably anaesthetised against the misery of yet another dire performance. I plan to adopt the same rules against Switzerland tonight — but I may use a bigger glass.
Terry J Neale
St Mary, Jersey