Here are the basic facts from Thursday’s plethora of UK elections, limited to those affecting the relative Labour and Conservative Vote
English Council Elections
Labour 1,291 councillors Conservative 828 Councillors
London Mayoral Election First Preferences
Labour 45.2% Conservative 35.0%
Labour also won the three other mayoral elections in Bristol, Liverpool and Salford
Scottish Parliament elections constituencies
Labour 22.6% Conservative 22.0%
Welsh Assembly Election Votes
Labour 34.7% Conservative 21.1%
And yet the BBC ran a claim all day that the “projected” national vote share was Labour 31%, Conservative 30%.
This simply cannot be true. Labour won the London mayoral election by over 200,000 votes. They were 130,000 ahead in Wales. Taking all the elections except the English local council seat elections, Labour were 360,000 votes and approximately 6% ahead of the Tories. To balance this plus the majorities of the 1,291 Labour English councillors elected, each of just 828 Conservative English councillors elected would have to have an average majority of approximately 1,000. Random sampling shows this is absolutely not the case.
My own calculations, based on knowing all the other results and extrapolations from samples of the English local council results, is that the national vote count was Labour 34% Conservative 29%. It might not be precisely correct, but is not far out.
But I can say for certain is that the BBC 31/30 figure is a despicable and quite deliberate lie. The BBC has become a caricature of a state propaganda machine.
UPDATE It has been pointed out that in the Scottish regional list vote the Tories beat Labour by 520,000 to 431,000, a huge disparity with the aggregate constituency vote which Labour narrowly won. But if you use the regional rather than the constituency total in the UK wide calculation, the extra 89,000 Tory lead only marginally affects the overall calculation.