uk politics just makes no sense to me no matter how many times i get it explained by teachers. i know that first past the post leads to disproportionate votes but have never understood the system of winning seats
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I recommend a video series by CGPgray about this topic. Basically each seat is elected by a district. It does not matter how popular a political party is in the entire country, as long as they get the majority votes in that district they get that seat. Some districts are heavily for one party, typically you have lots of union workers living in an area and they all vote labor. But half the votes does not matter as labor would have won anyway. They only need half the votes. Other districts are a bit more divided with half the population favoring labor and half favoring the torries. If the torries wins these district then the votes for labor in this district did not matter. They could have voted torries and the election result would have been the same. So now you have just under half the votes in a labor district not making any difference and just under half the votes in a divided district who all votes for labor not making a difference to the result of the election.
And then you have the spoiler effect. Say for example a district is mostly voting labor but with a sizable torry voter base. And then a candidate from SNP, UKIP, the greens, etc. gets very popular among the labor voters in that district. The problem is that if a lot of voters go for this third party they may still not get more voters then the torries, but also labor would not get as many votes and also lose out to the torries. So a third party can actually spoil the election for the most popular major party.
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