LShift swing visualizer

Comparison of 2001 and 2005 UK general elections

All but three constituencies have now completed their counts and are part of the live data.

Hover mouse over dots for details. Please mail any comments or questions to election@lshift.net.

What to look for

At the bottom, many red dots can be seen charging into the blue territory. These are former Labour seats won by the Conservatives.
Many other seats can be seen heading towards the blue but not quite reaching it. These are seats with a strong swing from Labour to Conservative, but staying under Labour control.
An inconsistent but strong upward drift of Labour seats towards the yellow can be seen, representing a strong swing towards the Liberal Democrats. This is most remarkable for seats such as Manchester Withington and Brent East which the Lib Dems won with massive swings in their favour, but can also be observed for seats that Labour managed to hang on to such as Birmingham Ladywood and Birmingham Hodge Hill, which both saw very large swings towards the yellow.
Note that Brent East was actually won by the Lib Dems in a by-election in 2003, but we don't consider by-elections for consistency.
You can find the seats with the biggest swing towards the Lib Dems by hovering the mouse over the smaller diagram above and to the right of the main triangle. Seats with large Lib Dem swings are represented by small dots in the higher part of this diagram.
Similarly, you can find seats which buck the general trend away from Labour, such as Birmingham Perry Barr, by moving the mouse around the left of this smaller diagram.
At the border between the Lib Dems and the conservatives, three seats change hands in one direction and five in the other. However it's hard to discern an overall trend in the movement of the seats.
The major parties did not stand in all three seats:
- Glasgow North East (Speaker) as indicated is the speakers seat; by convention, this is not contested by other major parties, so is the only seat right in the Labour corner.
- Wyre Forest was not contended by the Liberal Democrats for the second consecutive election, in order to give the best chance to the Independent incumbent, Dr Richard Taylor.
By selecting Gains in the filter box, you can find the seats that changed hands. Not all of these involve the three major parties. The Labour party lost two seats to the SNP, and two to independent candidates, while the Liberal Democrats gained Ceredigion from Plaid Cymru. These seats don't appear to cross the border since the balance between the three major parties did not change to that extent in those seats.

Created by Paul Crowley and Matthew Sackman at LShift.