You'll be surprised to learn that the general election was a huge win for the British left

REUTERS/Neil HallEd Miliband gestures as he resigns as Britain's opposition Labour Party leader in London, Britain, May 8, 2015.

The 2015 general election was a huge gain for the British left.

Admittedly, this is not obvious given that the Conservatives won 331 seats in the House of Commons, giving them a working majority over the Labour Party, which only managed 232 seats.

But the final numbers actually show huge statistical gains for the left, and a swing away from the Conservatives.

David Cameron's win was so unexpected - everyone believed the count would be a dead heat - and so thorough, that I recently suggested it represented a massive realignment of political loyalties in Britain, in which working class voters are abandoning the Labour Party in favour of UKIP and the SNP.

Since then I have been crunching the total voter tallies in an Excel spreadsheet and I have changed my opinion a little bit. When you ignore the UK's awful first-past-the-post constituency voting system - which suppresses votes in some seats and magnifies them in others - the left did well in Britain.

Here is a chart which divides the parties into left and right blocs. I've placed the Liberal Democrats on the right even though some might argue they are a centre-left party:

Jim Edwards

The first thing to note is that the left-wing parties grew their total vote between 2010 and 2015. If you wanted to move the Lib Dems to the "left" bucket then that growth would be even more pronounced.

The shift is also illustrated by this chart, which the BBC tucked away on its election web site. It shows the Conservative gain was the smallest (except for the Liberals):

BBC

The BBC chart understates the shift because it measures changes in percentage share rather than changes in actual vote totals. Here is a grid that shows the actual change in votes:

BBC

Notably, while Cameron added 631,000 voters to the Tories' count, Labour leader Ed Miliband - who resigned in humiliation - added even more: 741,000.

Perhaps more importantly, the total vote shift in favour of the left looks like this:

• Gains by left-wing parties: +2.6 million votes
• Losses from right-wing parties: -828,000 votes.

The reason the Conservatives won is to do with where all those votes fell. The SNP added nearly 1 million votes but took those from Labour candidates in Scotland, which hasn't been Tory country for decades. The Green Party quintupled its national vote but its 1.1 million supporters are so spread out they make no difference. Labour added votes, just not geographically.

The first-past-the-post parliamentary system did the job it is supposed to do - return a majority in the House of Commons for the party with the most votes. But the result nonetheless came from such a distortion of the actual underlying votes that you can argue it's better evidence for voting law reform than for keeping the status quo.