Votes in UK General Elections 1945-2010

Out of interest I plotted the raw number of votes cast for Conservative, Liberal/Lib-Dem, and Labour parties in each general election from 1945-2010, using Wikipedia as the source of data.

Its interesting that For most of the time Labour and Liberal(-Dem) are anti correllated - a gain for one is a loss for the other.  The Liberals have generally failed to attract conservative votes.  The Conservative vote has been fairly constant, except immediately after WWII and after the scandals in the early 1990's after which many of the Conservative voters simply did not vote (or voted for a fringe party).

Raw figures are:

year	Labour	Conservative	Liberal
1945	11,967,746	8,716,211	2,177,938
1950	13,226,176	11,507,061	2,621,487
1951	13,948,385	13,724,418	730,546
1955	12,405,254	13,310,891	722,402
1959	12,216,172	13,750,875	1,640,760
1964	12,205,808	12,002,642	3,099,283
1966	13,096,629	11,418,455	2,327,457
1970	12,208,758	13,145,123	2,117,035
1974	11,645,616	11,872,180	6,059,519
1974.5	11,457,079	10,462,565	5,346,704
1979	11,532,218	13,697,923	4,313,804
1983	8,456,934	13,012,316	7,780,949
1987	10,029,270	13,760,935	7,341,651
1992	11,560,484	14,093,007	5,999,384
1997	13,518,167	9,600,943	5,242,947
2001	10,724,953	8,357,615	4,814,321
2005	9,562,122	8,772,598	5,981,874
2010	8,604,358	10,683,787	6,827,938