We all benefit from a voting system which more accurately reflects what we think, whether Conservative or liberal progressive in our outlook. Adopting proportional representation will be essential to building a better politics.
Let’s play a game of spot the difference. Here are two examples of a parliamentary election. See if you can guess what year they were held in and the number of seats the opposition party won.
Democratic Britain?
Election one: an embattled prime minister calls a surprise general election. The campaign is marred by gaffes, mistakes and poorly thought-out policies which crumble under the lightest of scrutiny. There is a sudden surge of interest in a political outsider. With an extremely popular manifesto, the opposition goes on to win 40% of the vote.
Election two: an embattled prime minister calls a surprise general election. The campaign is marred by gaffes, mistakes and poorly thought-out policies which crumble under the lightest of scrutiny. The sudden surge of interest in a political outsider upsets the apple cart. With a bland manifesto nobody cares about, and in the face of a totally apathetic public, the opposition wins less than 40% of the vote.
How many seats do you think the opposition party won at each election? Have a guess …
The first election is the 2017 general election, when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party won 40% of the vote and won 262 seats, but lost the election.
The second election is the 2024 general election. Labour has won 412 of a total 650 seats (65%) on 34% of the vote.
The unfairness of our electoral system
In 2024, Labour won the general election on a lower share of the vote than in the previous two general elections, and on a lower number of votes than the party achieved in 2019. It largely did this by ‘spreading’ its vote in a horizontal way across the electorate
Under first past the post, our electoral system has developed a ‘lopsided’ quality about it. In an electoral system where parties compete for the maximum number of votes within specific geographic locations. Despite how diverse, in every sense, each party’s electoral coalition is, if a party can’t win small towns and villages, and specifically the type of voter who inhabits these areas more than any other, it is very, very difficult to win an election. It’s worth remembering that in 2019, Labour won by a mile with people between the age of 18 and 50, because Labour was deeply unpopular with people over 50, it fell to a landslide.
Such a situation is a damning inditement of Britain’s claim to be a democracy. The Labour landslide on 4 July was based on the votes of roughly one in every three registered voters. By any stretch of the imagination, this is an absurd way of consulting the public about the government it would like. If the Labour government leaves the NHS worse off after five years, and an independent analysis by the Nuffield Trust revealed last week suggested that it might do, it will do so with the consent of one in every three adults.
The solution is democratic reform
Electoral reform is now essential to building a better, more democratic and more progressive politics.
There is strong information to suggest that the public has a sense of disillusionment with both the main parties, as shown by the turnout which is the lowest for a generation. If there is one mood which seems to sum up this general election, it was more an overwhelming desire to see the back of the Tories rather than a genuine chance to explore alternatives.
This will be the case so long as Britain sticks to its antiquated, outdated electoral system. The Tories and Labour both view first past the post as a shortcut to office. It simplifies their job massively, reducing the task of opposition to a matter of simply fishing for a minority of voters who read minority newspapers in minority constituencies.
The views of two out of every three voters in this country didn’t make a material difference to the outcome of this election. It is scant comfort to say that the Tories are done for when there is an institutional bias towards the Conservative Party, which they can use to fast track them back into power every four years.
For a new kind of politics to emerge, politics as usual must change. That means abolishing first past the post and replacing it with a proportional system.
