As Kier Starmer cruised to a predictable and wholesale victory last Thursday, the larger story of the evening was perhaps the performance of Reform UK and the Green Party. Reform, the SNP and the Greens won more than 23% of the votes and yet won just 2.7% of the seats. This seems to be undoubtedly and irrefutably undemocratic, but is it?
In the days after the election, we have seen a host of clamouring calls from both the left and right of politics calling foul on First Past the Post (FPTP) and adulating a system which engages in Proportional Representation. On the face of it this seems a very sensible system to support, with votes being proportional to the seats in Parliament, This seems very fair and democratic. However, to trick ourselves into believing that the voting system is the crux of our democracy fails to address the other flaws in our democracy, particularly our voter turnout, our press, and our standard of political education and critical thinking. Consequently, what FPTP enables is a safeguard against the further degradation of our political democracy by these other influences. It ensures that not only is there support, but that support is concentrated, it guards against the poisonous populism that is cascading through mainland Europe.
Furthermore, it is not true to say that these votes are wasted. The belief that a vote only matters if it contributes to the election of a Member of Parliament is folly. Votes act as a weathervane for public opinion. For example, when UKIP won 4 million votes in the 2015 election, were those votes wasted? Or did their strength force David Cameron’s hand in both promising and delivering a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union? Reform are now second place in around 100 Labour constituencies. Labour will be very aware that they must provide answers to issues of immigration that matter to Reform voters or face the decimation of their majority in 2029.
On the other side of the fence, the Green Party won 1.8 million votes, a staggering result for them and one which for both the Labour and Conservative parties will illustrate that a significant portion of the UK electorate desire change and leadership on environmental policy. These votes are not wasted, political parties are not so naïve as they may appear, they are calculated vote harvesting machines and the top brass of the Conservatives and Labour will be analysing the performance of the Greens and Reform in some detail.
So why, you may ask, are calls for proportional representation misplaced? The answer is three-fold. Firstly, they enable and legitimise extremist parties who do not and could not represent the majority of the population. Secondly, they create weak coalition governments stuck in a constant state of paralysis and bickering. Thirdly, they erode and remove the constituency link between elected representatives and their local communities.
Proportional Representation is the flavour of the month in Europe, from Germany to Sweden to Italy and the Netherlands, the system has been favoured for decades. Britain’s lack of PR and mainland Europe’s utilisation of it is the single largest factor explaining why Britain has thus far avoided an increasingly powerful populist far-right party acting within Westminster. In Sweden as with the Netherlands, the largest parties are those who 20 years ago were derided for their far-right and neo-Nazi connections. It is the role of PR, that slow and steady accumulation of votes, seats and normalisation which removes the taboo of these racist, xenophobic, and bigoted parties.
Reform has shown itself this election to be nothing more than a place where bigots and racists feel at home, their candidates exhibit a racism and homophobia which we cannot allow into our halls of power, and yet their voters demand respect and demand to be listened to. They are within their rights to call for new measures on immigration and they are right to feel disillusioned with politics. But they do not need PR to illustrate this, they do not need 100 Reform MPs roaming the corridors of Westminster to illustrate this. Their vote share illustrates this, without actually enabling Reform to enact catastrophic damage on our parliamentary system as has occurred around mainland Europe.
Coalition governments do not work, they often collapse every few months and pass very little legislation. Just take a look at the state of the Northern Irish Assembly over recent years or indeed the panic in France after their General Election and the fears that legislative gridlock will roll out the red carpet for Marine le Pen’s Presidential bid in 2027.
Finally, a system of PR would destroy the connection between the UK Parliament and the local community. We often feel as though Westminster is an abstract and removed part of our lives, and it really often is at times, however by severing the local link between MPs and constituencies we would further entrench these feelings. One of the most impressive parts of this 2024 General Election was the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as an independent in Islington North. Throughout the campaign, Corbyn’s supporters and constituents illustrated the power of a local candidate, of local community and of having a man in the nation's Parliament who above all represented them and their interests.
Not all MPs are as conscientious as Mr Corbyn, I am sure not all of them work night and day answering each and every constituent concern, toiling to secure answers on council housing or caring about community in such a way he clearly does. Mr Corbyn illustrates the power of community, the power of local led politics and the unique ability of FPTP to reject extremism, create strong government and yet still deliver change for the local constituents on issues that matter for them.
Image: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
This is a very good article and I do agree the PR (at least in the Commons, a reformed House of Lords is a slightly different debate however) is not the answer.
Another point that you could have made is that not enough people vote. Unfortunately, politically more motivated people tend to vote more than politically disengaged which biases PR elections towards more radical candidates - Reform supporters (as well as people of the hard-left) are more likely to vote than "centre Right-to-centre Left normies" which may pull the politically debates to either extreme.
I do quiet like the alternative vote (which is what the 2011 voting reform ref. was about) as it preserves local representation (which some forms of…