Does the election result show Britain’s voting system needs urgent reform?

Even a cursory examination of the election results shows that Britain’s first-past-the-post system produces some spectacularly disproportionate and arguably unfair outcomes. Reform UK is loudly claiming the system is “broken”, while even during the campaign some Conservative commentators raised questions about how governments can wield great power on a comparatively weak mandate.

Labour scored about 35 per cent of the popular vote – modest by historic standards – but harvested 63 per cent of seats in the House of Commons, and thus also a landslide 174-seat majority. Given the low turnout of 60 per cent, it means only about one in five adult Britons actively voted for Keir Starmer’s programme of change. Starmer will be governing the country with just about the lowest share of the vote of any administration since 1923.

Of course, in the British system the point is that Labour’s lead over the Conservatives was still very substantial, at 11 per cent, and the two-party swing comparable to Tony Blair’s in 1997, and of historic proportions. This is a strength of the system: it forces a choice. (Though both Labour’s lead and its vote share were smaller than the polls had indicated).

Psephologists will need to crunch the numbers to give a full account, but a few factors seem to be at work. First, the system helped Labour because more of the left vote solidified behind Labour, while the right was badly split between the Conservatives and Reform UK. Tactical voting across Labour and the Liberal Democrats also helped, which might have artificially pushed the Labour share down. And Labour ruthlessly concentrated on winning marginal and even normally safe Conservative seats, because there’s no point in piling up the votes in Labour safe seats.

Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s party won more votes (about a half a million more) than the Liberal Democrats, but were rewarded with only five MPs, against 71 for Ed Davey’s party. Greens also won four seats despite having 1.5 million votes. So you could say it took about 800,000 votes to elect each Reform MP, but only 23,300 to elect a Labour one.

Because it tends to exclude smaller (but still sizeable) parties who poll fairly well across the country but rarely quite enough to finish first in any one constituency. Westminster’s system works well, and quite proportionally, when there are essentially just two big parties, as in the 1950s. It starts to go awry when four or even five key parties are involved.

Ironically, the Liberal Democrats, who used to suffer greatly under the present system, have now perfected the art of targeting seats. Thus, for example, the predecessor SDP-Liberal Alliance ran Labour close to coming third in the 1983 election with 25 per cent of the vote, but only won 23 seats against more than 200 for Labour.

A purely proportional system would be fair to all, but would weaken or lose the link between an MP and their constituents. It would mean more coalitions, and fewer governments armed with a mandate for radical change. And it would mean extremist parties would be able to get into parliament and coalition governments more easily.

Alternative Vote is another system that means an MP would have to win a majority of votes in a constituency, with second and third preferences being taken into account. It tends usually to be more proportional, but it can make landslides even bigger. It was rejected in a 2011 referendum.

As usual, nothing – even though the Conservatives have had cause for second thoughts. Labour usually gets interested in PR after a long frustrating period out of power, but as soon as it wins a majority, enthusiasm for change rapidly dries up. That was certainly the case the last time Labour came to power in 1997. A manifesto commitment made by Blair to “a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons” was quietly forgotten.

In fact, Labour delegates at the 2022 party conference overwhelmingly backed PR, with major unions Unison and Unite supporting the move. Indeed in his leadership campaign in 2020, after their fourth successive defeat, the now prime minister offered hope for reform: “I also think on electoral reform, we’ve got to address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count. That’s got to be addressed. We will never get full participation in our electoral system until we do that at every level.”

However, now Starmer’s official spokesperson is clear that he has a “long-standing view against proportional representation”. So, to adapt a fashionable slogan, “no change”.