The first step to fixing our democracy is to acknowledge that we have a problem. 

There’s now broad agreement on this point: the sticky cliché that politics is ‘broken’ is now heard from across the political spectrum. 

But the foundational nature of First Past the Post (FPTP) means it can hide in plain sight without ever being implicated in these broader conversations about the state of UK politics.

Amidst the day-to-day wrangling over polls and policies, the rules governing our elections and their unforeseen consequences are seldom scrutinised. Yet we know the effects of our voting system are deep and widespread: FPTP frames our national debate, warps our perception of politicians’ behaviour, and dictates the decisions of our leaders.

Even those seen as beneficiaries of the system – the larger parties – are more trapped by it than they seem to believe.

In my new report for Compass, Why the Player Should Hate the Game, I argue that deeper democratisation could not only win Labour votes but, in the longer term, liberate them from the contortions and constraints demanded by FPTP.

To Labour supporters who complain about a lack of specific policies, about failures of imagination or absence of talent, we say: look structurally. Look to the game we’re all forced to play. Look to our voting system.

‘Caricatures like Stevenage Woman cheapen our politics’

FPTP maps out a path to power that lures prospective prime ministers – especially those from progressive parties – towards the centre to pick up enough marginal voters to push them over the finishing line. Progressives must appear unthreatening, safe and stable – an image conscientiously cultivated by Starmer’s closest allies. It’s a small target, but high stakes strategy that leaves most voters cold. But it can, because most votes don’t count.

Our voting system gives rise to voter caricatures that cheapen our politics – the now infamous Workington Man or Stevenage Woman – and gives the lie to concepts like the Red and Blue Wall, which breeds a complacent and lazy approach to voters. Win over 100,000 here and 100,000 there and you’ve got yourself a majority. Why voters moved – and what the rest of the country are thinking – is of much less importance.

Marginal voters wield disproportionate power and reap the rewards: more investment and better health facilities means living in a marginal constituency might even save your life. To recycle an old favourite, this is a system for the few, not the many.

‘Pendulum politics’

FPTP allows tiny margins to trigger huge swings, such as the Uxbridge by-election, won on 495 votes, which prompted the Tories to swerve and take aim at Net Zero. And perhaps most importantly, our electoral process encourages splicing the electorate into ever-smaller subgroups, rather than identifying possible commonalities, which might add up to a vision for the kind of country we might want to be.

We’re so used to ‘pendulum politics’ in the UK that we have lost sight of the way it wears our country down. When politics becomes a war of attrition, one side grinding on in government when it’s long past its shelf life, citizens disconnect, become alienated, worn down and even cynical. 

Government changes hands not because electors brim with enthusiasm, but because they decide that ‘things can only get better’ and begrudgingly give ‘the other side’ a go. This is the ‘distrust and alienation’ that the Labour Party have already identified; our voting system drives people away and turns people off politics at a time when we need collective democratic engagement more than ever.

‘FPTP affords progressives few spells in government’

And just as unhealthily, when a new government eventually sweeps into power, after they’ve cleared the huge barriers to entry put up by FPTP, the fall from grace can be precipitous.

A system that deprives voters of choice and change breeds a desperation for hope, which can over inflate our expectations: see Obama’s 2008 victory or the now almost mythical status of Labour’s landslide win in 1997. 

Once in power, the new government tends to lurch wildly in the other direction, unpicking and uprooting the policies they’ve spent the last few years criticising – something which might satisfy voters’ need for ‘change’, but can mean wild turnarounds for systems that require steady, long-term planning like our health system, transport, industrial and education policy.

And whilst we’re on 1997, FPTP affords progressives so few spells in government, that the last Labour leader who won power at a general election did so when most current university students weren’t even born. Such slim pickings when it comes to leaders encourages a hyper-fixation on those mythical few who do the impossible – win a parliamentary majority.

And whilst many analysts are at pains to repeat the mantra that ‘2024 is not 1997’, Labour politics is still dominated by a person, a party and a programme that came to power 27 years ago. Whether New Labour was genius or compromise, if theirs is still the only manual for progressive victory, we remain shackled to the past, which breeds its own kind of conservatism.

‘We need a new buffet of options’

This report argues that if Labour could step back and see that the game we’re all playing works against a politics of emancipation and equality, how it makes us narrower, more timid, even more conservative, then it might be possible to understand ourselves as potential long-term winners of a shift to proportional representation.

During the election, our Compass Local Groups will use their votes, time, and activism to support the best-placed progressives who back PR in key seats.

We’re saying to candidates: we will vote for you, we will donate to your campaign and we will be on the streets for you. But only if you commit to real political change – starting with proportional representation.

Sceptics wonder whether electoral reformers, those democratic evangelists, over-promise when they point to the land of milk and honey they claim is proportional representation. But if we don’t like the politics we’re being served, maybe we need to look at the water it’s cooked in. 

When the set menu is stale and samey, we need a new buffet of options – similar, but probably spicier, with much more choice. Nothing is guaranteed under PR; it doesn’t make better outcomes certain, but it does make them possible. British politics in 2024 seems stuck and stagnant. When in doubt, surely ‘daring more democracy’ seems worth a try.