‘ After these Local Elections there can be no doubt: Labour’s future lies in electoral reform’

The writing is on the wall, for those willing to read it: Britain’s multi-party electorate is here to stay. That is the lesson from the Local elections last week, where we saw a five-party split collide with a two-party system. Five parties are now projected to take at least 15 per cent each of the popular vote nationally. First Past The Post (FPTP)  was never designed to cope with a complex modern electorate, and we have now reached a tipping point. Sir John Curtice’s analysis in the days following the results warns that, rather than protecting Labour and the Conservatives, this system is now accelerating collapse. Unprecedented political fragmentation now means parties are able to win seats on as little as 15% of the vote, with the vast majority of constituents not only voting against the representative that FPTP hands power to but unable to show preference to who should represent them, potentially handing the seat to the least popular candidate. After Thursday’s results, Labour must remember and reassert what it is we are here to do: address inequality – economic and political.

One old argument against Proportional Representation (PR) was that it allows the populist right in through the back door. Well, they’re now walking in through the front door. Farage and his neo-Thatcherites, backed by Crypto-Billionaires and formerly Russian oligarchs, have got everything they wanted under First Past the Post over the past decade – from austerity, to Brexit, to the gradual erosion of our human rights. But things can still get worse. For Labour, it is increasingly irresponsible to ignore the fact that Britain’s voting system could hand Reform UK power on less than a third of the popular vote. The legacy of this government would be wiped out overnight.

READ MORE: ‘Why these local election were so tough for Labour’

This is not about party-political advantage. Growing numbers of experts are alarmed that Westminster’s voting system – already an outlier in Europe – is dangerously outdated. As the Constitution Unit’s Professor Alan Renwick recently told the Local Government Committee, we now “risk having an election next time round that is simply indefensible”. Others like Professor Rob Ford have described this system as little more than an “electoral pinball machine”. In February, over 50 leading political and constitutional academics wrote an open letter to the government warning that Westminster’s voting system is a risk to Britain’s political stability. The UK has record-low public trust in government when compared with our international peers. Just 12% of people trust governments to put the interests of the nation above those of their own party. Usually, elections help to restore some of this trust. But 2024 was different. Political fragmentation under the status quo means parliament looks less and less like what the public voted for.

Meanwhile over recent years, First Past the Post encourages an approach to campaigning which effectively drives a wedge between Labour and our core voterbase. Pursuing a few thousand “hero voters”, whose votes unfairly count for more than others because of where they live, has warped our policy offering and party communications. Labour has contorted itself to breaking point to fit through the incentives this system offers. We have alienated former heartlands and lost hundreds of thousands of members. But in an era when authenticity is everything, voters have not thanked us for jettisoning our identity and values in pursuit of electioneering. And while we should thank all involved in 2024’s win, a parliamentary landslide secured on just 34% of the vote has left the government dancing on the head of a pin when it comes to delivering change, unable to please and constantly forced to appease. 

Meanwhile, with over a century of comparative data available, there is growing evidence that where governments are elected by a majority of the vote, they enjoy a built-in incentive to create policies that benefit most people. This leads to better standards across the board on social, environmental and education policies and workers’ rights. In other words: political equality at the ballot box is fundamental to delivering equality everywhere else in society. Two-thirds of the Labour membership back PR. Over the weekend, CWU joined the now vast majority of Labour trade unions with policy in favour of PR. And in increasingly uncertain times, there is another reason for the Labour leadership to embrace the cause — proportionally elected governments are more stable, with ministers and prime ministers serving years longer on average in their posts. Increasingly, this stability is being connected with policy stability and economic growth.

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This is not completely uncharted territory. A century ago, British politics was in flux. A society changed forever by technological  progress and wracked by rapidly rising inequality led to the dismantling of the two-party status quo that had held until then. The Liberal Party, after a century of political ascendancy, was decimated – and the Labour Party was born. At the time, Keir Hardie had the vision to recognise that political, social and economic inequality are inextricably linked. Today, that same unequal voting system threatens yet more chaos for our politics. It is time for today’s Keir to recognise the challenge of our crumbling democracy. It is time to change a voting system which is obviously unfit for purpose – starting by convening a National Commission on Electoral Reform. It’s time to remind the country of Labour’s values of fairness, equality, and democracy, and present our progressive vision for what British democracy must look like in the 21st century.

The Prime Minister in his reset speech said ‘a return to the status quo would not be enough for people.’ First Past the Post is the biggest example of the Status Quo in UK politics. A very modest part of any reset would be to accept and announce a National Commission for Electoral Reform. If this modest request in the face of the destruction of the viability to First past the post doesn’t happen we can only conclude that Keir Starmer is a Status Quo Prime Minister.

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