Britain will never truly change for the better as long as Britain’s deeply unfair voting system remains in place, argues Neal Lawson
This week I’m going to write about electoral systems. No don’t look away. Bear with me. This really matters. Because something odd happened last week. Like ships in the night Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch sailed silently past each other on this seemingly dry but decisive issue. We will get to that soon enough but first let’s take a step back and look at the fundamentals of our failed democratic system.
Churchill famously said democracy is the worst form of governance, other than all the available alternatives. But while there are many different forms of democracy, ours is proving to be particularly dysfunctional. And right at the heart of the rot of adversarialism, tribalism, short-termism, centralism and establishment conformity to the diktat of the super wealthy, is our voting system.
Rather than representing us, the First Past the Post (FPtP) voting system coerces and bullies us. It works like this. FPtP is designed to create and uphold a two-party system in which ‘strong’ power oscillates between the two major parties its privileges. It does so by disproportionately rewarding only those parties who win the most votes in key seats while disregarding the rest. The test is not popularity but vote efficiency – winning the most votes in enough targets seats. By doing so it erects huge barriers to new market entrants, who may have lots of support across the country as a whole, but their vote isn’t concentrated in the right seats, thus enshrining the two party dominance. As a punter, if you want your vote to ‘count’ then you have to pick one of the two major parties. This warps the whole of our political system.
It does so by instilling a coercive discipline on both party members and voters. You have no choice but to suck up whatever the party leader or manifesto of your preferred one of the big two parties says. Come the election you are forced to accept the lesser of two evils – or see your vote ‘wasted’. We’re bullied and blackmailed into the least bad option, which then fails to deliver the things we need and grows the general and widespread dissatisfaction with democracy. Parties like Reform then grow as a sense of resentment and frustration takes hold.
And then we are presented with an even worse dilemma – vote for us or it’s not the Conservatives that will win, but Reform. This is how Labour strategists will be cynically preparing the ground for the next election. And so it goes on. At its heart it’s not representative democracy but coercive democracy.
But it’s even worse than that. As Compass, the organisation I’m the Director of, showed in its report on the last election Thin Ice, Labour wins only when the Conservatives become discredited and default Conservative voters can be persuaded to back Labour, but only on the promise not to change anything of significance. Meanwhile the country’s progressive majority are force-fed a diet of thin change gruel. Unsurprisingly Labour fails to even pragmatically change sufficiently the economic and social order and are then kicked out of office, with Reform and not the Conservatives now looking like the alternative.
But why would anyone in the leadership of the duopoly give this enormous coercive power away? Their whole political existence depends not on their vision, charisma, compassion or policies, but their stranglehold on party members and voters who are given no option but to back them. Its turkeys, votes and Christmas.
No other sector critical to the functioning of society gets to regulate itself like politics. The beneficiaries of the duopoly set its rules and do so in a way that benefits them. They have veto on reform. It is time to smash this duopoly. And the ground is moving to do so.
People aren’t just supplicants; they will suck up the frustration and the alienation for so long – eventually they reach a tipping point. So, we see the emergence of a multi-party reality, as people vote for Reform, the Greens, Independents and Liberal Democrats, being shoehorned into a system made for two. It creates chaotic outcomes as small shifts between up to five parties polling over 10% lead to massive and unpredictable changes in seat allocations.
And what of our fabled ‘strong’ government? We saw after 2019 the Conservatives stumble from crisis to crisis despite the fact they had an 80-seat majority. And look at Labour now, sitting on top of a 170-seat majority and are not even in command of their own CVs and LinkedIn pages let alone their own growth priority. To be ‘strong’, a government has to be about something meaningful and represent the interests of a broad enough bloc of voters. Labour won 34% of the votes on a turnout of less than 60%, and a huge chunk of those voters were simply holding their nose for fear of something worse. There was no mandate for change. And now we pay the price.
So back to Nigel and Kemi. Last week in an interview Farage reiterated Reform’s support for PR. It is outrageous that his party received 14% of the vote but only 0.8% of the seats. It’s wrong democratically but fails us politically too, as it sows the seeds of justifiable democratic resentment. But the man is a charlatan, as he went on to point out that under FPtP you reach a tipping point, at around 30% of the vote, when the system that punishes you starts to disproportionately reward you. Figures around Reform have been toying with the embrace of ‘our British voting system’, because they can see that under PR 33% of the vote leads to 33% of the seats, but under FPTP they can win 60% of the seats based on only a third of the vote. A majority is in touching distance.
Meanwhile in another interview last week Badenoch exclaimed outrage that Labour had indeed won over 60% of the seats on less than 34% of the vote. No Conservative Party leader has ever voiced such criticism of our voting system. These are odd times.
Our democracy has been enclosed. While establishment political leaders are dead set against voting refom, it will take a governing or social crisis to unlock it. That could be a hung parliament. But whatever the event we need to be ready with the arguments and pressure to end the bullying and the coercion. Labour party members are there, more and more MPs are there through the new All Party Fair Votes Group, big campaign organisations like Greenpeace are there, and so are voters. The penny is dropping that there won’t be social, economic or climate transformation without voting systems change.
PR wont magic away the huge problems we face. But it will create a level playing field in which political competition can fairly and openly take place. It’s only a start. But it’s a critical one on the road to a deeper democracy that will let society meet social challenges and opportunities.
This article first appeared in the Byline Times on Tuesday the 25th of February 2025.