By Tommy Thin
On the 4th of July 2024, forty-eight million Brits went to the polls to elect a new government. The thirty-four percent who voted for the Labour Party, were returned sixty-three percent of the parliamentary seats; the fourteen percent who voted for Reform UK, were returned less than one percent of seats. Rightly or wrongly, this, disproportion caused uproar among the likes of Reform UK, who felt they were being pushed out of parliamentary politics. More importantly, these results raise intriguing questions about our electoral system – and how we should actually do politics – to the forefront of our political discourse.
Admittedly, just pitting vote proportion against parliamentary seat proportion is a crude way to represent the British electoral system, known as ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP), but it raises important questions about what we hold as our most sacred democratic values. In Britain, the FPTP system works so that each voter belongs to one of six-hundred-and-fifty constituencies of similar population and votes only for a political representative in their own constituency. In each constituency the candidate with the most votes wins the constituency seat, meaning, the disproportions occur due to the ‘wasted’ votes for losing candidates.
Often lumped in with vague notions of British parliamentary history and traditions from the Acts of Union passed in 1707 and 1800, the likes of David Cameron have hailed our electoral system as being “enshrined in our constitution and integral to our history”. On the contrary, what’s much more integral to our history is dispute about the electoral system and how it should work. Nineteenth century British parliament was awash with competing ideas of how we should vote – the ‘Limited Vote’, ‘Cumulative Vote’, ‘Single Transferable Vote’, and ‘Proportional Representation’, all proposed and trialled at various points by various parliamentarians. A far cry from being constitutionally enshrined, the electoral system has been an object for revision, changing to suit either the developing needs of the British people or the political ambitions of its parties.
All of this is not to suggest the eventual formation of the modern system in 1950 was without good reason, or the system without its merits. The disproportionality facilitated by FPTP, and that we have seen to a great extent in 2024, is in many ways a necessary sacrifice to uphold other ideals and democratic values in Britain. While it’s true that Labour’s ‘landslide’ victory was not won with a majority of the popular vote, let alone a landslide, it has likely saved Britain from extensive political in-fighting and compromising of manifesto promises. The simple fact of modern democracy is that having tens of millions of people agree on the right for one party to rule, from a choice of nearly a hundred parties across the country, is not going to happen. Compromises have to be made in one manner or another. In a system of proportional representation, while each party might be more justly represented, it’s far harder for any one party to win a majority, so severe compromises must be made between parties and their different political agendas. In the few cases in Britain in which no party has secured a majority, the electorate’s distaste for discarded manifesto promises has been palpable. In 2010, when the Conservatives were forced to align with the LibDems – and vice versa – to form a government, for many all that followed was a series of ‘miserable compromises’. So, pivoting to a system of Proportional Representation, which is necessarily based on that kind of compromise, seems a strange vision for political satisfaction among the masses.
Proportional representation is often associated with some imprecise idea of ‘fairness’, without any consensus on what that actually is. It’s an easy argument for Nigel Farage or any other disgruntled parliamentarians to make when their party’s seat share pales in comparison to its vote share – that the system is ‘unfair’. But firstly, it’s worth noting that political parties like Farage’s, with relatively little support but wide name recognition, often make a conscious effort to exacerbate the disproportions they will later complain of. Reform UK admitted to fielding ‘paper candidates’ to win votes in constituencies they hadn’t campaigned in, with the hopes of bolstering their share of the popular vote. Playing up the supposed injustices of the system is almost always in the interests of political parties on the fringes of power, painting a narrative of systematic exclusion and corruption. But much more importantly, there has to be some acknowledgement that ‘fairness’ in electoral politics is about more than just proportionality. It’s not so far-fetched to suggest that political parties actually doing what they promise in their election campaigns – or at least having the means to – is an important part of fairness. FPTP goes some way to help that. The thirty-four percent who did vote for Labour now have a government with the power to do what they promised, and perhaps that is worth more than having one hundred percent of voters proportionally represented by parties without the means to deliver.
What it means to be ‘represented’ is another aspect of the debate that is too commonly overlooked. After each general election in the UK, every constituency has its own elected representative.whether you voted for that candidate or not, they are mandated to voice your views and the views of your area to the national government. And this kind of geographical system indicates a pertinent and quite unique aspect of British politics and representation in the nation’s cultural diversity. It seems plausible to argue that two constituents of contrasting political persuasion in Penrith and the Border would share more similar representational needs than two constituents of the same political persuasion, one in Penrith and the Border, the other in Clapham and Brixton. Electing politicians primarily as representatives for an area and its people rather than a political party promotes an understanding of politics as about the individual and their needs. In this sense, although the British electoral system is not literally ‘enshrined in the constitution’ it does reflect some fundamental truths about the nation and its values.
Of course, there are alternatives to FPTP and proportional representation, and you don’t have to look far to find them. The devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales both use the Additional Member System for their own separate parliamentary elections. In this system the voter has two ballots: one ballot lists local candidates to represent the area – just as in the General Election – and the other is a party list from which additional party members who aren’t standing to be a constituency representative are elected. So, there is a compromise between having local representatives and still giving an eye to proportionality. And this does actually seem to make a difference for those parties which are otherwise more or less shut out. In Scotland the Green Party have gained considerable influence in recent years despite failing to win a single constituency seat. The votes they received on the second ‘party list’ ballot were sufficient to win them eight seats in parliament, which in turn was sufficient to form a coalition government with the SNP. A party which would otherwise cease to exist in the Scottish parliament became the kingmakers.
Yet there is a sinister flip side to this coin – an entry point for the extremists. More proportionality always seems more democratic on the surface, but opening up the possibility of extremist political parties exerting the kind of power that the Green Party have enjoyed in Scotland could well prove dangerous. In Germany, where a similar system is used, the far-right AfD have risen to prominence, winning seventy-seven seats in the Bundestag. This is a party playing to the fringes in a dangerous way: openly endorsing climate change denial, arguing for unequal rights in favour of ‘ethnically german citizens’, describing the Holocaust as merely a ‘speck of bird’s muck’ on a glorious national history. It doesn’t require the wildest leap of imagination to envision a situation in which they take up a role similar to that of the Green Party in Scotland, in which they begin to pull the strings.These are the situations we must imagine when considering electoral reform in the UK. ‘Two-party politics’ might reasonably be derided as undemocratic, but its alternatives shouldn’t be blindly lauded instead. The Additional Members System is just one popular alternative to FPTP but it demonstrates the kind of trade-offs that have to be made in the construction of an electoral system, and that ‘pure democracy’ cannot and does not exist.
What really drives these debates about electoral systems and how to achieve the purest form of democracy is a misguided idealism. Absolutely we should not write off the possibility of electoral reform in Britain in the name of some false sense of tradition, but we also shouldn’t oversimplify the issues. For all the disproportions and apparent injustices thrown up by FPTP, it does offer up its own means of making democracy work properly. It offers stability and a defence against the rise of extremist parties; it offers citizens their own representatives for their own local needs; and it allows governments to form with a mandate to do what they have promised. These are values at the core of British democracy and they must be protected.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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