Every election, millions of people in Britain vote knowing their ballot probably will not matter.
If you live in a “safe seat”, your vote can feel irrelevant before you even enter the polling station. If you support a smaller party, you are constantly told you are “wasting” your vote. And if you back the winning party nationally, there is a good chance they will gain enormous power without anything close to majority public support.
This is not healthy democracy. It is managed frustration.
Britain’s First Past the Post voting system was designed for a different era — an era before modern political diversity, before devolved government, and before millions of voters stopped identifying with the old two-party tribes. Yet we still force 21st-century politics through an electoral system that rewards tactical voting over honest voting.
The result is a political culture built around fear instead of representation.
People are told not to vote for what they believe in, but against the outcome they fear most. Labour supporters are told to hold their nose to stop the Conservatives. Conservatives warn voters about Labour chaos. Smaller parties are squeezed out of debates despite representing millions of people nationwide.
And then Westminster wonders why public trust continues to collapse.
Proportional representation would not magically solve every problem in British politics. But it would create something we desperately need: a Parliament that actually reflects the country.
Under proportional systems used across much of Europe, parties win seats roughly in line with the votes they receive. That means cooperation becomes necessary. Consensus matters more. Politicians must persuade rather than dominate.
Critics claim coalition politics creates instability. But what is truly unstable about parties being forced to work together? What is stable about Prime Ministers changing repeatedly without public votes, or landslide majorities won on barely a third of the national vote?
The truth is that First Past the Post does not deliver strong government. It delivers unchecked government.
For the Liberal Democrats, electoral reform is not some abstract constitutional obsession. It is about fairness. It is about making every vote count equally whether you live in Canterbury or Cornwall, Glasgow or Guildford.
Most importantly, it is about rebuilding faith that politics can still belong to ordinary people.
Young voters in particular increasingly feel disconnected from Westminster because the system tells them their voices matter less depending on where they live. That is indefensible in a modern democracy.
Britain is more politically diverse than it has been in generations. Our electoral system should reflect that reality instead of suppressing it.
Democracy works best when people can vote for what they believe in — not merely against what they fear.
And until Britain embraces electoral reform, millions will continue entering polling stations feeling that the system has already decided their voice matters less than someone else’s.
That should concern everyone, regardless of party.
* Toby Mortimer is a Young Liberal and a member of the Liberal Democrats for Canterbury & Coastal.
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14 Comments
While I appreciate the earnest nature of the article, it does rather gloss over a few problems of proportional systems with quite a bit less consideration than they deserve. For example the rhetorical question and assertion “Critics claim coalition politics creates instability. But what is truly unstable about parties being forced to work together? ”
To which the answer was “Look at Italy” and now is “Look at Israel.” To some being in power overrides all other considerations.
The issue we all need to come to terms with is that no electoral system is anywhere close to perfect and working together only works if all sides in a coalition are willing to take the blame together and accept that in a democracy they will sometime have to accept that their opponents have their turn.
Britain’s First Past the Post voting system was designed for a different era — an era before modern political diversity,…
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Here’s how the previous regeneration went…
‘In UK politics during the early 20th. century transition from Liberal to Labour, did commentators say that multi-party politics (with more than two parties) was here to stay?’:
https://gemini.google.com/
Well said, Toby. While electoral reform is a necessity if only to restore voters’ confidence in the value of their vote, we can still negotiate about which is the best new system to adopt.
Exploring how proportional systems would operate in a more fractured political system is an absolute must. With a “five party system”, I believe we risk further instability that would inevitably create distrust within the electorate.
Where we recognise that trust in the establishment and polarisation are worsening in our politics, we must be very cautious about electoral reform. The result would almost certainly be coalition government with more compromise than we’ve seen before that ultimately doesn’t deliver to the two (or three or four) manifestos that the public have voted for.
I am not against electoral reform but I remain cautious given the political volatility we live in today. Where we see centre parties operating with some consensus on critical policy areas, there could be a route to a proportional system. To date, I’m not convinced we (as a society) are there.
Not PR. Alternative Vote maybe.
Really we have recently done well out of the current system.
Canadian Liberals soon dropped the idea when they got power.
We should not be blinded to think we are in a multi party system, it could all change in 2 years and go back to square 1
Really there are much bigger fish to fry, Defence for one.
PR is not a priority, voters will see it as the political classes in their own bubble and out of touch with what really matters.
PR ?? Interesting to note that when there was the option of including PR in the 1918 Representation of the People Act, the then Liberals (both Asquith & Lloyd George groups) opposed it. Constituencies too big according to former Prime Minister H.H. Asquith. It’s in Hansard for those keen to get the facts.
@theakes: Yes, and that is the conundrum. Electoral Reform is really essential for our democracy, but outside the political bubble, few people care about it. I think the solution is make sure we are mostly talking about and offering solutions to things that voters do care about (cost of living, etc.) while also keeping electoral reform in our manifesto, as something that we’re upfront that we’ll do it if we get into Government, but it isn’t the thing that leads all our communications.
I fully agree in principle that PR is fairer and makes many more people’s votes matter. But in practice I worry about the fact it helps extreme parties. And I think a bigger point is that any system of democracy can bring about some horrendous outsomes if the electorate are uniformed about politics and manipulated by demagogues to vote out of emotion rather than reason. Therefore I think we should campaign for better political education every bit as hard as we campaign for PR. ‘Citizenship’ is compulsory but delivered patchily. I favour a mandatory 45 session every week in years 10 and 11 and a compulsory exam.
@David Vigar – “the fact [PR] helps extreme parties”.
I don’t accept that as a “fact” at all, if you adopt a remotely sensible system of PR (i.e. nothing like that in use in Israel). The central point which those attempting to defend the indefensible have got to face is that under the existing system it is perfectly feasible that the Farageists could get a majority of seats on 29% of the vote. Under a proportional system that 29% support would get them enough seats to be a thundering nuisance, but not enough seats to hold monopoly power.
It is, of course, the great difficulty that while PR (or as I would call it, “democracy”) is undoubtedly needed, it is at the top of nobody’s personal shopping list. If you are struggling to make ends meet, or homeless/threatened with eviction, you are not going to be saying to yourself “What I would really really like to see is a change in the voting system”. That was the one respect in which the No2ruthaboutAV campaign came perilously close to getting something right.
But you’re dead right about political education.
Is not the issue with politics nowadays that the first-past-the-post system forces parties to create and maintain wide coalitions of voters, and that both parties of late have forgotten the second part of that, in that in both 2019 and 2024 the winning party appealed to a broad coalition but then almost immediately they came into power started doing stuff that annoyed various sections of that coalition, with the result that they slumped in the polls as one group after another who had supported them at the ballot was turned away?
When what we need is to get back to parties putting together a platform that attracts broad support and then implementing that programme so they maintain that broad support to the next election.
PR wouldn’t solve that, indeed, would probably make it worse, as PR actively encourages parties not to try to make broad coalitions but instead to hyper-focus on their core constituencies and concentrate on trying to energise them to turn out in the hopes of getting enough seats to be involved in coalition negotiations; and then if they do get into coalition to blame their partners for any time they don’t get their way, to keep their base feisty and try to repeat the trick next time.
Under proportional systems used across much of Europe, parties win seats roughly in line with the votes they receive.
But often the government is formed by a ‘coalition of losers’ completely excluding the party that won the most votes and seats (as currently in Austria, France, Poland, Spain and Sweden). To me, that’s less democratic than FPTP where a minority government can win with less than 40% of the vote (normal in the UK as around 12% of votes are effectively taken by nationalist or regional parties).
I don’t see any evidence that PR produces better government. In the UK, the Welsh Sennedd and Scottish Parliament are even more dysfunctional than Westminster. Elsewhere in Europe, there is much stagnation with ‘consensus’ governments unable to make the change in direction needed leading to an increasingly frustrated and fractious electorate – Germany being just one example…
‘Why Friedrich Merz has been such a flop’ [May 2026]:
https://archive.is/8mVDs
The problem to a large extent is that the electorate is really divided on what the problems and solutions are, and the voting system can only go so far as to get an answer out of that.
Taking current polling as an example (and yes, this would change under PR), and assuming a perfectly proportional system, what coalitions could form a majority (whether as a formal coalition, or at least as one of the parties agreeing not to immediately vote down the others)? Assuming the LDs won’t make such an arrangement with Reform, then Con + Lab + LD seems to be the only option.
(And it would certainly be better than a Reform majority, for all I wouldn’t expect it to do anything else of value)
The country desperately needs PR regardless of political advantage. This is an issue that transcends party politics. fptp is holding this country back in so many ways.
David Evans: “The issue we all need to come to terms with is that no electoral system is anywhere close to perfect and working together only works if all sides in a coalition are willing to take the blame together and accept that in a democracy they will sometime have to accept that their opponents have their turn.”
But this is also true of the unspoken coalitions that exist WITHIN parties which has been a feature of the recent chain-assassination of leaders occurring in the ‘old big two’ parties.
FPTP over the last few years has been supporting an unhealthy command-control / institutional-capture culture inside political parties that projects false strength, plays merry hell with the principles of meaningful representation and democratic dialogue, and is keeping us isolated from the European mainstream of consensus democracy.
Which – although yes, it’s flawed and slow – as a country recovering from the social divisions of successive economic shocks and cost of living squeezes, Brexit and Covid, we desperately need, in my view.
But that’s also why ‘votes must equal seats’ whilst its a good slogan, could end up empowering the party leaderships whose natural lust for power will still depower voters.
I continue to be in favour of a more proportional system, but I’d favour a more open system with meaningful choice about who represents me, over a most-proportional system with closed list and power given to central party leaderships.