When the Labour Party won its ‘loveless landslide’ in 2024, its interest in electoral reform became conveniently weaker. By the time that Labour had won a huge majority at the last election, The Guardian’s Peter Walker was reporting that ‘the leadership could barely be less interested’ in electoral reform, even though there was and still is significant support for it within the Labour Party.
What about one year on, as the dust settles on the recent local elections? The results show that five parties are now competing and winning significant support. Will this lead to a different attitude towards electoral reform on the part of the Labour leadership?
Probably not. There are already three arguments being used to suggest that nothing much has changed. The first is that Reform will have responsibility now. They’ll have to run some councils. People will then see how useless they are. I have no truck with Reform’s policies, but this is not a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. The idea that Reform are no more than a bunch of nutters and bigots, often with a dodgy criminal past, will not do. It is more likely that as with other extreme right-wing parties, for instance in France and Germany, their influence will linger, and they will continue to have a base of support. The right approach is to take them seriously while being firmly opposed to their policies. And that means not having an electoral system where they might be able to take complete control with no more than one-third of the vote.
The second argument (perhaps unsurprisingly) looks away from our European neighbours to go further afield. See what’s happened in Canada and Australia, it says. Centre-left parties were written off there, but look at Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, who both won recent elections. Yet these elections took place in very different circumstances. Carney’s victory, for instance, involved challenging Trump and being prepared to retaliate where appropriate. Not exactly the way Starmer deals with Trump.
The third argument used to suggest that it will all soon be ‘business as usual’ again is that these five parties, like globules in a 1970s lava lamp, will end up recombining, Reform joining up with the Tories, perhaps the Greens with Labour or the Lib Dems. I think this is very unlikely. The five parties are now well-organised throughout the country and will not hesitate to put up their own candidates in future elections. I would also argue that there are still significant differences of policy between them.
For these three reasons, I fear that the Labour leadership will not take electoral reform as seriously as it should. Might it change its mind as we get closer to 2029 (as it has before on this issue)? It might, but even if it does change its mind, will it legislate to reform the voting system? Or will it end up promising to have another Commission looking yet again into all the alternatives and making recommendations to be implemented after the next election – which may become a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Lib Dems have been consistent supporters of electoral reform even though in recent elections, both national and local, they would arguably have done no better without First Past the Post. But being a party of principle, they realise that this is not the point. Electoral reform is a good thing for its own sake, making sure that smaller parties are not sidelined and ignored because the largest minority party happens to have scooped up most of the seats.
I know some Lib Dems will see this as far too pessimistic an assessment of how well Reform might continue to do. I hope they’re right. In any case, even if they are right, the case for electoral reform remains as strong as ever. But I’m nagged by the thought that too many people see Farage as a joker whose comeuppance is imminent and whose talk of winning the next general election is laughable. He is not. He is a skilled politician – as well as being one whose policies are completely wrong. He roars towards 2029 like a car driven at speed down the motorway. Caught in the headlights of his advance, Starmer stares back at him. Half the time it’s the headmaster’s stare as he looks disapprovingly at someone breaking the speed limit. The other half it’s the look of a rabbit caught in the headlights, unable to move. It’s for the Lib Dems to drag him off the road and make him change the system while he still can.
* Mark Corner is a UK national, who teaches economic history and philosophy at the University of Leuven, is married to a Czech EU official and lives in Brussels. He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.
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15 Comments
“He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.”
It’s not a case of the UK becoming more positive about the European Union, Mark – it’s more a case of England (including the so called ‘Middle England) becoming more positive about the European Union.
The strongest argument for electoral reform is not that it would help one party or another party. It is that it gives voters a CHOICE, not just once every four or five years (and then usually in picking the least worst candidate), but all year round as in a multi-member ward or constituency they can choose between the elected representatives as to which can be more helpful in promoting values which the voter holds.
‘Fair, equal votes’ has indeed to be about the rights of the voter, not this or that party advantage. In this respect, our recent (GE 24 and Locals this month) where we got seats more or less proportionate to our vote share adds more credibility to our call for voting reform. Which we are doing, notably but not only through Sarah Olney’s ten minute rule bill last December.
There’s more about current campaigns including cross party working on what is now the largest all-party parliamentary group in this parliament – http://www.fairelections.uk – and at Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform – http://www.lder.org.
Labour hierarchy on electoral reform:
1. In opposition – support electoral reform.
2. In government – not interested until they lose a future election and go back to 1.
Unprincipled and also stupid! Will they ever learn?
Jim Dapre makes some interesting points, though in fairness it must be said that the Liberal Party had enough MPs when the 1918 Representation of the People Act extended the franchise to include PR. In fact they turned it down with Asquith claiming multi member seats would be too large. In more modern times the Council seats in Scotland are elected under PR and are enormous and very difficult to service for even the most dedicated ‘local champion’.
@Jim: I don’t think that’s entirely correct. The Labour leadership has consistently opposed electoral reform in both Government and opposition. Lots of Labour members and MPs have moved to supporting electoral reform, and continue to do so now Labour is in Government, but they are not the leadership so they don’t get to determine what the Government does. It’s a terrible shame that support for electoral reform within Labour has not yet reached the leadership, but I don’t think you could argue any individual is being inconsistent/unprincipled in the way you are implying.
It looks to me like the All Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections (that Keith linked to above) lists 84 Labour Parliamentarians as publicly declared supporters (most of that number are MPs, some are Peers), so it’s clear that there is extensive support within Labour for electoral reform, and I get the impression that support is slowly growing.
“‘Fair, equal votes’ has indeed to be about the rights of the voter, not this or that party advantage.”
So those of us who thought the Liberals and later the Lib Dems were in favour of PR because it would, prior to the ’24 election, have greatly increased thie Parliamentary representation were quite mistaken?
It might be an idea to push for a totally PR elected second chamber and see how that works out first. PR did work out well in various elections for UKIP and The Brexit Party.
I’d expect it wouldn’t do Reform, and even worse parties, any harm either. So you’d have to be careful what you wished for.
@Peter Martin: If the recent local election results were to be repeated in a Parliamentary election (yes, I know, a big if) then Reform would benefit from FPTP. The case for electoral reform is nothing to do with whether it would benefit this party or that, and the unpredictability of today’s electorate means that such considerations could easily be turned on their heads.
I’m not sure what David Raw means by enormous. In Leeds wards with 3 members have electorates of 20000 – 30000 and that used to be the case in Birmingham but now they have (largely) single member wards of about 10-12000. I very much doubt if Scottish wards are that big.
The reason for PR in local government is to make sure seats are allocated according to party support and a lot of areas now have a range of councillors and voters can chose the one that most represents them.
@ Mick Taylor Mick, urban Leeds is a much more compact kettle of fish to a rural ward in Scotland (20 miles long/ ten miles wide, connected by minor roads) with ten different Community Community Councils (meeting monthly and ‘requiring’ attendance by the local authority elected members).
Always lovely in May when the gorse and blossom is out, but less so in January/February when it’s questionable whether or not the gritters can get out. Lovely people though.
Why do people assume that larger multi-member constituencies are more difficult to represent than small single-member constituencies? Actually multi-member constituencies can be more representative because they can more easily represent natural communities. Many SMCs (especially after the recent change in guidelines to require a smaller deviation from average electorate size) are highly artificial constructs with bits of one community and bits of another, but not the whole of anything. Not very representative of any natural community. People are more likely to identify with a city as a whole than some artificial slice of it. Plus in an MMC people can approach whichever representative they wish to hear their case, rather than being stuck with one who might not be very helpful or sympathetic.
So it’s a myth that “larger” necessarily means “less representative”. STV in MMCs actually increases local representation and accountability by removing monopoly of representation and enabling voters to rank individual candidates.
I do have doubts about the argument that a multi-member constituency means people will have a choice which representative to go to, because it could allow less hardworking representatives to in effect get a free pass: As soon as one MP gets a reputation for being a hard-working MP who really goes out of their way to solve people’s problems, everyone will go to that person rather than any of the other MPs for that constituency – so the workload gets unbalanced. Also, people will start going to the MP they think is most sympathetic to them: For example, they might go to their LibDem MP for a problem related to getting care, but to their Tory MP for help with a dispute with HMRC. That means no MP will be getting a full view of the range of problems their constituents face, and you could end up with MPs getting more entrenched in their own ideological bubbles, because many MPs will no longer have much contact with constituents who don’t vote for their party.
I’d argue the opposite Simon.
Any MP relying on the hard work of their constituency peers are far more likely to find themselves out of a job come the next election. The hardest working representatives will get a lot more support.
Living in Scotland with multi-member wards for local elections, I’ve seen first hand how hard working Cllrs are rewarded, while the less active ones lose out.
It would be fascinating to know how the votes would have changed in the recent English council elections with a preferential system. It would help with the formation of coalitions if we had evidence of where the 2nd and 3rd preference votes were going for each party.
@DavidRaw. Whilst I accept that rural Scotland is nothing like Leeds, the size of Leeds Wards is big even by urban standards and they often cut across local communities. I know from first hand experience how difficult it is to deliver 10-150000 leaflets every month or every week during an election because I’ve done it in two Leeds wards and in two Leeds Parliamentary seats as well. If we’d had STV then we would have gained seats in both the wards I fought and people would have had better representation.
Oops. 10-15000 not 10-150000!