Soon after I was elected in July 2024, I was approached by a man in Cirencester Market Place who congratulated me on my win. He’d voted in every general election since 1974, he said, and this was the first time he had ever voted for a winning candidate. For most of that time, he told me, he had barely bothered looking at the names on the ballot paper. He already knew who would win, but had voted out of habit – “or maybe just stubbornness” – but knew that it would, in effect, be a wasted vote.

South Cotswolds is a new constituency, created at the 2024 boundary changes, and covers areas that had consistently returned Conservative MPs for a hundred years or more. 2024 was the first election many residents could remember in which the outcome was genuinely uncertain. The response was striking. Engagement was different. Conversations on doorsteps were different. People who had stopped paying attention started paying attention again, and we had the 6th highest voter turnout in the country.

That should not be remarkable. The fact that it is tells you most of what you need to know about what first-past-the-post does to democracy between elections – not just on the night the results come in, but across decades of people quietly concluding that their participation is pointless.

I spoke in Westminster Hall this week in a debate on first-past-the-post. This is not the first time I’ve raised electoral reform in Parliament, and I want to use this piece to explain why I keep coming back to it – and why I believe the stakes are now higher than ever.

The numbers are worse than we think

We know the headline: Labour won 63% of the seats on 33% of the votes in 2024, giving them 100% of the power. The Gallagher Index – the standard academic measure of proportionality – gave that election a score of 23.67, making it the least proportional general election in modern British history, and the fifth least proportional result anywhere in the world.

But the detail is more striking than the headline. According to Make Votes Matter, it took on average 23,500 votes to elect a Labour MP in 2024, and over 820,000 to elect a Reform MP (silver linings). That is a 35-fold difference in the value of a vote, depending solely on which party you supported. The Green Party, Reform UK and the SNP between them received more than 6.7 million votes – over 23% of the total – and shared just 2.7% of seats.

Make Votes Matter also points out that for roughly 90% of the time since 1935, Britain has had single-party “majority” governments, and not one of them had the support of a majority of voters. Some may claim this is strong government, but it is minority rule, dressed up in emperor’s new clothes, and we need to call it out.

The distortion goes deeper than election night

FPTP does not just distort results. It distorts government between elections.

The incentive is for parties to spend the majority of their campaign funds in a small number of marginal seats. Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed.

The system was designed for two parties. We now have five (or six, or seven).

The risks are not just about fairness. They are about stability. In 2024, for the first time in modern British electoral history, four parties each received more than 10% of the vote – Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats. A fifth, the Greens, exceeded 5%. Between them, parties other than Labour and the Conservatives took 42.6% of the total vote – a record high.

In a multi-party landscape, FPTP produces results that are not merely disproportionate but could appear almost arbitrary. Research published this year in Parliamentary Affairs describes the risk plainly: fragmentation does not translate into fair representation under FPTP – it produces super-majorities as a by-product of vote-splitting, leaving the opposition barely able to function and government effectively unchecked. University of Bath researchers put it even more bluntly: under volatile multi-party conditions, FPTP creates a risk of “perverse, extreme, and even seemingly random results.”

We cannot govern a twenty-first century multi-party democracy with a nineteenth-century two-party voting system and expect it to work.

Why this matters beyond the constitutional

I have been writing elsewhere recently about what I believe is the deepest inequality in modern Britain – not inequality of income, but inequality of agency; the sense that your actions matter, that your voice counts, that you have real influence over the decisions shaping your life.

People are not apathetic. They are alienated. There is a real difference. When people feel that participation matters, they engage. When the system signals that it does not, they stop – and the near-record low turnout of 59.9% in 2024 tells part of that story.

Proportional representation is more than a niche bureaucratic detail – It is a statement about whose voice counts. A system that tells millions of people their vote is wasted before they have cast it is undermining far more than an election result.

The man in Cirencester Market Place voted all those years out of stubbornness, not because he believed it would make any difference. He deserves a system in which his vote counts. So does everyone else who has quietly concluded that their participation is beside the point – not because they gave up on politics, but because politics gave up on them first.

* Roz Savage is the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds. She spoke in Westminster Hall on first-past-the-post on 24 June 2026, and is working on a paper for Compass with a working title of "Power Back to the People: The Future of Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century (2026)".