Replacing first-past-the-post (FPTP) with a fairer voting system has been Liberal Democrat policy for as long as I can remember, but the increasing number of political parties making this urgent. We need something else in place before the next General Election.
FPTP only makes sense if there are just two parties. The emergence of Labour as a political force a century ago could have led to a three-way discussion of the nation’s future. Instead, FPTP meant we swapped one two-party system for another.
With rumours of a new left-wing party around Jeremy Corbyn potentially taking half of Labour’s vote we face the prospect of the next UK General Election having candidates from Reform, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, a new party of the left and the Greens competing in most English constituencies. The SNP and Plaid Cymru will add to the complexity in Scotland and Wales, and things will be even more difficult in Northern Ireland. It will be hard for MPs to have a credible mandate, and harder still for a government to have the trust of the country. A coalition is possible, but how do you negotiate a credible coalition if your MPs have shaky mandates?
On its own, this makes voting reform urgent.
Less idealistically, we face the possibility of a Reform-Tory alliance coming to power because of debates between Labour, Corbyn-Labour and the Greens: that would mean an unsavoury government with power but no mandate.
In the past I suspected that many voters heard debates about voting reform as somewhere between political geekery and the grumbles of sore losers. But there’s a looming political crisis because there’s a sense that no government is legitimate. I remember a weekend of canvassing Huntingdon constituency in the 2024 General Election where person after person was saying “I don’t know who to vote for”. Just one person said they were planning to vote Labour out of what sounded like conviction, and one Tory “because my son was at Sandhurst with their candidate(!)”. I am hearing the frustration of people who feel their perspective is never represented, and fear it is fuelling support for extremes rather than helping us get responsible government.
Along the way, the sense of politicians working on behalf of everyone has come under threat from the “we won, suck it up” attitude that came into focus after the referendum.
I’m also thinking of the falls of Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson. After Thatcher, my sense was that the Conservative party MPs got together and found someone who could put the show back on the road in a way that would have the trust of enough of the nation to win the next election. After Johnson the Tories managed to find, in Liz Truss, someone even less suited to high office after what felt like a presidential election (though it was only the 0.3% of the population who are Tory party members who could vote).
If we’re not going to face very serious alienation, we urgently need to find a path to a situation where people’s votes matter.
I think FPTP has had a bigger effect on our political parties than we realise because it’s made it harder for large parties to split or to have serious debates about their futures. Arguably both Labour and the Conservatives are coalitions, and the present urgency is that these are unravelling.
Right now, we need to change how we count the votes for the next UK General Election to something that allows people to express preferences (like the Supplementary Vote that Labour have said we will return to using for mayoral elections). We should also commit to a review of this after (say) 15 years, to find something that works when the artificial constraints of FPTP are a reasonably-distant memory.
* Mark Argent was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Huntingdon in the 2019 and 2024 General Elections.
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22 Comments
One of the key failures of the Liberal Democrats in their negotiations to form the 2010 coalition government was the complete failure to secure any advance towards electoral reform. Instead, they the party was sidetracked into a referendum on a non-PR alternative than was rejected by voters.
I suggest the Party should have taken a leaf from the Scottish Liberal Democrats who succeeded in getting STV for Council elections as the price for joining a coalition with Labour in 2003. That step forward remains secure and has allowed smaller parties fairer representation in councils across the country. My hope is that in the near future the Scottish Parliament moves to STV elections as well.
I say this because while I agree with the urgent need for electoral reform, we need to think tactically. It is better to get a small, secure advance, for STV in local government than agreeing to any sort of tinkering with FPTP for Westminster that will probably prove unpopular and short lived.
In the event of a future hung parliament, one question that will key to the future of the Liberal Democrats is how the party responds to any offer to discuss electoral reform, especially from Reform.
Winning a majority at Westminster is much easier under First Past the Post and if Reform have a very good result at the next general election under FPTP, they may well ditch their support for PR, but if they do not, and as neither Labour or Conservatives are likely to support proportional representation, will possible future negotiations with Reform be a price worth paying to change the electoral system?
One big mistake in 2010 was the commitment by Nick Clegg to negotiate first with the party with most seats, rather that with any party which had a similar policy platform to the Liberal Democrats, to see what important policies and principles could be incorporated in any future government. What happened then is now history, but the chance to change the electoral system, if it is in party manifestos, would not require a referendum if a future government was elected with a clear commitment to it.
Dealing with Reform is something many Liberal Democrats would not wish to ever have to do, but will it be a price worth paying to end the present corrupt electoral system that has to change if we are ever to see the number of MPs elected for any party represent how the country has voted?
I have to begin by saying that I concur with John Barrett completely on most things, and on LDV his wise counsel is always welcome. Indeed on this post, most of what he says I still agree with – with one exception – and that is regarding the question he raises “will possible future negotiations with Reform be a price worth paying to change the electoral system?”
Personally I cannot see any point in spending time and effort even thinking about negotiations with Reform, as their objective in any making an offer to discuss will be to draw us in and then call things off at a useful moment decrying our alleged unreasonableness. Nigel Farage himself would be very effective in this. As to the reliability of any commitment that may be made I refer to past comments on the British Steel Industry compared to the current love in with Welsh voters regarding Port Talbot – Is there an election coming there soon?
Quite simple Reform will say whatever they think will work to increase the chance of getting in power, and once close to power in Westminster I am convinced the party’s claimed support for PR will melt as fast as an iced lolly on a summer day.
I may of course be totally mistaken, but in this matter, I doubt it.
Frankly, although I am horrified at the thought, I think if it becomes apparent that the Tories are sitting ducks in front of a Reform tidal wave turbo-charged by FPTP, they may come round on electoral reform.
And if they are a necessary component to a Farage-led coalition, the Tories should be asking for electoral reform as a safety valve against said coalition ending precipitously.
Electoral reformers should be talking to the Tories, not Reform. If the polls are correct, Reform don’t need PR and will spurn it.
I take no joy in the above.
David – I was posing the question rather than stating whether or not it will be the right thing to do. I also added that they may ditch their support for electoral reform, but if they don’t, I ask the question “how should the party respond?” There needs to be some well thought out debate and discussion before important decisions are made on this and other issues, unlike in 2010 when the party was repeatedly bounced into agreeing with whatever the leader at the time decided.
I have recently listened to a BBC Crowd Science podcast on voting systems. Interestingly the recommended option was multi member constituencies of around 6 MPs compromising between comprehensibility, proportionality and accountability. Definitely worth a listen. On current polling ( Reform 34/lab25/ con 15/Ld 11/ Green 9/ Oth 6) a 6 member constituency would return 2 reform, 2 Lab, 1 Con, 1 LD. Single member constituencies would all go Reform , of course. The larger the number of MPs per constituency, the more proportional and vv. It would certainly be a lot easier to explain on the doorstep than D’ hondt or the German system.
D’Hondt: After all the votes have been tallied, successive quotients are calculated for each party. The party with the largest quotient wins one seat, and its quotient is recalculated. This is repeated until the required number of seats is filled. The formula for the quotient is[
q=Votes/(Seats+1)
PS Winners always like the electoral system which enabled their win.
Rather than being so fulsome in our praise of the restoration of the Supplementary Vote for mayoral elections we should be pressing for the use of the Single Transferable Vote (aka the Alternative Vote for a single vacancy election).
This would give a fairer result to those elections and be a start to familiarising electors to ordinal voting which, if extended to local elections would bring proportional representation to the many multi-seat council wards.
Though not proportional until the introduction of multi-member constituencies, it would also require majority support for each MP.
@JennyBarnes. You could argue that FPTP actually worked for the LibDems in 2024 or that we successfully gamed the system. Yet we don’t like FPTP and support STV. Actually we would have probably got a similar number of MPs under STV, though maybe more people would have voted for us freed from the FPTP problems.
By the way, in single member PR seats (alternative vote) the winner has to get 50% +1 so there’s no certainty that Reform would win. It would depend on transfers and who initially came second.
You exhibit fear of a Reform-Conservative colation government coming into power. It could be worse than that. If Labour could win 411 seats (and thus an overall majority of 172 seats) on just 33.7% of the vote, as they did in 2024, then Reform stands to win nearly as much of they poll 29% – 30% of the vote, as current polling indicates. A one-party Reform government is a distinct likelyhood in that case. We must not make the error of refusing to believe in what the polling is telling us. Unless circumstances change drastically in the next four years, that is what will happen in 2029. And to make circumstances change will need ACTION, not complacency.
Clearly both Labour and Conservatives are hooked on complacency – they cannot believe that the above will happen. Liberals know that it can happen, because it happened to us a century ago. Polling returns show that the Conservatives have not yet reached their nadir; they may end up with anything between 20 and 40 seats in 2029 (again, unless things change). Labour cannot accept that they can be beaten by Reform – yet; it’s going to take the results of next May’s elections before they begin to understand the truth. They will still have the advantage of incumbency – hopefully they will use that power before 2029 to adopt a proportional electoral system. It would mean recognising that never again could a single party win undiluted power without reaching 50% of the vote. But that would stop Labour OR Reform from having sole power.
It will takes some rough apportionment of the vote to understand what might happen with a PR system if applied to the current mix of parties. To do this one must assume that the promised left-of-Labour (call it Corbynite, for the sake of argument) comes into being. Best guess is that it will take about 10% of the overall vote, but only about a third of this will actually come direct from Labour (with another third predicted to come from the Greens or other left-centre parties, and the final third from electors who currently don’t vote). However this is likely to bush the remaining Labour vote down to 20% or less, and round about 100 seats, mainly to the benefit of Reform if FPTP stays in being. I’m assuming that LibDem and Nationalist vote shares remain as now, although the decline in Labour and Conservative votes should reward both LibDems and Nationalists with some extra seats.
On a more broad approach, present indications are that the Reform and Conservative combined share of the vote is stabilising at around 45% of the British vote (let’s exclude Northern Ireland entirely from our calculations), while the centre-left aggregate (Labour-LibDem-Green-SNP-Plaid) is around the remaining 55% (a new Corbynite party will come from the centre-left aggregate), even if they don’t win many or any seats). So a proper PR system should enable a centre-left retention of power, however hard if will be to create in practice (no-one is talking of a coalition, I should stress!)
Obviously, Labour – in particular the Labour leadership – cannot accept their permanent exclusion from undiluted power. They won’t until the results of next May’s elections are in. Their philosophy is that the only poll that actually counts is in the ballot box, which is a comfortable way of self-delusion. Next year will result in Labour losing sole power in Wales (indications place Welsh Labour in third place behind Plaid Cymru and Reform – and no-one is betting on which of those two will top the poll) and failing to take power away from the SNP in Scotland. Only then is the Labour leadership likely to respond to their own grass roots, and use their current Parliamentary majority to adopt a proportional system.
@Jenny Barnes
I sometimes wonder whether those who advocate STV for Parliamentary elections consider the consequences for representation. A six-member seat in a Parliament the same size at present would mean a constituency size of around 450,000 electors. We could manage this fairly easily in large cities like London, Birmingham, or Manchester, but what about rural areas? Would we be happy with a constituency that covered the whole of Cornwall? Scotland is even worse, taking all the Highland constituencies north and west of the Great Glen even with the two island constituencies leaves us well short of the desired constituency electorate in this area. Is it reasonable to ask three or four MPs to represent this massive area? Roy Jenkin’s electoral reform proposal for New Labour was for AV+, l.e. AV with a top-up to improve proportionality. If that top-up came from the best-losers for each party, rather than a party list, we could still keep single-member constituencies and the special rule for the four island constituencies while gaining proportionality and giving even losing candidates the incentive to fight for every vote.
@ Mick Taylor. I suggest you listen to the podcast. STV has problems with irrelevancies affecting the result, and I do not support it. And I was not talking about single member constituencies under PR, but FPTP.
If Labour can be convinced that they will lose under the current system then they might very well change it while they can.
@Rif: I would not be at all surprised if Reform got something like 30% of the vote next time, but I’d be extremely surprised if that got them into Government. Why? Because for every voter who loves Farage, there’s another voter who detests him, and that’s likely to translate into a lot of anti-Reform tactical voting if Reform look like they could get elected. Labour got a huge majority on such a small share of the vote last year because other parties were splitting the vote AND there was no intense dislike of Labour that would cause people to vote tactically to keep them out.
(To be clear that is not intended as a defence of FPTP. I totally agree with the article that FPTP needs to be consigned to history)
@Jenny Barnes I genuinely do not know what you mean when you say “STV has problems with irrelevancies affecting the result”. Could you explain that for me please ?
@ Simon,
“……. but I’d be extremely surprised if that (30%) got them into Government.”
I wouldn’t be.
It’s quite likely we could see something like this:
Reform 30%
Tory 20%
Labour 15%
Lib Dem 15%
New Corbyn/Sultana Party 14%
Green 4%
Others 2%
Just how this would work out in terms of seats depends, of course, on the homogeneity of the voting. But it’s almost certain to result in a Reform govt. The best we could hope for would be a Reform govt in coalition with the Tories.
Because of the split in the right wing vote Starmer won a huge majority on just 34% of the total vote. This was only slightly better than the 32% Corbyn managed in 2019 and substantially worse than the 40% Corbyn achieved in 2017.
Actually who got what seats may bear little relationship to percentages. Tactical voting to stop reform candidates will probably be widespread and if non reform voters get it right then Reform may win far fewer seats than the percentage suggests.
And another thing. It’s still nearly four years till the next GE. If the SDP/Liberal Alliance is an ything to go by then RefUK may well be nowhere near 30% by then. Predicting elections four years out is a mug’s game and I’m amazed that people still do it. Who would have correctly predicted the 2019 GE result in 2017, never mind 2015.
@Jenny Barnes – if I found the podcast your talking about it was talking about 6 member constituencies each elected proportionately within that. So I don’t think that gets you round having to explain the D’hondt system. But that’s a red herring as you don’t need to get into that just explain it as ‘seats based on how many votes each party gets’. And its not that big a difference from a system already inplace for top up lists in Scotland, Wales and London.
I’m not sure about the faith in anti-Reform tactical voting (which there undoubtedly would be) as it would eb very unclear who the best repository of that might be,
But all this is just internet waffle unless the Lib Dems as a party get their butts into gear and start to actually advocate for voting system reform by y’know actually talking about it a lot.
@ Mick,
You’re right to remind us that there’s quite a time for things to change before the next election. However, it strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of Simon and yourself to assume that somehow there is a natural anti-Reform coalition which will somehow get its act together to vote tactically in sufficient numbers to thwart Mr Farage.
You can’t assume that the second choice, if they were to exercise their second choice for tactical reasons, of previously Labour voters in the more working class constituencies is going to be the Tories, the Lib Dems, the Greens or the new left party. It is very likely to be Reform. There is a natural aversion to voting Tory on the basis of traditional class based loyalties which unfortunately doesn’t extend to not voting Reform. Not yet anyway.
@Laurence Cox. Under current proposals, all those rural communities will have unitary authorities of a sensible size to be STV constituencies. “Would we be happy with a constituency that covered the whole of Cornwall?” Yes. Cornwall is a community. “St Austell and Newquay” isn’t.
Voting reform has been urgent for as long as I can remember. The issue as I see it is we have too many people in politics who confuse talking with acting. Why when an action is obvious are politicians so reluctant to act. Certain sectors of society who see a career in politics as a good option have a propensity to procrastinate and articulate the issue rather than the solution. Parliament needs a better balance of thinkers and actors.