On Friday, if the polls are right, millions of us will sit up into the early hours, eyes glued to our TV sets, watching the annihilation of the Conservative Party. With every seat that falls, we will cheer, we will weep, we will punch the air, high on the sugar rush of seeing so many Tory MPs finally get their comeuppance.
Unrepresentative democracy
Some will wake up in the morning thinking they have witnessed democracy at its finest. But sugar rushes always lead to a comedown. And others, including me, will feel more doubtful. We will await with a sense of inevitability the pronouncements by Sir Keir Starmer that the British people have given his party an emphatic endorsement rather than that they have given the Tories an emphatic rejection; the claims to an overwhelming popular mandate not borne out by the numbers of votes cast; the arrival of another of those elective dictatorships that are a feature of our First Past the Post (FPtP) electoral system – possibly built, this time, on the most distorted majority we have ever seen.
Don’t get me wrong. Within the confines of this electoral system, where we have a choice of two, I am desperate for Starmer to be our next prime minister. But I am desperate in the way I’d be desperate to take a cold bath if the only other choice was an acid one: hugely relieved yet with a sense of unease, even mild dread; open-minded but sceptical about the benefits. And one of the prime reasons for the unease will be the electoral system.
Some of the statistics are staggering. The Financial Times reports that Labour stands to win as many as 70% of the seats with just 41% of the votes, while the Tories win 10% of the seats with 20% of the votes. The same newspaper’s tracker of 46 polls suggests that Labour’s huge majority will be won in the context of the lowest combined vote share in a century for it and the Conservatives. In Scotland, where the SNP have been such beneficiaries of FPtP in recent years, a relatively small increase in vote share for Labour, and consequent amassing of large numbers of marginal seats, could make a mild swing look like a wild swing.
What happened to electoral reform?
Forget the electoral reform the Labour membership wants and Starmer himself said he would address when he ran for party leader. When he was asked last week about FPtP, you could have guessed his script before you heard the answer. “It’s the right system” he said. “It has given us strong government in this country and we are not making any changes to it”.
Maybe you could have got away with that once, although after the last decade – which exposes the fatuousness of the line – I’m surprised they haven’t even tried to come up with something new. Is it “strong” government Starmer means, or ‘powerful’ government? Strong governments can be built on consensus and compromise. Powerful governments don’t need to be. Sometimes they don’t even need any semblance of democracy. Ask the citizens of Russia, China or North Korea.
Many of the arguments against PR apply equally to First Past the Post
Democracy, for all its many forms, is surely about representation, not some arbitrary notion of strength. Yet this is all horribly unrepresentative. Defenders of FPtP tend to cite examples of a select group of other countries – Israel and Italy in particular – to demonstrate the dangers of Proportional Representation (PR), as if there weren’t multiple variants of PR and there were any such thing as a perfect system.
The common argument is that PR gives extremists too much influence. The answer to that, again with a view to the last few years, is that under FPtP those extremists simply have to infiltrate the body of another party or even, dare I say it, get a regular slot on BBC Question Time. In the Conservative Party’s case, the extremists have not only infiltrated it but, having sucked it dry of blood, left it for dead.
But in any case, is it healthy if, say, Reform end up with not a single seat on 16% of the vote? As John Burn-Murdoch says in that same FT article: “ You could scarcely come up with a better recipe for fuelling the advance of Faragism: millions of voters with a justifiable sense of having been screwed by the system, while their figureheads rail against power instead of having to face the choices that come with wielding it – a position populists have always preferred”.
There may be a contradiction between my rejoicing at the impending wipe-out of the Tories and my dislike of the system which enables it. But there is often a contradiction between head and heart. My heart would like this version of the Tories to disappear for ever, and take Reform with them. My head says that failing to match the votes of such a substantial chunk of the electorate with adequate representation (as well as giving such enormous power to the victors), is a dangerous game to play. I know it doesn’t bother them when the boot is on the other foot. But many of them don’t have democratic instincts. The rest of us shouldn’t measure ourselves by their standards.
First Past the Post – keep moving to the right
There is an irony in saying this just when we are about to see the right removed from power, but, as Stuart Donald has written in this publication, another problem with FPtP is that, over the long-term, it tends to drag a country’s politics inevitably towards the right, including by making progressive parties sound less progressive. It’s hard to look back over the last fifty years and argue that hasn’t been true, and it’s premature, even if Labour win big, to say that that trajectory has now changed.
An all-powerful Labour?
You can’t blame any party for wanting to win as many votes as possible. But Starmer’s message about strong government also has a not-so-subtle subtext, looking ahead to the 2026 elections to the devolved parliaments: that only with the same party in power across England, Scotland and Wales can you expect effective government.
Superficially it’s a beguiling message: people who agree with each other will tend to work better together. But it’s a conveniently self-interested principle for Labour to advocate since they are the only party to whom it could ever apply. Isn’t it all too comfortable? Isn’t it better, on a point of principle, to have some creative tension? Isn’t this consistent with the pathetic attitude towards cooperation and coalition our politicians display, at least in public, which marks the UK out not as a mature democracy but as an immature one?
Read this – from Starmer again – on a recent campaign visit to Scotland: “The ambition between Labour and the SNP is stark. We say elect Labour MPs in Scotland so they can sit at the heart of an incoming Labour government…what the SNP says is send an MP to send a message, to sit literally on the opposition benches and shout across the aisle”. This reminds me of the somewhat childish line regularly used by Rishi Sunak about Starmer that he is “sniping from the sidelines”. Its message is that there is no point voting for a “little” party that has no prospect of forming a government. Which must be news, among other things, for the people of Northern Ireland.
Implications for Scotland
What of Scotland? In a recent Bylines Scotland podcast, Professor James Mitchell, Professor of Public Policy at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, described that section of the electorate whom he termed “instrumentalists”, who support independence because they want to see a different kind of Scotland, but who could, in theory, go back to the Union because they don’t see independence as an end in its own right.
My guess is that electoral reform is a huge factor for some of these people. An unreformed electoral system allows for future Tory elective dictatorships. Judging by what the current one has done, many will think that is not a risk worth taking. However elated it feels after its victory, Labour may in the not-so-long run want to consider which it values more: the Union, or its own occasional stint at absolute power.
Will Labour ever learn?
In an article last year for Open Democracy, David Ward, formerly head of policy for the late John Smith, quoted Robin Cook from just a month before he died in 2005. “My nightmare”, Cook said, “is that we will have been twelve years in office, with the ability to reform the electoral system, and will fail to do so until we are back in opposition, in perhaps a decade of Conservative government, regretting that we left in place the electoral system that allowed Conservative governments on a minority vote”.
Why is it that I find Cook’s words so poignant? Partly because he was right that, in the Blair/Brown governments’ remaining years in power, they would fail to reform the electoral system. But it’s more than that. It’s also because he was so wrong in his assumption that, after another lengthy spell of Conservative government far more threatening to our very democracy than he could ever have foreseen, a future Labour government would inevitably want to do so.
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