I’m stunned to find myself writing this, but I can suddenly spot a path by which the UK might—just might—reform its electoral system. Only a couple of years ago I wrote a world-weary piece explaining why change was desperately needed—and yet would never come. Historically all parties have been interested in reform only when they are a long way from power, only to crush such hopes when they go on to secure it.
In the shadow of shocking Conservative defeats in 1906 and 1974, for example, large parts of the Tory family developed real interest in a more proportional voting system. Within a year of being routed in 1945, Winston Churchill was discussing electoral reform, and continued to dangle the prospect of it as he sought a rapprochement with the Liberals into the early 1950s. As for Labour, the party edged tentatively towards fairer votes as its wilderness years dragged from the 1980s into the 90s.
But in all these cases, after the respective parties went on to dominate under first-past-the-post, they duly came to judge that the system was just fine as it was. The single best shot at change came in 1917 and 1918, after a cross-party Speaker’s Conference recommended introducing a measure of proportionality into elections for the Commons. The studied indifference of none other than Lloyd George—the UK’s last Liberal prime minister—was crucial to that plan fizzling out.
Leaders who prevail under existing rules are always disinclined to meddle with them. The logic of that bind has, until very recently, seemed so tight as to be inescapable. MPs are the only people who can change the system, and yet under first-past-the-post there are always going to be a disproportionate number of MPs from parties that are over-represented by the way we vote. Many of them would lose their jobs under PR. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
Keir Starmer’s own story encapsulates the traditional transition of rising politicians from electoral reformism to electoral conservatism. In running for the Labour leadership he argued vaguely for change, airing fears about wasted votes, but disavowed such talk as the winning line moved into sight. He went on to be the biggest first-past-the-post winner in history, securing a bumper majority of 172 from a record-low winning vote-share. As throughout history, the old rules created one big winner, and that winner made peace with the way they had won.
So what’s changed? The political landscape has fractured in such a way as to pose grave danger to both main parties at the same time. The cast-iron rule which said that when one party went down, the other must rise, is rusting away.
The Conservatives, who have so often been the biggest winners from, and doughtiest defenders of, first-past-the-post, lost two-thirds of their seats at the last election. This happened not because of any great surge in Labour’s vote share, but principally because of a great swing to Reform, which has only gathered strength since. All the evidence—not only from surveys, but also real results in the local elections—suggests an entirely unprecedented Tory collapse is now possible.
As the leading political number cruncher Peter Kellner reports, YouGov’s most intricate polling suggests that the party would today win fewer than 50 seats. Another gust of the same political wind could, his calculations reveal, reduce that rump to below 30 or even 20. No wonder the top Tory thinktanker, Robert Colvile, is re-evaluating his lifelong loathing of PR. Paul Goodman, the well-connected editor of Conservative Home, suggests such debates are now pulsating across his tribe.
What of Labour? Well it, too, is polling very badly, and it lost two-thirds of its defences in the spring local elections. The party obviously starts in a far better parliamentary position than the Tories, and Kellner’s number-crunching suggests that, while the outlook for Labour in a general election tomorrow would be ghastly, with fewer MPs set to be returned than in Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 Waterloo, its defeat would not necessarily be existential—at least not yet. Labour would remain on 178 seats. It would still be by far the biggest remaining force opposing Nigel Farage’s party.
In theory, things could brighten for the government at any time. In practice, however, if this young administration follows the conventional trajectory, a further descent into mid-term blues is to be expected. Just think about how things could feel next spring. Labour rule in Wales is in jeopardy for the first time since devolution. In Scotland, the party is running way behind the exhausted, 19-year-old SNP administration it had until recently hoped to replace. In some borough elections across London, the new left party of Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, which boasts of having attracted half a million sign-ups in its first few days, could prove a serious challenge. If Labour MPs from all these disparate places see big losses in their own backyards, then collective fear will take hold. Throw in a few more lost points in the national polls and survival could become the order of the day.
There are, as it happens, increasingly principled reasons for electoral reform in this moment, too. The fracturing electoral landscape makes wildly disproportionate first-past-the-post results ever more likely. Polarisation, as another set of Kellner numbers reveals, means that a figure like Nigel Farage can simultaneously attract the biggest fan-base and the widest mistrust. That’s a contrast with the historical pattern, where politicians would tend to become more liked by their admirers at the same time as they became less disliked by non-supporters, and it is a mismatch that our voting system simply cannot handle. It’s also worth pausing on some of Farage’s chilling (if ambiguous) musings, about the potential “end of times for the democratic process”. Combine that with a thought experiment about just how easy it is for any government with a Commons majority to sweep supposed constitutional protections away, and you might well conclude it would be wise to make majorities harder to get.
But then principled arguments never make much difference when it comes to voting reform: it is political interests that count. What has changed is that those interests are in flux. The Liberal Democrats are a larger bloc in parliament than ever before. The growing Greens and, we can assume, the new left party will be on board for PR. It would be hard for Farage to campaign with any conviction against it as he has for so long raged about the old rules, which last year translated his four million votes scattered nationwide into just five Westminster seats.
Absent an easy-to-lose referendum, a struggling government that was manoeuvring to prevent Reform from winning under first-past-the-post could reasonably be attacked as cynical. This should give any prime minister pause. But—at least in one scenario—there is an interaction with Labour’s internal rule book that it is worth thinking through. In the event that health, politics or anything else catalysed an early departure for Starmer, the choice of his successor is set to fall—just as the choice of successors to Theresa May and Boris Johnson fell—into the hands of ordinary party members. And Labour activists are overwhelmingly in favour of PR. In a putative leadership election, the candidate prepared to suck up all the embarrassment involved in scrambling together a new electoral system could become impossible to stop.
For sure, this candidate would need a brass neck. But their argument—that politics has changed, and the way we vote needs to catch up—would have the merit of truth. More consequentially, their PR plans could look like a lifeboat to MPs right across the Commons, as they cast around desperately for anything to save them from being swept away.
