The government’s Representation of the People Bill, introduced on 12 February, has been hailed as the biggest expansion of democratic participation in a generation. Cleaner political finance rules and automated voter registration are welcome reforms which will strengthen election integrity and make participation in elections easier. But we should be honest about what this Bill is not: it is not electoral reform.
The Bill conspicuously avoids the one change that would transform our democracy most fundamentally – replacing our archaic first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation. As the Bill currently stands, it will only deliver the Representation of Some of the People.
Under first-past-the-post at the 2024 general election, Labour won in a landslide, gaining 411 seats with just 33.7 per cent of the vote. Reform UK, meanwhile, won 14.3 per cent of the vote which translated into only five seats. Labour took five times the number of Green Party votes but more than a hundred times the number of seats. Millions of votes made no impact on Parliament whatsoever. Entire communities were left without accurate representation.
We have just seen in the Gorton and Denton by-election seemingly on a knife edge with Green, Labour and Reform UK each polling around 28 per cent ahead of election day. Any of these three very different candidates could have won with less than a third of the vote. In the absence of a truly representative system, tactical voting is deemed vital to keep the worst option out. While many voters refer to advice from tactical vote websites, it is possible that, in the context of finding the “best bet”, there was an observed increase in polling places of “family voting” (often husbands ‘advising’ their wife on where to place their cross). While no voter should ever be pressured to vote for someone else’s choice, imagine the fear of forced repatriation (threatened by Reform UK) felt by many non-Anglo-Saxon voters should the wrong candidate win.
It is interesting that while Reform UK wails about the sanctity of the secret ballot they are less concerned about other long-standing norms such as the acceptance of your opponent as the victor (see Trump 2020) or the use of divisive and inflammatory language.
The result shows a clear majority for progressive parties (66 per cent) over right wing parties (31 per cent).
The government has a unique and overdue opportunity to address the issue when the Bill returns to Parliament on 2nd March. The Bill’s ambition is to put voters at the heart of our democracy. But a system that routinely hands majority power to parties rejected by two-thirds of the electorate is not a democracy working for voters, particularly now we are very clearly in an era of multiple parties, not the old days of Labour or Tory.
While votes at 16 is a genuinely historic step, how motivated will young voters feel when, for so many, their vote will almost certainly change nothing? The most powerful thing we could do to engage all voters is to give them a system in which their votesactually matter.
Dozens of other democracies across the globe manage perfectly well with proportional systems, including Wales and Scotland, and even previously in English mayoral elections until the Tories scrapped it in 2023. The UK shares an electoral system with Russia and Belarus, neither of which is a bastion of people power. Coalition governments force politicians to work across party lines and to reach consensus that represents a broader range of public opinion. Compromise avoids extreme positions and enables decision making based on longer term strategic ambition rather than the current five-year swing.
Let’s not waste this unique opportunity on tinkering, when real and democratic transformation is the right thing to do. Labour has already pledged to reintroduce PR to mayoral elections, so why not to all elections? Let’s urge our local MPs to support amendments to this Bill that would at least require a review of the voting system.
A campaign to introduce PR into the Bill can be found here. More information on fairer electoral systems is available from Make Votes Matter or the Electoral Reform Society.
