The election story facing all the parties… how proportional representation would serve democracy far better than first-past-the-post
The crank-wheel of post-electoral theorising is already spinning slowly and powerfully… we will try to catch it, appropriately, when it meshes with our vision and practice over the next few weeks.
But there’s one obvious point to make about the election, which the graphic above nearly animates. Look at how poorly the first-past-the-post electoral system in the UK matches actual votes to actual seats, by comparison with a proportional representation system (the Electoral Reform Society, on whose blog we found this, use what’s called the d’Hondt (or Jeffersonian) system of proportional calculation, similar to what’s used in the European Parliament elections, and local government Scottish and Northern Irish elections).
You can use the button at the top of the graphic, to shift from one form of representation to the other. Darren Hughes, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, puts it plainly:
No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote. Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics beyond recognition and we’re all paying the price. Under proportional voting systems, seats would more closely match votes, and we could end the scourge of millions feeling unrepresented and ignored
Parties like the Greens and Brexit Party won huge numbers of votes and almost no representation. The Lib Dems saw a surge in votes and their number of seats fall. Something is very clearly wrong.
Voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are used to using more democratic voting systems – and having a more cooperative politics as a result. Westminster’s system is built on confrontation and warped results, but we can do better than this. We can move to a fairer system, restoring trust in politics and building a better democracy at the same time.
WE’D also like to give a shout out to the indefatigable Make Votes Matter - who pursue the case for electoral reform so relentlessly. Their own graphics about the night’s result make the disproportion all too obvious:
Or as another tweet put it, from the Green MEP (and MP candidate in Stroud): Conservative vote increased by 1% which led to this ‘landslide’… Lib Dem vote increased by 4% and they came out one seat down… This is the absurdity of the horse-race 🐎 voting system we are supposed to accept as democracy”.
Was there a progressive majority to be had under PR? Assuming that the Liberal Democrats would ally with the majority of parties seeking a second referendum, at least around that issue there would have been.
But in any case, the actual diversity of democratic opinion in the country would have been fairly expressed. Fair for the Greens (14 seats instead of 1) and for the Brexit Party (10 instead of 0). The SNP down to a reasonable and proportionate number of seats for their actual votes (28 instead of the 48 they got). The Conservative “landslide” actually rendered as a loss of 77 seats. And the Liberal Democrats - whether they’d have lost their leader Jo Swinson or not, would have leapt to 70 seats - instead of the 11 they got under FPTP.
It really is a poor, broken system - and the campaign to change it looks like having new bedfellows, with Farage’s wish to change the Brexit Party into the Reform Party after the UK leaves the EU, aiming to “get rid of the House of Lords, change the voting system” (as he told ITV).
However, we’d like to close with a few selections from a great post-election piece by Open Democracy’s editor Adam Ramsay, musing on whether the Labour Party should have campaigned on radical democracy - by the many - not just economic empowerment - “for the many”:
I argued yesterday that Labour struggled because people didn’t believe that our political system would deliver the party’s manifesto. As I travelled around the north of England interviewing people about the election, I discovered something new had happened.
Where people used to often say, “They’re all the same,” in a resigned way, the most common reply now is, “I don’t trust any of them!” usually snapped with fury.
In 2014 in Scotland and 2016 across the UK, the Yes campaign and the Leave campaign were able to mobilise sentiment against the political system behind them. In this election campaign, it became clear as I travelled the country that Labour had failed to do this – looking to too many like technocrats offering nice things in order to trick you into voting for them.
It’s no coincidence that, by my sums, 88% of Tory gains were in seats where turnout was down.
…The problem was that Labour ran a campaign with a ‘retail’ offer when voters wanted empowerment. They asked people to trust the political system to transform their lives after the Tories had been waging war on trust in the political system.
They failed to drive a debate about radical change to the British state, to rage against a system designed to ensure elite rule. And so huge numbers didn’t believe they’d deliver their otherwise popular policies. Because they have no faith in politics.
Rather than fighting to rip up the rules of our broken politics and hand power to the people, pro-Labour groups spent a huge amount of money reminding people of one broken part of our system, and then telling them to suck it up.
….Labour’s proposals could be summarised as a core argument: we will use politics to make your life better. But if people don’t believe in the political system, they won’t trust you. Corbyn should have raged against elite rule, and promised a new democracy, by the people, for the people. He should have tapped into the anti-systemic energy. It should have been 'by the many'. He could have won.
Well, that’s one view - and there will be many others down the line. Yet even though we can pretty much despair about most national-representative politics at A/UK, we should try to keep graphics like the above in mind over the next few years of government. It can be better - but not unless we’re brave enough to put the problems of the democratic system at the heart of any manifestos that are going.