Come talk with Make Votes Matter’s Klina Jordan, in our next The Elephant Meets… Zoom event

On December 1st we return to the Elephant Meets… room. We’re welcoming friend and colleague Klina Jordan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Make Votes Matter, the “campaign for equal votes” [free tickets here or click the embed below].

Since many will find it difficult to believe that in our British democracy the vast majority of votes don’t count, here is a brief introduction from Klina, starting with her passion for the urgency to start acting on climate change (first published in The Independent newspaper):

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is one of the most remarkable grassroots movements of the 21st Century. Spurred on by dire warnings about climate breakdown, it has mobilised thousands of people who are willing to get arrested, or even face prison, to make their voices heard.

How is it that in our supposedly democratic society so many feel compelled to break the law to make such an overwhelmingly reasonable point: that we shouldn’t destroy the environment on which all life depends?

The answer is that our broken democracy leaves little choice. XR may be a global movement, but a glance at their map of local groups reveals just how heavily weighted their activity is towards the UK – the only European country that still uses the antiquated first past the post voting system.

Germany has eleven local XR groups. Norway has two. The Republic of Ireland, four. The UK, on the other hand, has over one hundred and thirty local XR groups – each consisting of dozens or hundreds of otherwise law-abiding citizens; citizens so desperate for their politicians to listen that they are willing to go to jail.

And in second and third place globally for number of XR groups are the US and Canada – the only other two major developed countries to use first past the post.

This makes perfect sense. Our first past the post voting system has systematically denied representation to the people who care the most about the protecting the natural world. In 2015, over a million people voted for the Green Party and their policies aimed at averting climate disaster.

In 2017, despite the hundreds of Green candidates standing down in the hope of unseating Tory MPs, they still received half a million votes. Yet at both elections they won just a single MP.

The rebels have tried playing by the rules by turning out and voting in their hundreds of thousands. And what impact has it had on parliament? None. Our electoral system silences them almost as if they’d never voted at all.

It’s obvious why XR is nowhere near as big anywhere else in Europe. Almost all other European countries use some of proportional representation – so seats match votes and all votes count equally. When a party wins a million votes, it picks up a lot of seats in parliament. It’s then able to represent the views of its voters, shape the debate and influence legislation.

Some Germans are just as worried about climate breakdown as their British equivalents. A few are even willing to risk arrest. But in Germany, every climate activist could instead choose to spend their time campaigning to elect environmentally friendly MPs – and their efforts will be rewarded in proportion to votes they win.

Indeed, Germany’s Green Party has surged in national and regional elections in response to rising concern about climate breakdown. It’s not surprising that most European activists decide the parliamentary approach has a much better risk/reward ratio than getting arrested.

First past the post doesn’t merely make people feel unrepresented; it stops vital change from happening in response to public demand. There’s a wealth of academic evidence showing that countries with proportional representation far outperform those with winner-takes-all systems like first past the post when it comes to climate action and environmental protection.

Countries with PR slowed their greenhouse gas emissions faster, perform significantly better on the Environmental Protection Index, ratified the Kyoto Agreement faster, and have deployed significantly more renewable energy.

Most countries have still done nowhere near enough. But there is hope in countries with PR – because these democracies are responsive to rising public demands and are able to build consensus in order to address these serious long term threats.

For the UK, the climate crisis is a crisis of democracy – and as much as anything else Extinction Rebellion is a rebellion against the way crucial voices are systematically shut out of our politics. To create a democracy capable of addressing the most urgent challenges of our time, we need proportional representation. As the chant goes, ‘Change the system, not the climate!’

To advance this work earlier this year Make Votes Matter set up a Good Systems Agreement, to invite cross-party demand for PR, but also go beyond the current political system and invite signatories from across society. For more information on how to sign up, click here. 

In the age of the Anthropocene – where humans become responsible for the fate of the planet – Klina is, in her own words, a confirmed meliorist: believing the world can be made better by human effort.

Come and meet her on Tuesday, December 1st at 5pm. And below, here’s a short video of Klina answering our two big Elephant questions - how do you see the system we’re labouring under, and what should the next system be like?