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| Map showing countries around the world that use proportional voting systems (source) |
I’ve been thinking about what needs to be done to make the UK a more modern place in these strange times, as we face the end of the latest lockdown. And our antiquated electoral system is one of them.
The obsessive, all-pervasive nature with which the UK has focused on its inglorious and messy exit from the European Union in the last four-and-a-half years, and the chaos caused by the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019, plunging not just the UK but the global economy into recession, has meant that another pressing matter has been left on the drawing board: reform of the UK’s voting system. This is despite the fact that the very same voting system arguably contributed to Brexit happening in the first place.
The UK’s insistence on clinging to first-past-the-post (FPTP) remains at odds with many of its European neighbours. The UK’s antagonism with the EU, culminating in Brexit, may in part be down to the fact that the UK’s voting system favours a 'winner-takes-all' approach, with parties in Parliament facing each other in adversity. This can be contrasted with the EU’s tradition of consensus, as reflected in the fact that many EU member-states favour versions of Proportional Representation (PR). Furthermore, the European Parliament also uses PR, in which MEPs work together as blocs according to different political spectrums. Indeed, it could be argued that if the UK had adopted a voting system other than FPTP, it is possible that the UK could have ended up with a very different scenario to the one it faces now.
In essence, in FPTP, voters indicate on a ballot the candidate of their choice, and the candidate who receives the most votes then wins. This simplified view of the electoral process has been baldly labelled as “bad for voters, bad for government and bad for democracy” by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), which has long campaigned for change. It has ensured that a compressed two-party system is embedded in the political system – a principle known as 'Duverger’s Law', after the sociologist Maurice Duverger - with little chance for other parties to make their mark. The exception is if a coalition is formed, such as the previous one between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats after 2010’s general election (GE), but coalitions in the UK still remain relatively rare compared to those in countries that use PR. FPTP is still used in the USA, with its deeply flawed electoral college system, as well as many countries in the Commonwealth - but by no means all: Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa have all changed from FPTP to a PR voting method. At the same time, within the UK itself, PR has been used to some extent in the devolved Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly with the Additional Member System (AMS), which mixes PR with FPTP.
The legacy of FPTP in the UK is that in GEs, many voters in ‘safe seats’ have simply given up voting for any party other than Labour or Conservative, given that under FPTP their votes would essentially be worthless. Those who have voted for anyone but the main two parties have found their vote effectively ‘wasted’, leading to voter apathy.
In contrast, many other EU member-states employ PR, an arguably much more representative electoral system, in which more than one candidate is elected in a constituency/voting area. How these member-states implement PR varies, whether using the party-list method, single transferable vote, or mixed-member method. Overall, though, this has ensured a more precise representation of voter intentions, with the line-up in Governments accurately reflecting the result of elections (especially using the D’Hondt method) in terms of allocating seats. This can be compared to the 2005 UK GE, where the Labour Party was victorious, despite winning as little as 35% of votes. Likewise, in 2019’s GE, only 44% voted Conservative, yet they gained an 80-seat majority - and, with it, 100% of the power.
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Graphic by Make Votes Matter (source) |
PR has meant a greater choice for voters that can match their beliefs more strongly, which in turn has encouraged turn-out for elections. Not only does this mean less 'wasted votes', but it also means that candidates have to campaign in all districts, rather than just the 'swing seats'.
In the UK, the Brexit campaign, while stretching far back with many roots, was truly set rolling when the Conservatives pledged to hold a referendum in their manifesto for the 2015 GE. The Tories would go on to win that election despite only 36.9% of votes cast. Along the way, the Liberal Democrats, who under PR could have stated the case for their party as presenting a genuine alternative that embraces Europe, found themselves out cold. In contrast, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who the Tories relied on as part of a coalition after the 2017 general election, were effectively given a green light to hold the Government to ransom, despite commanding only a minority of votes in Northern Ireland, and hardly any in Great Britain itself. While the majority of Northern Ireland’s voters expressed their desire to remain in the EU, the DUP insisted that the region remains entirely the opposite, opposing any divergence of Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK – except when it came to same-sex marriage and abortion, of course. Ironically, due to the DUP’s Brexit vote, with Northern Ireland staying in the EU’s customs zone and the UK facing a de facto internal border between NI and GB, Northern Ireland is now set to diverge ever more from the U.K. and be drawn ever further into the EU’s orbit, thus hastening the reunification of the island of Ireland – although the UK may attempt to stop this with its current shenanigans over the Northern Irish Protocol.
Opponents of PR have long held that it would ensure a presence in parliament of right-wing groups such as UKIP. However, the experience of a number of other EU member-states has shown that the views of more extremist wings can often be neutered. In the general election that took place in the Netherlands in 2017, all major parties refused to form a coalition with Geert Wilders’ right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV - Partij Voor de Vrijheid in Dutch), which meant that the PVV was effectively denied any chance in participating in Government policy.
The UK did have a referendum on changing the electoral system in 2011. This was to replace the present FPTP system with the ‘Alternative Vote’ (AV) method, rather than PR. Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. The ballots for the eliminated losing candidates are then redistributed until one candidate is a top remaining choice of voters. If two candidates are left with equal ranking, an 'instant runoff' allows head-to-head comparison – hence the use of the term 'Instant-Runoff voting' as an alternative name for AV. The referendum to change to AV was rejected by 67.9% of voters. Noticeably, the areas that voted 'Yes' above 50% to changing to AV were Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin, and six voting areas in London – the same places that voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU referendum. Since then, the 2011 referendum has been barely mentioned.
Prior to this, there were attempts to introduce PR into the UK parliament during the early 1900s. In the 1970s, FPTP produced weak majority governments in the UK while part of a coalition – ironically, the very situation that detractors of PR have claimed is its major flaw. In more recent times, the Liberal Democrats have advocated for PR.
If the Conservatives had gone into the 2015 election under a PR system of Government, they could have found their commitment to holding a referendum on the UK’s EU membership under sustained scrutiny. Members of Labour, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats could have stared down the Eurosceptic backbenchers. In addition, the likes of the Greens, virtually shut out of Government under FPTP, could have exerted pressure under PR to guide in liberally progressive policies. Instead, the UK had found itself stuck in a never-ending two-party system that sees no sign of opening up – a gift for the Conservatives, in particular, who have no desire to change the system (Labour’s view remains more ambiguous), but a curse for other parties, whose only chance of making a change is via a coalition with the two main parties. The fact that FPTP benefits the Tories and Labour so well has ensured that a change to PR remains an unlikely prospect; it would mean politicians from either party having to deal with MPs of real mettle, such as the Greens' Caroline Lucas. Yet it is not impossible that Labour may try to agitate for electoral change.
But how would PR work in practice? As an experiment, I’ve tried to imagine what the UK system would look like under a PR party-list system. It’s a mind-bogglingly complicated task. The aforementioned Electoral Reform Society point out that "rather than electing one person per area, in Party List [i.e. Proportional Representation] systems each area is bigger and elects a group of MPs that closely reflect the way the area voted. At the moment, we have 650 constituencies, each electing 1 Member of Parliament (MP); under a Party List system we might have 26 constituencies, each electing 25 MPs".
Theoretically, the number of these constituencies under PR - which I’m going to call ‘voting super-areas’ (VSA), as awful as that sounds, to distinguish them from current constituencies - doesn’t have to be 26. A mathematical calculation will tell you that 50 VSA under PR with 13 MPs makes 650; however, the number of MPs – i.e. seats - in each of these VSA could fluctuate from 10 to 13, divided proportionally with the top three or four main parties, based on the population density of each VSA, making the total number of MPs in the country total 650. Each of those constituencies would be a coalition of MPs, based on voter figures. The Boundary Commission, the body that is responsible for balancing the UK’s constituencies sizes under our current FPTP system, would have a huge task.
Nonetheless, there are already precedents that we can go by. The most obvious is the fact that while the UK was a member of the EU, it took part in elections to European Parliaments under PR. Going by the results of the 2019 European Parliament election – the last that the UK was involved with – you can see that the UK was split into just 12 super-regions (technically 13 if you include Gibraltar, which was included but has its own Parliament as a British Overseas Territory):
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| British super-regions for European Parliament elections (source) |
Taking the example of London, as you can see, the city was counted as one overall super-region, for which the Brexit Party, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens al all won seats, sending MEPs to the Parliament in Brussels - all of which then joined their own pan-European bloc of like-minded fellow MEPs (the current iterations of which can be viewed here).
The UK’s referendum on the EU in 2016, meanwhile, split England, Wales, and Scotland into ‘Voting Areas’ based on Councils, each comprising a number of constituencies (Northern Ireland kept to its normal constituency boundaries). Wales had around 22 of these voting areas, while Scotland had 32 (blue areas in image voted overall to leave; yellow to remain). Due to its much larger size, England had vastly more voting areas.
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| Map of the United Kingdom showing the voting areas for the European Union membership referendum, 2016 (source) |
The method used for the EU referendum still produced more voting areas than would be possible under PR. At the other end of the spectrum, the method used for the European Parliament elections in 2019 had an extreme version of super-regions/VSA – only 12 (13 including Gibraltar, as mentioned). However, the point nonetheless remains that the methods used in both the European Parliament elections and the EU Referendum redrew the voting maps of the UK accordingly, which proved that it can be done.
Let’s go back to what the UK under PR would look like. In London, the sheer amount of people per capita would require there to be several VSA. A good way to divide up these areas would be to have an equal amount of boroughs – 4 – in each (except for the City of London (CoL), which would be its own VSA due to its unusual status as a separate entity to the rest of London as a whole). This is illustrated in the image below, which I have modified using Photoshop to divide a map of London’s boroughs into these VSA. Each VSA could then have three MPs for each borough, leading to 12 MPs in each constituency area. There are actually echoes of this in the fact that prior to 1999, London was represented during European Parliament elections as a number of single-member constituencies: London South West, London North West, London South East, London North, London Central, London West, London East, London South Inner, and London North East. Where the CoL was included in those VSA, and how it operated accordingly, is unclear.
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| How London could look under PR, divided into VSA (original map of London boroughs taken from LondonMap360° - source) |
The permutations of this could apply not just in London, but in the UK’s other most populated cities – Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester most prominently, all of which have their own systems of boroughs or administrative areas. Yorkshire as a whole, meanwhile, contains nearly as many people as the whole of Scotland, so would require more than one VSA. Meanwhile, much less densely populated areas, such as Northumberland or Argyll & Bute, would require only one VSA. This system would lead to a fairer and, yes, more proportional system, in which people would be motivated to vote.
It wouldn’t be perfect, of course. To give an example, Hackney, where I’m from, would see three MPs elected as part of an Inner North Central VSA, as mentioned. Those three MPs might be one each from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives (though the latter only command a small amount of support in the borough); or those three might be one each from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens. How the Conservatives would work with MPs from other parties in practice in VSAs would await to be seen – there may be a process of horse-trading - but the aforementioned coalition between the Tories and the Lib Dems after 2010’s GE illustrated that it is possible, not to mention the also afore-mentioned previous history of cross-party London MEPs being elected to European Parliaments under PR during the period that the UK was a member-state of the EU. That could still leave candidate MPs from other parties not represented – and therefore other, smaller parties could still find themselves side-lined under PR. Nonetheless, they would be side-lined less than under FPTP, in which only one party is represented in a constituency. A PR system would be particularly beneficial to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, who would have a bigger representation in VSA.
This video from Australia, describing their system under PR, is a good explainer. As you can see, six candidates are whittled down to three via the votes being reallocated using a Single Transferrable Vote (STV) system. Despite this clear enough explanation, the transition from FPTP to PR still remains a mind-boggling complicated process. You can see this when comparing Australia’s neighbour New Zealand, a beacon of sanity at the moment in the world (not having Rupert Murdoch in charge of much of its media probably helps). New Zealand also uses PR, but with a mixed-member system (MMP), which does retain elements of FPTP; the comparison with the UK system, and how New Zealand’s PR MMR system would apply, is complicated.
So too is the different versions or PR that can be applied. Wikipedia lists some sixteen different versions of PR, including models such as ‘Bi-proportional Appointment’, which applies mathematical modelling to election results to achieve proportionality.
Whether a UK system under PR should adopt Party-List, STV, or MMR methods remains a moot point. Fundamentally, though, they would still be more democratic than the current system, even while some of these use FPTP as part of their system.
In any case, lots of people in the UK want our election system changed, as part of a wider shake-up that should include a re-evaluation of the House of Lords as an entirely unelected body characterised by cronyism. Labour For a New Democracy is one of them. A coalition of pro-PR groups such as the afore-mentioned ERS, Make Votes Matter, and Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, Labour For A New Democracy (they’re serious people who don’t appear to do acronyms) plan to take the case to Labour’s conference in September, backed by 188 Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) around the country. The fact that so many CLPs back PR makes the campaign an increasingly prominent issue, even if it hasn’t been backed to the same extent by the Trade Unions.
PR may not be a panacea for all the UK’s troubles, which have only been amplified by Brexit and the pandemic. But adopting it would lead to a revitalised political system based that would alleviate the worst aspects of cronyism and factionalism. PR shows another way. New Zealand achieved it in 1996, albeit by keeping elements of FPTP, as mentioned, via MMR. It must happen if we are to truly call ourselves a modern European democracy in the 21st century – whether in the EU or not.
