Unbalanced UK election results give rise to calls to scrap first-come, first-served voting | Electoral reform

A push for reform of Britain's electoral system is gaining traction after one of the most unbalanced elections in history, according to campaigners and academics.

Longtime reform campaigners have found themselves in uneasy bedfellows with Reform UK's Nigel Farage after Labour won just 34 per cent of the popular vote but a majority of 174 seats.

Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Association, said this election had put the spotlight on our electoral system because it was the most unequal on record. We are already hearing a growing chorus of publicity. [proportional representation] In the aftermath.

Farage said the majority-presidential system was unfair after the Reform Party came third with 14.3% of the vote but won only five seats. The Greens won 6.8% of the vote and four seats.

“I think these results will further reinforce the need for reform in people's minds,” Faraj said.

Some experts argue that PR has further developed social democratic politics in Wales and Scotland, but others say it can also be a pathway to extremist politics, as has happened in parts of Europe.

Hughes said the major political parties and FPTP supporters could no longer use fears of the rise of extremist parties as an excuse to resist change.

Debate over electoral reform often focuses on which parties will benefit from which voting system, but the only people who should be biased by the electoral system are the voters, he said.

According to the Electoral Reform Association, if England had used the additional member system (PR) used in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, the Reform Party would have won 94 seats across the country on Thursday, while the Greens would have won 42.

Labour and the Conservatives recorded their lowest vote shares ever, while for the first time ever, four parties won more than 10 per cent of the vote.

The additional member system is a hybrid system in which half of the members are elected through FPTP and the rest through proportional representation, with the remaining members being allocated to each party according to their percentage of the vote.

Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats ruthlessly focused their resources on seats they could win rather than focusing on vote share, and as a result, they won a record 72 seats, up from eight in 2019, despite a similar vote share of around 12%.

A Liberal Democrat insider said: We don't like first-come, first-served voting, but it's fair to say we had to use the system in front of us and take advantage of the boards that were there.

An analysis of the results by the cross-party pressure group Make Votes Matter found that 58% of voters did not choose their representatives. Steve Gilmore, a spokesman for the group, said previous election results using FPTP were also unbalanced and unrepresentative.

In 2015, the Conservatives won a majority with 36.9% of the vote, and in 2017, they had to form a minority government with 42.4% of the vote. Then in 2019, they increased their vote share by 1.2 percentage points to win a majority of 80 seats.

Gilmore insisted Thursday's result should still be seen as an outlier. He said the government was elected with a third of the vote and won two-thirds of the seats, which is quite remarkable even by the incredible standards of the first round of voting.

A proposal to change the electoral system was rejected across the board in a 2011 referendum.

After delegates at the 2022 conference, including major unions Unison and Unite, backed PR, campaigners were hopeful a Labour government could deliver reform.

Keir Starmer said during his 2020 leadership campaign that the party needed to address the fact that millions of people were voting in safe seats and feeling their votes did not count. His official spokesman has since said he held long-held views against proportional representation.

Insiders say there is growing support for reform within the Labour Party. Gilmore said there had been more progress internally than ever before.

Martin Smith, professor of politics at York University, said self-interest was likely to push the major political parties to change the voting system.

The more divided the party system becomes, the more unbalanced the electoral system becomes, and that division will not go away, he said. There will come a time when both Labour and Conservatives will see that the current system is threatening their interests, and then they may start to think, 'Okay, we have to change this.'

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