Voting reform or bust

The UK uses the first past the post electoral (FPTP) system meaning we elect an MP and the party which gets the most MP’s normally forms the government. This means though that the share of vote does not translate into seats in parliament as what is more important is your vote share being more evenly geographically distributed nationally.

No use winning a few seats by a landslide if you don’t win any others.

The traditional benefits of the system are you know your MP as they are elected directly by you and it historically provides for stable government as tends to create a large winning majority in the House of Commons.

The problem is that most of us would rather not know our MP right now and it patently hasn’t delivered the second for the last three elections and I suspect won’t for many more.

FPTP worked well at the beginning of universal suffrage as the nation was effectively two large tribes defined by money and class who were extremely partisan. Alongside these tribes there was a very small percentage of people who were floating voters who moved between them.

Political scientists could split the electoral map into two groups

• Constituencies with a majority of voters who were still tribally loyal to one party or other
• Marginal constituencies with a large pool of floating voters which could swing either way

This meant two things –if you were in a constituency dominated by the one party your vote was wasted as counted for little and that marginal constituencies where there was a large enough pool of floating voters defined who won an election.

But the number of marginal constituencies was always limited due to the small size of the floating vote.

This all started to change in the late 70’s and early 80s as the tribes started break down. People became less class obsessed and society became more fluid. Alongside this the shape of the economy changed as the Thatcher reforms kicked in and much of the traditional heavy industry disappeared. Suddenly for a lot of people the idea that a certain party would always represent their views didn’t hold true.

The number of floating voters increased and with it the amount of marginal seats.  

Labour especially was unprepared for the change as the economic reforms impacted their traditional vote more. Starting in the early 80’s they moved to the left under Foot espousing more traditional left-wing economic policies whilst combining it with a more antiwar message including nuclear disarmament.

This caused a split with a small group of Labour MP’s and supporters leaving to setup the Social Democrat Party (SDP) which argued for a European style social democracy. The SDP formed initially an alliance with the Liberal party and then formally merged later in the decade to create Liberal Democats (A small group left to maintain the SDP).

In the 1983 election Labour lost to the Conservatives under Thatcher and the unified Liberal SDP party (Alliance) took 25% of the national vote share which compared favorably to Labours 28%. But whereas Labour had 209 seats in parliament, the Alliance got barely 23.

They had in effect captured a lot of the floating voters, but they were both too spread out and too concentrated in some constituencies.

For the first time in decades you had a new party that a huge portion of the electorate had plumped for but it could not break through because of FPTP.

This happened again in 1987 where the vote levels held up but again the Alliance struggled with only 22 seats.

During this time the parties slowly migrated politically and economically to the perceived centre ground in an effort to attract ever more floating voters and compete in the marginals. The economic policy differences between the parties narrowed leaving mostly social or identity issues.

By the early 1990’s the Berlin wall fell and suddenly the traditional left right cleft looked very dated in a world that had reached the “the end of history” as Francis Fukuyama opined. The world moving forward would apparently be a combination of liberal democracy and free markets.

The migration of the political parties to the centre accelerated and culminated with Labour changing clause four of the party constitution which had called for common ownership of the means of production.  It made no difference, but it symbolised the Labour party’s journey to the centre.

Thatcher when later asked what her greatest achievement replied

“Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

From now on the objective of all parties was create an offering for floating voters. This meant nothing radical and certainly nothing that would upset anyone. The electorate would have to pick at the thin gruel of differences mainly focused on social policy with members and traditional voters having to accept it because there was no where else to go.

Throughout the 90’s and into the 2000’s the same trends continued. The differences between Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on economic issues remained small but larger on social or identity ones. At each election the Liberal Democrats would get about 5 million votes which would never translate into many seats in parliament.

What changed the political landscape was the emergence of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which had started in 1991 as the Anti-federalist league under Alan Sked. UKIP seemed to steam roller the political establishment under its leader Nigel Farage. Starting from very small roots it took off in the 2000’s attracting voters from the left and right and did well in council and European elections.

Yet when it came Westminster the FPTP system stopped any breakthrough. They peaked in the 2015 election getting 12.6% of the vote but returning only one MP - Douglas Carswell whom had left the Conservative party over its position on the European Union.

It is important to note that voter apathy in the UK has increased in recent decades especially post 1997 where turnout slipped down to around 60% in general elections. Though I have no direct evidence it has been quite common to hear the same refrain throughout the UK.

“What’s the point, no difference between them, nothing actually changes”

This is hardly surprising in a system where the opportunity for new parties to start and flourish is so limited and where chasing after floating voters in marginal constituencies has narrowed policy differences to the point where they are barely distinguishable.

This is what made UKIP quite remarkable – not the actual party results or its policies but that it scared the Conservatives and much of parliament into voting to allow a referendum on EU membership. This regardless of the end result – whether the UK leaves the EU or not – may finally have cracked the system.

The referendum has proven that when given an actual choice and with a system that means every vote matters – the electorate will vote. This is demonstrated in the turnout for the referendum which was 72%. Millions of people who had not voted before or had not for decades went to the polling booth as believed their vote mattered for a change. But beyond that on both sides you have seen a massive re-engagement with politics both at a local and national level.

It is also starting to destablise the two big parties.

Though first past the post has effectively stopped other parties from emerging it has also meant that the big two have had to build extremely broad political churches and suppress actual policy differences. These broad churches are remarkable but becoming impossible to maintain.

Labour combines MP’s which are both economically left and centre alongside pro defense and pacifists. The Conservatives combine one nation patriotic Tories with free market fundamentalists.

This is just a brief snapshot, but differences go much deeper.

In both cases the internal party dynamics are contradictory and Brexit due to the way it is cutting across party lines is highlighting it. The disconnect from both memberships is even worse with a large percentage of Labour members being pro EU and most Conservatives being anti. Yet neither party can reflect that because of the splits in the parliamentary parties and their traditional voters.

Looking at the breakdown of party discipline but also the violent way that political differences are being aired I find it unlikely that they will hold together over the long-term. The split by MP’s from both Labour and the Conservatives to form CUK is probably just the beginning and will likely accelerate.

That is a good thing.

It’s likely in the short term the Conservatives and Labour will capture the majority of seats in any election but this will be against a much declining share of the vote. They can attempt to hide behind the results but at some point, it will become politically unsustainable. This will over a few elections create a demand for a change from the first past the post voting system to a form of proportional representation (PR).

Let us be clear, PR will not necessarily solve all problems and it has many others.

Very pure forms of PR tend to mean there are no large parties or too few and hence forming a stable government is a problem. It also can be undemocratic in other ways including needing much of the time to use a coalition to form a government and hence not always getting all of your manifesto delivered. Beyond that the process by which agreements are struck between coalition parties can be opaque. Finally, many forms of PR will break the link between an MP and their constituent.

These are all valid points.

But in my view, we are reaching a point of democratic breakdown whereby we will need to consider PR in order to give people actual options. Looking at council and EU elections we see a clear demand for more plurality in our democratic landscape. It looks like the time is soon coming where even the party duopoly might be forced to concede this or otherwise lose all democratic legitimacy. The alternative would be mounting political disenchantment and anger from the electorate.

Either way the idea that post this period the UK will return to being represented by the Conservatives or Labour with no changes seems as unlikely as the UK slipping back into the EU as if nothing has happened.

The world has moved on and so have hopefully our politics.