Free and fair elections are the hallmark of democracy. If people are to be represented and governed as they wish, it’s not enough that they are able to vote. They must be able to vote without coercion, manipulation, or distortion.
General elections in Britain are free, but they are not fair. That’s the finding of a new report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections for which I am Vice Chair. Having formed just two months ago, it has already grown to become one of the biggest all-party groups in parliament. It has over a hundred members from different parties, all committed to three aims: tackling dark money in politics, combating disinformation, and replacing First Past the Post with a fair, proportional electoral system.
The report sets out the indefensible impact First Past the Post had on political representation in the 2024 general election. But this isn’t about one election result. The truth is that our voting system has been in steady decline for decades.
In the mid 20th century, almost everyone voted – and almost all of them voted Labour or Conservative. As a result, even under our distorting voting system, elections were sometimes reasonably reflective of how people voted – and to win most of the seats you needed to at least get close to winning a majority of the votes.
Those days are long gone. This year, less than six in ten votes went to either Labour or the Conservatives combined, while over 12 million people chose other parties. When this happens under First Past the Post, the system breaks down – and wild things happen.
That’s why it took on average just 24,000 votes to elect each Labour MP, 56,000 votes to elect each Conservative, and a whopping 486,000 votes to elect each Green. It’s why six out of ten people who turned out to vote ended up with a local MP they didn’t vote for. It’s why we’re in the quite extraordinary situation where a party that got only a third of the vote won nearly two-thirds of the seats – a historic landslide in parliament, and a completely inequitable and frankly undemocratic one.
This is the lowest vote on which a party has ever won a majority – the latest of an alarming downward trend. It not only calls into question the democratic legitimacy of the election result, it represents a real danger. When a party can form a super-majority government with the support of just one in three voters, it’s frighteningly easy to imagine an extreme or anti-democratic party taking power. This is all the more so when millions are disillusioned with politics, in no small part because their votes are repeatedly ignored on an industrial scale. Turnout amongst voters – probably the most reliable barometer of how fed up people are with politics – fell to an almost record low this year: less than 60 per cent of us voted.
Parties and politicians know this system is corrosive and indefensible. In fact, there is now an overwhelming new consensus across parliament that “the flaws in the current voting system are contributing to the distrust and alienation we see in politics”. That’s Labour’s official policy, signed off by Keir Starmer and his top team last July, whilst nearly all other parties in parliament have clear pro-PR policy. This means in total some 500 MPs, or 77 per cent of the House of Commons, represent parties which recognise that the very system they were elected by is undermining trust in politics.
The prime minister has called the fight to restore trust a key priority: “the battle that defines our age”, as he put it. So if the vast majority of MPs – including government MPs – recognise that our voting system is causing a lot of this distrust, would it not be a good idea to do something about it? The public certainly thinks so. There is now record and majority public support for changing the voting system, particularly among those who trust politics the least. Polling just out from Survation has found that almost two thirds (64 per cent) of the public believe the government should act to address the flaws in the voting system before the next general election.
That’s why the APPG for Fair Elections is calling for the government to launch an independent National Commission for Electoral Reform next year that allows citizens, alongside experts, to recommend a fair, democratic system in which every vote counts equally. The Commission would be an opportunity to put ordinary people at the heart of an open and honest conversation, to learn from the experience of proportional systems in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and beyond, and to recommend a way forward that would command public trust and confidence.
It’s time to update our democracy to make it fit for the 21st century – both the inner workings of parliament, and the way we run elections. The health of our democracy, the quality of our politics, and therefore the state of our country depends on us finding a better way. The fundamental principle of democracy – government by the people, for the people – simply has to be rooted in this essential truth: every person’s vote should count equally.
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