Our electoral system needs a PR makeover - Alex Cole-Hamilton
That a political party can obtain a near historic and utterly unassailable parliamentary majority with just 33.7 per cent of the vote is a democratic outrage. I don’t think the case for reform of our clapped out, undemocratic voting system has ever been more stark.
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Hide AdKeir Starmer, in the years since he took over as leader of the Labour party, consistently rebuffed calls within his own party and even parts of the trade union movement to embrace the case for a shift to fair voting through proportional representation at UK elections.
I wonder if he could see the scenario coming in which a suboptimal share of the popular vote would hand him an eyewatering majority. I’m now concerned that self-interest - in maintaining that majority and their individual seats - will silence any talk of reform among his ranks of new MPs, even those who know that the present system is a farce.
66.3 per cent of voters who cast their ballot in this election did not vote for this government, yet the Labour party now have the numbers on the government benches to do whatever they want. That could overhaul our public services and even take us to war without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
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Hide AdThe case for voting reform is urgent and it is unanswerable. A few thousand votes in a handful of marginal constituencies have determined each of the general elections in my lifetime. Put another way, if you live in a seat with a sizeable majority for the incumbent MP, then your vote doesn’t count half as much.
It’s skewing our politics as well. The civil war that currently rages in the Conservative party (both north and south of the Border) is a manifestation of the fact that the Tories are actually an amalgam of a host of entirely different political ideologies. It is only the pursuit of power and our first past the post system of voting for MPs that keeps them together, however unhappily.
A fairer voting system, as used by many countries on continental Europe, would allow those Tory factions to go their separate ways and form entirely new parties with the hope and expectation of still winning seats in Parliament. They may not know it or chose to believe it, but proportional representation can end the unhappy marriage that has forced the Tories to stay together for so long.
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Hide Ad“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the opening of this seminal 1762 work of political philosophy, The Social Contract. Rousseau’s antidote to this captivity was the idea of the ‘General Will’- the will of the people expressed at the ballot box in a general election.
I’m quite certain that were he to have been transported across the centuries to witness the UK general election of 2024 he would not have seen our voting system as the exercise of general will as he imagined it.
Labour could use that majority to end this democratic outrage once and for all. It’s something their members have called for over and over again, but I fear that near unlimited power may prove too seductive for Sir Keir. I’m not holding my breath.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats
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