The push for electoral reform in the UK has received a shot in the arm after the “most disproportionate election in history”, according to campaigners and academics.
Longstanding reform campaigners have become uneasy bedfellows with Reform UK’s Nigel Farage in recent days after Labour secured a 174-seat majority with just 34% of the popular vote.
“This election has thrown the spotlight on to the electoral system as the result was the most disproportional on record,” said Darren Hughes, the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “We have already had a growing chorus of calls for PR [proportional representation] in the aftermath.”
Farage said the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system was “unfair” after Reform took 14.3% of the popular vote – making it the third biggest party by vote share – but won only five seats. The Green party received 6.8% of the vote for its four seats.
“I think these results will reinforce in people’s minds the need for reform,” Farage said.
Some experts argue that PR has produced more social democratic politics in Wales and Scotland, but others say it could also be a pathway for extremist politics, as has happened in some places in Europe.
Hughes said the major political parties and FPTP advocates could no longer use fears of the rise of extreme parties as an excuse to resist change.
“The debate around electoral reform can often focus on which parties would benefit from which voting system, but the only people the electoral system should be biased towards is the voters,” he said.
If the UK used the additional member system of PR, used for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, Reform would have won 94 seats across the country on Thursday and the Greens 42, according to the Electoral Reform Society.
It noted that Labour and the Conservatives had received their joint lowest vote share on record, and for the first time four parties had gained more than 10% of the vote.
The additional member system is a hybrid system under which half of a tranche of MPs are elected by FPTP and the rest by a proportional list system, where parties are allocated the remaining MPs on the basis of vote share.
The Liberal Democrats under Ed Davey ruthlessly targeted resources at winnable seats rather than focusing on vote share. As a result, they won a record 72 seats, up from eight in 2019, despite a similar vote share of about 12%.
One Lib Dem insider said: “It’s not that we like first past the post. But it’s fair to say that we had to use the system in front of us and play the board that was there.”
Analysis of the results at the cross-party pressure group Make Votes Matter found that 58% of voters did not choose their MP. The group’s spokesperson, Steve Gilmore, said previous election results using FPTP had also been “disproportional 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%. Then in 2019 they landed an 80-seat majority on a vote share increase of 1.2 percentage points.
Gilmore argued that Thursday’s result should still be seen as an outlier. “A government has been elected on a third of the vote and they’ve got two-thirds of the seats,” he said. “That is pretty extraordinary, even by the discreditable standards of first past the post.”
In a referendum in 2011, a proposal on changing the electoral system was comprehensively defeated.
Campaigners were hopeful that a Labour government could result in reform after delegates at the 2022 party conference, including from the major unions Unison and Unite, backed PR.
Keir Starmer said during his leadership campaign in 2020 that the party had to “address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count”. Since then his official spokesperson has said he has a “longstanding view against proportional representation”.
Insiders say there is growing support for reform among the Labour party ranks. “More progress has been made internally then at any stage before,” Gilmore said.
Martin Smith, a professor of politics at the University of York, said it was likely that self-interest would be the factor that would push the main political parties to change the voting system.
“The more the party system fragments, the more disproportionate the electoral system becomes, and that fragmentation is not going to go away,” he said. “There’s a point when both Labour and the Conservatives will see the current system as threatening their interests, and then they may start to think: ‘OK, we need to change this.’”
