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Towards a New Westminster


It has now been four months since the UK general election, since the end of fourteen years of Tory rule, and the ushering in of a new era under Labour. Much of the elation caused by the defeat of the Conservative Party has died down, and we have (rightfully) not wasted any time in turning our critical eye to Sir Keir Starmer, our new PM. In the little time that Mr Starmer has been in office, he has incurred a worrying number of scandals and controversies. The Labour Party seems rife with division and discontent, with many MPs having to be coerced into following the party line. It is clear that after fourteen years of mismanagement and incompetence, the UK has had enough of the Tories. But was the UK equally enthusiastic about a Labour victory? The answer is unequivocally no. This election is by no means a repeat of the 1997 landslide victory under Tony Blair. Rather, it has exposed the urgent need to reform the UK’s archaic electoral system.


Labour’s 411 seats in parliament do not tell the whole story. In fact, while winning 63 per cent of the seats, Labour only won 34 per cent of the vote. It seems rather strange to me that a country that considers itself a bastion of democracy and liberalism is governed by a party endorsed only by a third of the population. The problem does not end with Labour’s over-representation but is compounded by the equivalent under-representation of other parties. I will highlight two particularly grievous cases: that of Reform UK, and that of the Green party. Putting the unsavoury politics of Reform aside, it is undeniable that a party which won 14.3 per cent of the vote and only got 0.8 per cent of the seats in parliament is a gross miscarriage of democracy. Similarly, the Greens won 6.7 per cent of the vote and only had 0.6 per cent of the seats.


The result of this election has been a government lacking the legitimacy of the popular mandate and large swathes of the population alienated from the democratic process. The culprit is the UK’s antiquated First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system. The process is simple: the candidate with the most votes in a particular locality wins the seat and the rest of the votes are discarded. In a two-party system, like in the USA, this system is not disproportionate, as the candidate with the most votes would necessarily have won at least a near-majority of the votes. The UK, on the other hand, has an increasing number of smaller parties that are challenging the traditional Tory-Labour vote split. The more parties, the more the deficiency of the FPTP system is exposed. The Gallagher index, which quantifies electoral disproportionality, has ranked the 2024 UK elections as the least proportionate in UK history, and the fifth most disproportionate recent election globally. A rather poor performance for a liberal democracy, and all of this for what? For a Labour that is just as committed to austerity, to Brexit, to repressive policing, to NATO, and to Neo-liberal economics as the Tories were?


I shall return to my original point. The UK needs electoral reform towards a system based on proportional representation. Proportional representation may have its flaws, and I as a Belgian am more than aware of this. But as the problem with Belgium is the Belgians, and since the UK has markedly fewer Belgians than Belgium, the UK shouldn’t have any issue forming governments. All jokes and Belgium’s imminent collapse aside, I shall not make any definite statements as to what exactly proportional representation should look like in the UK, but the best system is certainly the one proposed by the Electoral Reform Society, which I encourage readers to look into. It would entail ranked choice voting in multi-seat constituencies. Such a system would keep local MPs and would not require party lists, all the while ensuring constituencies are proportionally represented. I must stress the alternative to this is a return to the tactical voting of the two-party system, and a Parliament that would most probably be split between a Tory-Reform alliance and a Starmerite Labour. In short, a Parliament without a left wing where representation ends right of centre.


Image from Wikimedia Commons

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