The 2024 General Election was the 10th I could vote in (the unnecessary one in 2017 helped a bit there), which means I’m old enough to remember the rise to failure of the Social Democratic Party.
A breakaway from the Labour Party, with a few others thrown in, they briefly troubled the scorers in the 1983 election by partnering with the almost-defunct Liberal Party to form the SDP-Liberal Alliance. Oh, those rebel scum… anyway, despite hitting around 25% in the polls they didn’t get anywhere near 25% of the seats in Parliament.
The UK’s first-past-the-post system is skewed against smaller parties, it’s true. But before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, it’s important to remember that we have 650 constituencies, with around 70,000 voters in each. Some MPs spend their whole careers on the back benches, just being solid constituency MPs. Local MPs for local people, and quite right too.
If you set aside, say 200 seats in parliament for some form of proportional representation, then the remaining 450 will have to represent larger areas. Local representation starts to be lost. If you went the whole hog, and divvied up seats proportionally… where would you start? Where would you end? And what kind of a dog’s dinner would you end up with?
(This, of course, doesn’t apply to the Isle of Wight or Ynys Môn, or any of the other ‘protected constituencies’ where there are smaller, self-contained constituencies but with clearly smaller populations.)
Second chamber
But there is a solution, in reform of the House of Lords.
Obviously, it’ll need a new name. I’ve no idea what, but it won’t be an automatic home for the Lords in the future.
Use the former Government Office regions as base; Yorkshire and Humber, North West, Wales, etc. Create party lists. Using your chosen form of PR, elect ‘MPs’ based on vote share, just like we used to do in the European Parliament elections. Or do it on a national basis, either’s good. Some of those ‘MPs’ could be Lords, of course – they just can’t sit in the Commons.
Another advantage is that it stops parties parachuting people into constituencies or the Lords just because they need to be ‘in Parliament’ to take a role in Cabinet. They can do that by being on the party list.
The revamped second chamber will keep its ability to influence legislation, but not being able to overturn the primacy of the Commons.
Fewer members will also reduce the wage bill, and make it easier when the oft-delayed rebuilding work starts; MPs can decant to the Lords, the no-longer-Lords could work in smaller committees elsewhere.
I commend the idea to the House.
Hang on… what about proportional representation?
Yes. Now, I’ve deliberately not made a suggestion here, because there are so many ways of doing PR that, whichever version is chosen, someone will have a complaint. We used to use the D’Hondt system for elections to the European Parliament; we still use it for the “top-up” seats in the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the London Assembly. There’s also the Alternative Vote and Alternative Vote Plus methods. And the Single Transferable Vote. And probably lots of others.
My experience of PR comes from CIPR elections, where it is used… interestingly.
If there are three or more candidates for President-elect, it makes sense; the last candidate is removed and their votes redistributed until someone gets 50% (assuming no-one gets 50% on the first pass). If there are only two candidates… you still get two votes, even though both candidates can’t get less than 50% of the vote.
Even more confusingly, votes for the eight (at the time, it’s changed now) Open List seats used a transferable voting method, even though we were voting for eight individuals, not parties or groupings.
In short: if you want to change the voting system, fine. But be careful what you wish for.