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How Keir Starmer can save the UK from elective dictatorship

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

At this year’s Labour Party conference from September 25-29, Keir Starmer plans to paint “in primary colours” the kind of country he wants Britain to become. Well, here is a suggestion for his palette: how about a bold stroke that would illuminate Labour’s commitment to pluralism, while revitalising democracy and trust in government? This policy doesn’t require huge public spending and the Tories will never want to steal it (guaranteed).

It is proportional representation (PR), the reform that Margaret Thatcher most feared. Asked in 1995 whether the Conservative Party might benefit from a period in opposition, she replied: “That’s crazy ... they might change the voting system.”

In May, Labour won 11 of 13 mayoral elections, all under PR. Now the Tories want to change these elections to First Past the Post (FPTP). That’s because, like Thatcher, today’s Conservative leaders understand that our so-called majoritarian voting system works in their favour. They know that FPTP has given them power for decades, despite only winning a minority of the popular vote.

Following the 2019 elections, the Tories held a majority (56.2%) of seats with only 43.6% of the votes. They gained 48 more MPs with only an extra 1.2% vote share. That is ‘winner takes all’ FPTP in action: a system biased in favour of the Right, which promotes voter inequality, gives disproportionate power to swing voters in marginal seats, and encourages the belief that voting never changes anything.

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During the Labour leadership election in early 2020, Starmer recognised the importance of the issue, stating: “We’ve got to address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their voice doesn’t count … We will never get full participation in our electoral system until we do that at every level.” But what will Starmer do now?

Will he make an unequivocal endorsement of PR or will he be tempted to kick the issue into the long grass? Many previous Labour leaders have opted for the latter. Which is why, over the last 30 years, the UK’s engagement with PR has been a case of one step forward, two steps back.

Since 1997, every new representative body in the UK has been elected using an electoral system other than FPTP. We have had two decades of experience with PR systems in devolved assemblies, mayoralties, and in local government. But sadly, Labour’s ambivalent approach has meant that it has squandered the opportunity to scrap it for the election that matters the most: the House of Commons.

Labour’s founder backed proportional representation

Labour’s founder and first leader, Keir Hardie, supported PR. In 1913, the Labour Party conference agreed that “no system of election can be satisfactory, which does not give opportunity to all parties to obtain representation in proportion to their voting strength”.

By the 1920s, however, under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, support for PR began to wane, and interest in it was only revived decades later as part of the review that Neil Kinnock initiated after Labour’s defeat in the 1987 general election. The review, chaired by Professor Raymond Plant, eventually recommended scrapping FPTP in favour of proportional voting systems. Kinnock’s successor, John Smith, for whom I served as head of policy, accepted Plant’s recommendations for the European Parliament, as well as in the future Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, and pledged to hold a referendum for elections to the House of Commons.

Smith, who sadly died after serving as Labour leader for just two years, was committed to a radical agenda of constitutional reform. He was driven by the desire to remake Britain into a modern European state, determined to devolve power in Scotland and Wales, and to “blow away the cobwebs of unnecessary secrecy” through a Freedom of Information Act. In 1993, he warned that Britain had become an elective dictatorship – but was characteristically cautious about electoral reform.

I had numerous conversations with Smith on PR and the Plant recommendations. His response to my long-standing pro-PR stance was to sympathise with the principles underpinning the case for electoral reform. His reticence was mainly practical. He simply couldn’t imagine how most of the 50 Labour MPs from Scotland would support ending FPTP, which worked so clearly in their favour.

Given the post-2015 collapse of Labour’s dominance in Scotland, I often wonder what Smith would think about PR now. Certainly, it is very hard to see any path back for Labour north of the border, where FPTP heavily favours the SNP. In the 2019 General Election, the SNP gained 48 out of 59 seats despite attaining less than half the vote. Labour was left with only one MP, although it obtained nearly 20% of the Scottish vote.
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