Labour likely to miss an opportunity for electoral reform

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The now former PM’s Tory Oblivion Project failed at the last fence, leaving his party with more seats than he had hoped, and himself unable to make the planned getaway to California to be reunited with his fortune – for a few months at least. His only consolation must surely be that there are enough Tory MPs left for them to fall into multiple sects, groups, and schisms rather than unite behind a clear successor.

In terms of seats won, the scale of Labour’s victory is stunning, and under the antiquated electoral system used in the UK, it’s only seats that count. Scratch the surface, though, and start looking at the votes cast and the story is rather different. Winning 63% of the seats on a mere 34% of the vote gives absolute power to a party which could only persuade a third of the electorate to vote for it. Democracy it ain’t. Outside Scotland, Labour’s vote share rose only by a tiny margin overall in England, and actually fell in Wales, but those averages disguise differential movements in different constituencies which led to the votes being concentrated where they were most effective. Even then, had Farage plc not taken so many votes, mostly, one suspects, at the expense of the Tories, the result would have been very different.

It's a mistake, of course, to simply assume that Reform voters would otherwise have voted Tory. Some would have voted Labour, others for Plaid, the SNP, the Greens, or even the Lib Dems. But supposing for a moment, for the purposes of illustration, that all those who voted for either the Tories or Reform had actually voted for the leading contender of the two in every constituency, Wales would have woken up to a very different landscape yesterday. We would have 18 Labour MPs, 10 Tories, 2 Plaid – and 2 Reform, namely Llanelli and Maldwyn. There were special circumstances in both those latter 2 seats, of course, but ‘special circumstances’ can’t be used as an excuse for results we might not like. Whilst the assumption that Tory and Reform voters would have voted for each other’s parties is hopelessly over-simplistic, the illustration does serve to underline just how shallow Labour’s ‘landslide’ really is.

The Electoral Reform Society has done an analysis of the votes, and produced some numbers for how the result might have looked had the election been fought on the basis of the Additional Member system which has been used to date for Senedd elections (although it’s now being scrapped for a closed list system). Whilst it would have made no difference to Plaid on 4, and little difference to the Lib Dems who would have had 77 rather than 71, the impact on Labour, Conservative, Reform and the Green Party would have been huge, giving them 236, 157, 94, and 42 seats respectively. Starmer would today probably be negotiating with the Lib Dems and possibly the Greens as well, before forming a government. Caution is needed here, of course, not least because a different voting system might lead to people making different choices; assuming they’d simply vote for the same party is not an entirely valid starting point. If the Tories and Reform agreed to some sort of coalition, that would take them past Labour’s total, but then they run out of potential allies. Labour would have had far more viable paths to a working majority. I don’t really want to see 94 Reform MPs in the House of Commons, but I want to keep them out because people vote against them, not because of a rigged electoral system.

The ERS are promising to produce an analysis of the probable result based on use of STV, the proportional representation system favoured by many of us. It will be interesting to see the outcome of that work, although working out where people might have placed their second and third preference votes is even more fraught with assumptions than the analysis which they’ve done to date. I suspect that the overall picture will not be hugely different – at headline level, Labour would still be without a majority, the Tories would still be a larger group than they are today, and there would still be substantial numbers of Reform and Green MPs. And Starmer would still be trying to negotiate some sort of coalition.

The obstacle to electoral reform remains that both Labour and the Tories have demonstrated that the current system can give them absolute majorities on a minority of the vote. As long as enough Tories believe that swinging towards Farage’s position will make Reform go away, they are unlikely to change their stance. And while Labour, as a party, has adopted proportional representation as policy, the apparent scale of this week’s victory makes it unlikely that they’ll invest much effort in pursuing it. It wasn’t in their manifesto, and Starmer himself seems at best lukewarm on the idea. It would be a mistake, though, and one which could all-too-easily allow the return of the Tories in five years time. Those arguing that the scale of the victory means Labour will be in power for at least a decade need to remember that what was done in a single election cycle can equally be undone in another, and a mere 34% of the vote isn’t a very good starting point for any government. It’s in Labour’s own interests – and any sense of democracy and fairness demands – that the system is changed whilst they have the power and the numbers to do it. I’m not optimistic that they will, though.