Not the epitaph Starmer would choose

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Sometimes, people talk about aspects of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used for most elections in the UK as though they were design features. But the system was never really ‘designed’ at all; what we have today has evolved over a period from a system which was used when the number of people voting was strictly limited and elections were more about choosing an individual to carry the banner of the wealthiest in parliament than about choosing a government. Having said that, if it had been designed by what have been for the best part of a century the two main UK parties, they would almost certainly have included the ‘feature’ that the system should work to preserve the dominance of those two parties and freeze out, as far as possible, any challengers.

In that regard it has worked as it would have been intended to work, giving those two parties turns at being in government (with a built-in bias, obviously, in favour of one of them – nothing says that the turns have to be of equal duration). If that is the intention, then the system works really well. Right up to the point at which it doesn’t. Inherent within the system is the possibility of reaching a tipping point. As long as a challenger party’s overall support remains below about 25%, and is evenly spread across constituencies, whichever of the two incumbent parties can achieve a little over 30% with their support irregularly distributed can achieve an overall majority of seats in parliament, and the other can form HM's loyal opposition. Democracy it ain’t, but it serves its intended beneficiaries (Labour and the Tories) well, and explains why they are both so reluctant to change it.

However, if the tipping point is ever reached (and the whole point is that it isn’t supposed to happen), the system facilitates a challenger party sweeping the board, with an even lower percentage of the vote. We’ve seen the consequences of that this week in the English local elections. Labour and Tory alike are behaving as though the way to freeze Reform Ltd out is to adopt their policies and be more like them. More rational souls might wonder what the point of keeping them out is if you’re going to do the same as them anyway – and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if their views are thus legitimized, many voters might conclude that they should simply vote for the real thing.

A far better approach (which also has the not-exactly-inconsequential advantage of being more democratic as well) would be to adopt a proportional electoral system. The Lib Dems, Plaid, and the SNP would support such a change, and even the head Fromage is on record as saying he supports it (although if he thinks he might stand a better chance of becoming PM under the existing system, that might change – politicians’ principles have been known to become flexible when political advantage is at stake, and Fromage didn’t exactly have a lot of principles to start with). The Labour Party membership have supported the idea in party conferences, and with his current majority, Sir Starmer has a superb one-off opportunity to make a change which would be game-changing (as well as being likely to give Labour a share in power for more of the time). It seems, though, that he’d prefer to alternate between acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights and outright panic. Labour accused the Tories this week of gifting the by-election to Reform Ltd by not campaigning, but the person who is really gifting the next election to them is Sir Starmer himself. ‘The man who facilitated the UK’s slide into authoritarianism’ is probably not the epitaph Sir Starmer would choose. But then I suppose few of us get to choose our own epitaphs.