Gorton and Denton is a constituency in Greater Manchester. This past week, there was a by-election there after the incumbent Labour MP was suspended and then resigned. Labour – the party currently in government in the UK, and ostensibly a centre-left party – had held the seat and predecessor seats from which it was formed for decades. Nonetheless, the by-election quickly became news, with the suggestion it could be snatched away from Labour by Reform (far-right/authoritarian) or the (English and Welsh) Green Party (economically left/liberal).
A key problem is that the UK media doesn’t approach politics in a boring, sensible manner. It’s more like coverage of reality TV, with the outlets and readers seemingly addicted to spectacle. Because of this, we were subjected to countless breathless takes about the by-election going to the wire, and gleeful excitement about identity politics and the unknowns of what could come next. Some publications were giddy at the prospect of a Reform win.
This is bad, but the media isn’t alone when it comes to blame. Under a modern, representative democratic system, this by-election would have been far more boring. At most, it would have been a coin-flip between two parties with a reasonable degree of policy overlap. Instead, it was a three-way winner-take-all fight between political extremes. Why? Because the UK’s electoral system is archaic.
First past the post (FPTP) is a winner-take-all system. It works in a single seat if there’s an incumbent and a challenger. But beyond that, it quickly becomes problematic. Run 650 single-constituency elections (as happens in the UK during general elections) and the idea is the winner-take-all element will cancel out any imbalance. But when you realise that every battle can be won by someone getting one vote more than their opponent, you quickly spot the flaw. In a battle between two parties, one could win every single seat on a fraction more than 50% of the vote, while the other party gets nothing at all with a fraction under 50%, leaving everyone who voted for them unrepresented.
That, of course, is vanishingly unlikely. But the lack of representation and the random element in the system both increase sharply when more parties enter the mix. And, right now, England is at least a five-party system (Green, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, Reform all over 10%); things are further complicated in Scotland and Wales by way of nationalist parties. (Northern Ireland is very different, with a large number of parties that often ally with those in Great Britain or Ireland, but that aren’t part of the previously mentioned ones.)
When you have three, four or five parties battling in a rigid majoritarian system, things get weird. Just like at last week’s by-election. Many people were predicting that the Reform candidate might come through the middle, due to the split in the progressive vote. But all polling suggested that while perhaps 30% of voters might back Reform, almost double that would vote either Labour or Green – and most of those would not want Reform. Even under other majoritarian voting systems – SV or AV, say – much of the randomness would be gone. These systems allow you to rank candidates in order of preference. Under those, Gorton and Denton would have been all about where second preferences would go and whether the Greens or Labour would win. The story about Reform would have been a footnote, perhaps about a rise in vote share, but not about a potential win, because relatively few voters would put Reform as their second choice.
Note that this is not a partisan point. I am not in favour of electoral reform to keep out the right. In fact, I’d argue many of the problems in the UK over the past decade stem from a voting system that aims to keep the far right out. We’ve been trying to keep a lid on the boiling pot of extremism. But our system is such that there is a tipping point where the lid flies up and hits everyone in the face. And, unless things change in the future, elections could become little more than a dice roll regarding that coming to pass. Reform is currently polling around 30%. Seat calculators suggest that could net the party anything from about 140 seats (21%) to over 400 (62%). The latter becomes even more egregious when you examine research that suggests Reform is the party most voters really don’t want in.
Play nicely
That all said, because we have an electoral system that is winner-take-all and us-vs-them, natural partners often cannot conceive of a future where they could work together. The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, talked of “constructive opposition” after last year’s Labour landslide, given that this iteration of the Lib Dems appeared to overlap quite heavily with Labour across key policy areas. But this offer was largely rebuffed. Similarly, although the Greens and Labour have plenty of overlap, Labour has been actively hostile towards the Greens, branding them extremists.
On that basis, before the by-election, I glumly predicted the following likely responses to different scenarios:
- Labour wins on ~30%: Labour ignores the number and claims the win as validation for basically everything it’s doing.
- Reform wins on ~30%: Labour attacks Green (and probably Lib Dem) voters for not voting Labour. Press goes ballistic and argues Reform will now definitely win the next general election.
- Green wins: Press runs with a ‘Labour is doomed’ narrative and Labour attacks the Greens.
In the event, the Greens did win and I was pretty much on the money. The one thing I got wrong was that the progressive vote was higher than expected, which resulted in the Greens having a greater majority than predicted. The party secured 40.6% of the vote – well clear of Reform (28.7%) in second and Labour (25.4%) in third. Naturally, Reform has since, in Trumpist fashion, claimed the election was rigged. But any basic analysis of voting patterns in the area shows that Reform would have struggled to take the seat with the voters who showed up.
But it could have. And that’s the problem. Not because of Reform’s politics, but because that would have been deeply unrepresentative of the seat. Take that line of thinking nationwide and you have, well, the 2024 general election, in which Labour won 33.7% of the vote, which gave it 63.2% of the seats and, effectively, 100% of the power. Hence why the Labour leadership is perfectly happy with FPTP. Now and again, it gets to rule alone with a smallish vote share, but under a more modern voting system, it would have to share that power. And if a party ideologically opposed to Labour wins? Labour will just blame the electorate for the damage caused, despite Labour itself being in a position to make the voting system more representative and a British politics based around consensus, cooperation, collaboration and compromise. Its calculation: if Reform smashes up the country in 2029, following the Trump playbook, of course everyone will flock back to Labour in 2034. And that’s much more preferable than Labour sharing power with the Greens and Lib Dems from 2029.
There will be people who point out that Labour has in the past instigated electoral reform and brought in more progressive voting systems. For example, it was Labour that changed the UK voting system for MEPs to a form of proportional representation (PR) while the country was a member of the European Union. But those changes tend to align with Labour’s best interests. In short, if it can’t win outright, it brings in voting systems that allow it to improve the chances of it winning multi-round battles or at least retaining a reasonable level of power.
We saw this in Labour reverting mayoral elections to SV after the Conservatives had moved them to FPTP. No one should be under any illusion whatsoever that this wasn’t done to Labour’s benefit. It just so happens that the system also happens to be objectively better and more representative than what it replaced, since more voters will have directly stated that they are in favour of – or at least able to put up with as a second preference – whoever wins. Historically, Labour and the Conservatives had been quite evenly matched under FPTP in the London mayoral election, say. But London is a progressive city and so under SV, second preferences from Green and Lib Dem voters skew Labour.
Notably, there’s an electoral reform bill in progress right now, and yet it ignores the wishes of Labour voters, members, CLPs and affiliated unions, most of which now favour general and local elections switching to PR. But Labour, as always, fixates on the Lords (the upper house/revisioning chamber), despite the Lords mostly working quite well (despite its many problems). Why? Presumably because Labour’s long-term goal in the Lords is also to secure more power, along with eroding opposition by removing crossbenchers. (The latter of which would, in my opinion, be a grave error.) Reform for the Commons? Effectively ignored.
Time for change
Unsurprisingly, the by-election reignited the argument about PR vs majoritarian voting – and especially FPTP. People saw the volatility. They increasingly look at battles where a minority wins and the majority is pushed aside. (And this happens in UK conservative constituencies too, with the vote split between Reform and the Conservatives.)
For all its faults, AV (roundly dismissed in the 2011 referendum, largely because of the Conservatives and media being so hostile towards it) would somewhat fix this issue, in redistributing votes. In short, if a candidate gets over 50%, they win. If not, ranked choices are assigned accordingly until someone hits that target. You end up with a winner over half the electorate at least finds tolerable. It’s a good option for single-seat elections (such as mayoral elections and, yes, by-elections).
Beyond those, though (general and local elections), I’m in favour of shifting towards a system that makes the Commons look closer to the popular vote. Pushback here usually involves people griping about how PR removes the constituency link and involves top-up ‘list’ MPs you can’t ever get rid of. But various PR systems do retain a constituency link (albeit, typically, with larger constituencies) and list MPs can be dealt with through legislation and nuance. (For example, if a list MP dies, it would be reasonable to replace them with the next party candidate on the list, if one exists. Otherwise – or if the MP had to, say, resign in disgrace – you run a by-election under AV.)
That might not sound terribly British to people wedded to FPTP. But the UK already uses PR. The Scottish Parliament uses AMS. The Northern Irish Assembly and Scottish local elections use STV. The Senedd (Welsh Parliament) used AMS but is now switching to D’Hondt (a form of party list system). Historically, even England had multi-member constituencies. And guess what? Those places that use PR tend to end up with governments that require consensus and cooperation, rather than an opposition and government always at odds with every other party, pushing back against any idea or amendment that comes from outside, because that would be considered a defeat.
If you’re on the fence about/against PR, no one who’s in favour is necessarily going to convert you. But if you’ve managed to read this far (thanks to all three of you), do perhaps head over to the Electoral Reform Society and explore its list of voting systems. You’ll learn how they all work and gain an understanding of the balance of proportionality, voter choice and local representation we could have in the UK but that’s so far been denied to so many millions. And, who knows? What you read there might just surprise you.
This post was based on two threads from Bluesky.
