Cheeky campaigners last week unfurled a giant mocked-up Labour banner outside the party’s HQ, emblazoning the dour face of Keir Starmer alongside his February 2020 remarks about the need for electoral reform. Starmer lost all interest in the question in the months that followed, and it’s since been a running sore between the party’s leader and its members. There was an overwhelming vote for proportional representation (PR) at last year’s Labour conference, and it’s likely to bubble back up this autumn.
I’ve come to the view that the members are right, though not for the reasons most of them think.
It would be nice if electoral reform could be approached as a matter of high democratic principle, but the lesson of history is that this never happens. In the early 20th century, Conservatives feared being on the wrong side of a winner-takes-all system under the expanded franchise, and so were often the most prominent proponents of PR. After a Speaker’s Conference in 1917, it nearly came about, too, until it was thwarted the following year by none other than the last Liberal prime minister, Lloyd George. By the mid-1920s, with his seats bleeding away under First-Past-the-Post, the old goat shamelessly swerved to embrace electoral reform, which has been a great Liberal passion ever since.
As for Labour, it was very much interested in reformed votes until it became a national contender for power. Then it wasn’t. Over more recent decades it has wobbled between outright commitment to First-Past-the-Post as a facilitator of big majorities and then, when more anxious about its own prospects, wondering whether reform might be nice. But it’s never mustered the sustained commitment needed to make change happen.
While Starmer’s abandonment of past policies on tax, nationalisation and more amounts to the sharp shift right that he has now consolidated with this week’s reshuffle, this is one reversal that should surprise no one: leaders who look like winning under current rules are always disinclined to meddle with them.
Time and place
Low self-interest trumping high principle isn’t just a British failing, but an almost immutable law of democratic politics. In mid-1980s France, after taking a battering in some local elections, President Mitterrand suddenly recalled a half-forgotten interest in PR and rammed it through for the French National Assembly. It wasn’t enough to stop his centre-right opponents winning a majority in 1986, and it also let a substantial far-right bloc into parliament, giving them a prominent voice which—even though the electoral rules were soon switched back—they have retained to this day.
This makes the point that might surprise some Labour idealists: in certain environments, the effect of PR is far from progressive.
For every principled argument one can make for reform—making votes count equally, checking arbitrary rule by governments that lack a majority in the country—advocates of the status quo can come up with a counterpoint. Stitching coalitions together after a PR election, they will say, is less democratic than the very public challenge of building a “big tent” that can win a First-Past-the-Post election. They’ll highlight how party chiefs rig PR lists of candidates, and how the small “swing” parties that the bigger ones need to cement a majority enjoy entirely disproportionate power.
All this creates enough haze over the principle to encourage the obvious temptation to act on purely selfish motives. Yet even when it comes to self-interest, much of the British left again gets things wrong, fondly imagining that electoral reform will automatically unlock a perennial-but-latent “progressive majority” of combined Labour and Liberal votes. The keenness the Liberal Democrats displayed when they joined a Conservative-led coalition in 2010 should have laid to rest any presumption that the liberal bloc can automatically be bagged for the left rather than the right side of politics.
Nothing is perennial: the way electoral systems play out entirely depends on the time and the place in which they are operating. And the most compelling reason for Labour members to seek reform is because of very particular ways in which the system plays out against the left, as distinct from the centre, in 21st-century Britain.
The big contingent factor at work is the wasteful piling up of leftist votes—working- and middle-class alike—in the big cities, including London, Birmingham and Liverpool. Extraordinarily, despite Labour’s anaemic overall support in 2019, it secured all 10 of the largest constituency vote-share leads nationwide—a sure sign of too many votes being concentrated in the “wrong places”.
Most political punditry is uninterested in such mechanics, preferring to vaguely rationalise whatever result the voting system churns out in terms of a nebulous “public mood”. But consider how Labour has fared across the six general elections that there have been in this century and the slant of the system against the left is stark—as is the bankruptcy of the conventional wisdom in accounting for the actual shifts seen in the party’s total support.
Running the numbers
Across the three New Labour campaigns from the turn of the millennium to 2010 (Blair, Blair, Brown), the party’s average English vote share was 35 per cent. After the party plumped for the supposed “wrong Miliband brother” and edged left, its average English support in the following three elections (Miliband, Corbyn, Corbyn) was 36 per cent. This marginal advance in support is misremembered as a catastrophic decline because the outcome at Westminster was indeed grim. Averaging across those first three elections of the century, Labour secured 267 English MPs. Across the following three, a fractionally higher English vote share yielded an average of just 204 MPs.
There was a special story in Scotland where, after the 2014 referendum, Labour collapsed. Factor that in by looking at UK-wide votes, and the average score in the New Labour years remains at about 35 per cent, while that for the subsequent period now sinks to a touch over 34 per cent. This fractional decline in support was magnified into a real collapse in representation. The average UK total of 342 Labour MPs returned under Blair, Blair, Brown dropped by over 100, to an average of just 232 subsequently.
The 21st-century record, then, has been that centrist Labour pitches don’t necessarily achieve more votes overall, but do win many more seats.
Plainly, Jeremy Corbyn was a very unpopular leader, particularly by the end. But focusing on seats rather than votes exaggerates how far the country was alienated by his party. The 2019 election is routinely described as “Labour’s worst result since the 1930s.” And so it was, in terms of seats. But if we look at the English vote share instead, it could also be described as merely the party’s third-worst showing since 2001. On the same measure, the best 21st-century showing of all would be Corbyn’s first run in 2017.
That would be misleading in another way, because it’s also important to take account of relative shares, and Theresa May clung on to power that year after rallying rather more votes against Corbyn’s Labour than he was able to rally against her. Nonetheless, our electoral system wrought dramatic contortions: an advance of a full 10 percentage points of support on 2015 brought only 30 extra seats in 2017, again because of left-wing votes piling up in too few places: that year, the safest 28 seats were all Labour. Having come of political age at a time when the left still dreamed that First-Past-the-Post was a good route for assembling transformative parliamentary majorities, Corbyn and his cadre may themselves have failed to appreciate just how badly they had undershot the expected return on so many extra votes.
As for the punditry, its whole reading of every election is retrofitted around the constituency results. “Stevenage woman” is only the latest arbitrary invention of pollsters and apparatchiks to be framed as the authentic voice of the nation, following on from “Mondeo man” and “Worcester woman” back in the New Labour years.
Why should it be for her—rather than, say, “Peterborough person”—to speak for England? Apparently because Stevenage stuck with the Tories throughout Labour’s lurch to the left, whereas Peterborough stunned many by plumping for the souped-up social democracy that Labour offered in 2017.
More fundamentally, why do cautious smalltown voters weigh so much more heavily than, say, “Birmingham bloke”? It is in large part because of the workings of First-Past-the-Post in an age when left-wing voters are so heavily concentrated in the inner-cities.
In the United States, an antiquated electoral college over-weights empty states, which hasn’t always worked to the right’s advantage but has done so in modern times. It defied the popular vote to hand the presidency to George Bush in 2000 and then Donald Trump in 2016. The Republicans have understood this, and seem to have given up on seeking national majorities in favour of rallying the base in the right bits of the rust belt and rural America to squeak through; the Democrats look on with terror at what the system might mean for 2024.
Britain’s first past the post isn’t quite so arbitrary, and—as Starmer hopes to show—remains as ripe for exploitation by ruthless centrists as it is by the right. And yet, in 21st-century Britain it has already exhibited one very clear slant: against the left. This will only intensify if and when a large chunk of current Labour supporters desert the party for insufficient radicalism in government, perhaps swapping to the Greens in very large numbers—though never large enough to win many seats.
Many Labour members fear something important has been lost in their party’s stampede away from radicalism and towards respectability at all costs. But that is what Starmer, focused entirely on the sort of seats that First-Past-the-Post currently makes all-powerful, has deemed is required for victory. For their part, the members are wise to press for a commitment to electoral reform the moment that victory is won. And in demanding that, they will be no more self-serving than anyone else.
Correction note: an earlier version of this article’s image caption described the Alternative Vote referendum as the last and only UK referendum on adopting a form of proportional representation. It has been updated to note that Alternative Vote is not a form of proportional representation
