Before a vote is counted, this much we know. More results than ever will involve the winning party getting a disproportionate amount of power, considering the number of votes cast for it; fewer people will get what they voted for. The ever more random roulette wheel of our voting system will produce wildly odd winners and losers.
Our never-fit-for-purpose first-past-the-post system breaks apart under the strain of having five or sometimes six parties bunched together with no more than 11 percentage points between them in the polls.
A vote share of less than 20% may secure a win. Look how bad the last local elections were: in 2024, Tories in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, scored 90% of the seats with 50.5% of the vote. Lewisham became a one-party Labour state with not one opposition councillor in 2022, on just 55.4% of the vote. Labour’s clean sweep of Barking and Dagenham’s seats was won similarly. Moscow and Pyongyang would be proud.
This time, the electorate may be determined to define its vote more precisely, but it will be thwarted. Gone are the 1950s when more than 95% voted for Labour or the Conservatives, holding their noses to choose the less unpalatable of two great portmanteau parties. It’s better that we now have five choices in England (more in the other nations of the UK) – though Kemi Badenoch, in shifting too close to Nigel Farage, has failed to provide traditional Tories with a pro-European refuge, so they flee to the Liberal Democrats.
Expect plenty of grotesque results. There will be many no-overall-control councils – not a bad thing, but it will reveal who will partner with whom. Tories assisting Reform would break the cordon sanitaire that defends against this Trumpite invasion of British politics. No pacts, alliances or deals. Farage, the facsimile Trump, with his monster personal £5m gift from a Thai-based crypto billionaire, plus £9m to his party, reeks with a stink beyond anything known to Westminster until now. Farage chortles at his nakedly US-style pork-barrel politics, threatening to put migrant detention centres into Green-voting districts.
A cordon sanitaire is for keeping disease away from everyone else, isolating a politics beyond the pale. It’s for the Tories to police that line. Shunning Reform politicians is a public warning that Faragism is alien to British democracy: yes, unpatriotic, if there’s any remaining sense of basic British decency.
Time was when Farage backed electoral reform, rightly protesting that the last general election delivered 1% of seats for 14% of the vote. But after rising to top the polls, he has fallen silent and his party is changing its mind. Now Reform can see national victory within its grasp, for even fewer votes than the shocking 34% that delivered Labour absolute power in 2024 with two-thirds of the seats. Electoral dictatorship could be Farage’s for as little as 26% of the national vote next time, says a YouGov MRP poll.
The system is breaking. As recently as 2022, 65% of councillors in England were elected on a majority vote, says the Electoral Reform Society. In last year’s locals, just 16% of winners were backed by a majority. Will tomorrow’s results be even worse? That’s England, but a great advantage of devolution is that Scotland and Wales can do things differently, and they do. English reformers will scrutinise whether the new Welsh proportional representation (PR) system went too far in only allowing voters to choose a party, not a candidate, so the parties decide who tops their lists. But too often the case for reform gets lost in the details of D’Hondt Welsh-style, or Scottish-style top-up lists.
In England and UK-wide Westminster voting, parliament is far behind the people: 60% now back PR, with just 36% for keeping first past the post. How depressing that Labour’s English devolution and community empowerment bill just received its royal assent on 29 April devoid of electoral reform. It does correct the Tory gerrymander on mayoral elections, restoring the right to a second choice – but not in time for the six mayoral votes happening today in London.
The Labour party has voted for PR at conference, with 66% of members backing it in a poll, along with two-thirds of affiliated unions. Once upon a time Keir Starmer seemed in favour, just as Tony Blair did, until party dinosaurs prevented change. There’s no better time for Labour to seize reform: after its stonking general election win thanks to first past the post, it would be no gerrymander.
I have no crystal ball to show me what Labour will do in its paroxysms of misery when the results pour in. But if at some point, in some mode, Starmer leaves Downing Street, sooner or later contestants for his post are all likely to promise the electoral reform the Labour party membership wants. Andy Burnham, a very long-time reformer, has set the pace and other contenders will have to follow. (If they dare continue blocking Burnham, his voice as king of the north would still overshadow the winner, forcing this and other policies to the fore.)
Of course, Labour doesn’t need to wait for a new leader. Starmer himself could set up a national constitutional commission to report well ahead of the next election, for Labour to put electoral reform into its next manifesto, with no need for a referendum (after Brexit, please, never again). Get out on the front foot, since the next election may result in a situation whereby to keep out Farage and the Tories, Labour needs to be part of a grouping of progressive parties, with all the others committed to PR as the absolute sine qua non of cooperation; they know the lesson of Nick Clegg’s failure to change the course of history.
Whatever the results today, it’s a solid-gold bet that first past the post will do even worse damage to trust in democracy.
Source:
www.theguardian.com
