‘Britain’s Deeply Unfair Two-Party Electoral System is Dying and MPs Know It’

Last Wednesday, Members of Parliament voted in favour of a bill to introduce proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons. It was symbolic – it was the first stage of a no-hoper, backbench bill – but it was historic. 

Why? Because, by my reckoning, it was the first time that MPs had ever voted in favour of a bill to introduce proportional representation for elections to the Commons. 

In 1917, the House of Commons rejected a move to proportional representation, despite a cross-party Speaker’s Conference recommending it. The move fell by just seven votes. British history might be very different had a few Conservative MPs skipped the vote. 

Then in 1931, the House of Commons backed a Bill which would have introduced the Alternative Vote system, to let voters rank candidates by preference. But it wasn’t PR. And at any rate, the Government fell before the law could be passed. 

A world war was fought and empires have fallen since. 

But Westminster’s winner-takes-all voting system has remained, despite Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all rejecting it. 

Its warping effects are more visible than ever. 

Six months on from this year’s General Election, the Electoral Reform Society has crunched the numbers, and found that the General Election in 2024 was “not only the most disproportional election in British electoral history but one of the most disproportional seen anywhere in the world.”

In other words, MPs elected do not represent voters’ preferences, by a long stretch. It is obvious to anyone who saw the outcome: Labour securing 411 seats on 34% of the national vote – “a lower vote share than their election loss in 2017,” as the authors point out. 

“Underneath this headline lies a story – one of a volatile electorate, fragmenting party system and an electoral system that cannot keep up. The result for voters, and for parties, is a system out of step,” writes chief exec Darren Hughes in the democracy group’s latest report. 

They highlight some stark findings: 

1. Nearly 78% of votes did not directly affect the local outcome in 2024 – 21.2 million votes in total. That means they were either surplus to requirements (e.g. Labour votes above the winning total, in a super-safe Labour seat), or for parties and candidates that didn’t get any representation locally
2. 554 constituencies (85% of all seats) elected their representative on less than 50% of the vote.
3. The Conservative’s vote share was just 27%, making it their lowest ever recorded. The previous low was in 1832 (29.2%).
4. 72 MPs is a new record haul for the Lib Dems. But their vote share was barely four points higher than the 8% of votes they received in 2015 – when they recorded their lowest ever number of MPs (a rump of eight). 
5. Nearly 43% of votes went to parties (and independents) other than Labour or the Conservatives, a record high.
6. The sub-60% turnout was the second lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage was introduced, only narrowly beating the 2001 low of 59.4%.
7. One in three voters said they made a tactical vote instead of voting for their preferred party, according to polling for the democracy group
8. 344 seats, the bulk of the 650 across the UK, are not straight-up Labour vs Conservative contests. In these seats other combinations of parties make up the top two contenders. The two party system is dead, over, finished. 
9. Four parties gained over ten percent of votes (and five parties over five percent of votes) for the first time ever.

What does it mean? We are a multi-party democracy, trying to jam every possible shape into a square hole. 

The Electoral Reform Society has modelled three forms of proportional representation (PR) that voters in Scotland and Wales use (or will use, in the case of List PR for the Senedd, coming into force in 2026). 

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“All three have produced broadly proportional results that better reflect the choices made by voters across the country. Based on 2024 voting patterns, all three PR projections produce a likely Labour-led, left-wing governing coalition and a more diverse right-wing opposition,” the authors note. 

What might Keir Starmer’s Government look like if the Lib Dems and Greens had real power? 

What Parliament might have looked like using the Single Transferable Vote PR system

Here’s what that it would look like in numbers:

As you can see, Reform UK’s votes would translate into a lot more seats. As they should.

For principled progressives this is not an argument against PR. But even for purely pragmatic ones, it is not a just argument. In 2016, for the first time in a Welsh Assembly (now Senedd) election, a political party other than the Big Four there won seats. UKIP elected seven representatives. In-fighting, scandals, and heavy, justified scrutiny tore them apart. By the end of the term, just one remained.

And in the 2021 Senedd election, none were elected, for UKIP or the larger Brexit Party (now Reform UK). Voters saw the loony-Right in action. And they hated it.

What now for Westminster? Electoral Reform Society chief Darren Hughes says voters are “shopping around like never before” and switching between parties at a greater rate than we have seen in a century.

“However, our current two-party voting system is struggling to cope with this new multi-party reality and has produced a parliament that least resembles how the country actually voted in British history.”

He’s calling for a “fair, proportional voting system” that reflects how people want to vote. 

My sense is that the bulk of Labour MPs now want that to happen too. 

Any real Plan for Change – for rewiring the country, overhauling Westminster, for the kind of reform the PM is talking about – requires a look at the machinery of our politics. 

The All Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections – now backed by over 100 parliamentarians – is calling for a national commission on PR. Keir Starmer would do well to lead this push.

The full report, A System Out of Step, can be read here. 

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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.

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