Is electoral reform back on the political agenda? The short answer is no. A Prime Minister who has just won a historically large majority off the back of a relatively modest voteshare (63 per cent of the MPs with 34 per cent of votes cast) is not about to go tweaking the UK’s first-past-the-post system. Game over, case closed.
Only it isn’t. On Tuesday, the Commons voted by 137 votes to 135 for a bill brought forward by the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney calling for proportional representation for parliamentary and local elections.
Before anyone gets too excited, the bill won’t be going anywhere. Olney’s was a ten-minute-rule motion that can be brought by an MP of any party, and there will be no time allocated for it to progress in the Commons. Keir Starmer said as much when Ed Davey used one of his PMQs questions to enquire whether the government might be open to discussing it. But it’s worth paying attention to, even in a busy week that is being dominated by attempted coups overseas and big-picture reset speeches at home, for a couple of reasons.
First, this is the first time the Commons has signalled its support for changing the UK’s voting system. Of course, fewer than half of MPs took part in the vote at all (one imagines if there had been any real chance of it moving forwards, more would have turned up), but it is a symbolic moment all the same.
Second, take a look at which MPs voted in favour. Going through the Aye lobby along with 63 Liberal Democrats (whose party has been talking about electoral reform since its formation) were all four Green Party MPs, all four MPs from Plaid Cymru, four independents (three of whom were once Labour), three MPs from Reform, and the sole TUV representative. Mathematically adept readers will note that leaves 59. Where did those 59 MPs come from? Labour.
On the No side were 78 Tories (that’s more than two-thirds of the party), four MPs from the DUP, one independent, one from Reform, and one from the Ulster Unionist Party… and 50 from Labour. You don’t need to be mathematically adept to note that 50 is smaller than 59, meaning more Labour MPs voted for Olney’s motion than against.
Again, there are many more Labour MPs who don’t support changing the voting system who simply didn’t turn up for symbolic vote like this. But it’s also true that there is a sizable cohort on the Labour benches who are sympathetic. Last month, dozens joined a new All-Party Parliament Group on electoral reform, the vast majority from the 2024 intake. That’s not necessarily surprising: Labour members voted for the party to support voting reform at the 2022 conference, even if the party’s leadership has other ideas.
Support in the left-wing ecosystem rethinking the UK’s voting system isn’t new. As well as the Lib Dems (for whom it is as close as the party comes to having a creed), the Greens are big fans, and the SNP and Plaid Cymru are also supporters. What is new – and what I predict will make all the difference in how much airtime this issue gets this parliament – is the presence of Reform MPs.
Nigel Farage’s party did particularly badly out of the present system: if MPs were allocated purely voteshare basis, you could say they should have 91 rather than five. There are big caveats to this, namely that voters vote differently in different systems, and parties campaign differently too (in July the Lib Dems won more than six times the MPs they got in 2019, on virtually the same voteshare), so you can’t just map one system onto another and suggest that’s what parliament would look like. Still, it’s not hard to see why Reform supporters think the current setup is unfair, or at least distorted.
I wrote before the election that Reform would use whatever representation it got in parliament to agitate for an end to first-past-the-post; when I interviewed Richard Tice over a year ago, he told me outright that changing the UK voting system so smaller parties could do better was one of Reform’s top priorities. The hope was that with enough pressure and arguments that the current system was undemocratic, maybe a future Labour government would give in and agree to a referendum. And we all know how much Farage likes referendums.
That hasn’t been a massive Reform priority so far in this parliament. Farage didn’t turn up for the motion this week, and one of Reform’s other MPs voted against which is a pretty major split for fledgling party. But think about the attention Farage managed to whip up for the petition for another general election received last week – and think about how much we’d be talking about electoral reform if he started agitating about that instead, perhaps campaigning next to Sarah Olney and Ed Davey.
If he does, the Lib Dems will have a decision to make. As Starmer pointed out in response to Davey’s question at PMQs on Wednesday, the Lib Dems have done pretty well out of the current system, with 72 MPs (roughly equivalent to their voteshare). How closely would they be willing to work with a party that is their ideological polar opposite if it meant a better chance of furthering a cause they’ve been championing for decades? What about the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru? And how would a Labour government whose benches are full of new MPs sympathetic to a different system respond?
As I said, the bill won’t be going anywhere. The conversation… well that’s another matter.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
[See also: “Observer” staff rally against the sale of their newspaper]
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