The case for electoral reform

Proportional representation would be a boon to our democracy.

Pollsters are imperfect prophets. We saw them humiliated in the 2016 US general election; one survey by the Princeton Election Consortium declared that the chance of Hillary Clinton defeating Donald Trump was over 99 per cent. Here in the UK in the same year, very few believed that the majority would vote to leave the European Union, even among those who most desired that outcome. The electorate is a fickle beast.

So what are we to make of the latest of many ominous polls for the Conservatives? A new YouGov analysis seemingly obliterates Rishi Sunak’s chances of victory, with Labour projected to win over 400 seats. If this prophecy plays out, it would see numerous cabinet ministers dispatched, included Jemery Hunt, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps. The results are even worse for the Tories than those revealed by a poll commissioned by Conservative Britain Alliance in January, which drew information from a sample seven times larger than the norm. 

We have seen pollsters get it disastrously wrong in the past, but surely the return of Labour is now an inevitability. And although I am unlikely to vote for either Sunak or Starmer, I would never be comfortable with any one party holding such an overwhelming majority. Effective government requires effective opposition. The dominance of the SNP in Scotland should by now have taught us all a lesson about the calamities of a one-party state. 

So now might be an opportune moment to revisit the prospect of electoral reform. A new system that might usher in to parliament a wider range of perspectives and keep the excesses of the government in check seems long overdue. The first-past-the-post (FPTP) system guarantees that the two major parties are forever vying for ultimate control, but is this necessarily best for the country? It certainly isn’t democratic. Take the general election of 2015. Having garnered 3.9 million votes, UKIP were rewarded with just one seat in parliament. By contrast, the 1.5 million votes for the SNP resulted in 56 seats. Under proportional representation, UKIP would have ended up with 83 members of parliament.

I was never a supporter of UKIP, but I was surprised by those who could not resist the temptation to revel in the sheer injustice of this result. At the time, we heard many commentators resorting to a combination of casuistry and self-deception to claim that it was somehow in the interests of the demos to prevent its wishes from being realised. Nothing much has changed over the years, with smaller parties often routinely belittled as irrelevant or “populist”. In the case of UKIP, David Cameron famously referred to them as “fruitcakes”, “loonies” and “closet racists”. The latter designation sounds very much like the kind of amateur telepathy one hears from those who habitually accuse their political opponents of “dog-whistling”.