“Undemocratic, obscure, unfair and crazy.” That was David Cameron’s assessment of the Alternative Vote system ahead of the 2011 referendum on changing the way Britain chooses its governments. Despite the pleas of the Liberal Democrats, the electorate agreed with him and rejected the proposal to abandon first past the post (FPTP) for a form proportional representation (PR) by 67.9 per cent to 32.1. According to Cameron, it was a “resounding answer that settles the question”.
14 years later, the question looks far from settled. The British electorate has been fragmenting. The General Election of July 2024 marked the first time four parties – Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Reform – each received at least 10 per cent of the vote share. This was not a blip: not only did the Greens join the 10 per cent club in May’s local elections, according Professor John Curtice’s projected national vote share, but for the first time in a century a party other than Labour or the Conservatives came top.
“Five parties getting 10 per cent of the vote in a two-party system is mind-blowing from a psephological point of view,” says Darren Hughes, when we meet in a coffee shop in London Bridge two weeks after the locals to discuss what this all means for UK politics. “People are voting as though they already have proportional representation… What are we saying, that voters are wrong to want this many preferences? That they’re making mistakes? Good luck to the politician who gets up and says that!”
This is the kind of sentiment one might expect from Hughes. He is chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), where he has spent over a decade campaigning to change Britain’s voting system. The ERS has been making the case for the UK to switch from FPTP to a more proportional model since 1884. But their efforts have failed to change the hearts and minds of Britain’s political class: the UK and Belarus remain the only countries in Europe to use a purely FPTP system for general elections.
The recent past has challenged the conventional wisdom that FPTP produces strong, stable and decisive governments. Voters are becoming less tribal and more “politically promiscuous” (to borrow a phrase from the New Stateman’s data expert Ben Walker). The combined vote share of the two main parties has (with some exceptions) been trending downwards. Seemingly strong parliamentary majorities – whether won by Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer – artificially inflate the feeling that the winner has a serious electoral mandate.
The ERS argue this parliament least reflects the way British public voted of any in history, with Labour winning two thirds of MPs with just over a third of the vote. The opinion polls are consistently showing more than half of voters reject the two main parties, and the now-most-popular party – Reform – has just five MPs.
Among PR campaigners, Hughes has a unique perspective. He hails from New Zealand – while he orders a black coffee, he insists as a point of national pride it was New Zealand and not Australia that invented the now ubiquitous flat white. He jokes that his efforts to reform the UK voting system could be considered “reverse colonialism” (even though his father was from Paisley and he has always held a British passport).
New Zealand switched from FPTP to a form of PR in 1994; Hughes was elected as an MP in 2002, aged just 24, and served in parliament until 2011 under the Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark. Clark was a critic of changing the voting system to prior to 1994, but has since changed her mind and become a vocal proponent, having watched the dire warnings – of gridlock, weak coalitions, and the mainstream parties splitting – fail to materialise.
Critics say PR voting systems allow extreme parties to gain a foothold. But New Zealand’s experiment has not vindicated their arguments. In fact, Hughes argues, representation for the more populist parties in New Zealand has “acted like a release valve, the steam doesn’t build up too much in the system”. Coalitions, he suggests, are not something to be frightened of. After all, the only government in the past 15 years to last an entire term with the same Prime Minister was the 2010 coalition between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems.
“The idea that first past the post a strong and stable system is just a joke now,” Hughes says. “It doesn’t make sense to pay the high pain threshold” – that is, the reality that voters in a FPTP system rarely get a parliament or a government that matches what they voted for – “for something that’s not fit for purpose anymore.”
Electoral reform has always been a core tenet of the Liberal Democrats, who made the referendum on AV the price of going into government with Cameron. The Greens are also supporters, as are various national parties like the SNP and Plaid Cymru. (The Scottish parliament has a very similar type of PR system to New Zealand, confusingly under a different name, and the Welsh Assembly also has PR.)
But PR is not only in the interest of these centrist or left-ish parties. Of course, the party that lost out most as a result of FPTP in the last election was Reform: mapping vote share onto seats would theoretically have given Nigel Farage’s party 93 MPs rather than five (though this doesn’t take into account how voter behaviour changes in different systems). Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has been scathing about how FPTP punishes parties outside the mainstream, and Reform is signed up to the Make Votes Matter PR Alliance.
Hughes points out that the Conservatives too were disadvantaged by FPTP in July (according to their 23.7 per cent vote share, they should have won around 30 more seats). “And they should have got way more seats in the local elections,” Hughes adds. “But they didn’t, because the first-past-the-post ‘winner’s bonus’ has now become like a lottery ticket. Reform are currently spending that lottery ticket. In July it was Labour.”
Parliament itself is less certain on the issue than you might expect of an institution full of people who won their seats under FPTP. In December, a 10-minute rule motion brought forward by the Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney calling for PR unexpectedly passed in the Commons. The vote was purely symbolic, but it was the first time a motion of this kind has passed – thanks to the Lib Dems, the Greens, Reform and 59 Labour MPs.
“This was the House of Commons expressing what a lot of MPs do privately think,” Hughes believes. “It’s a shot in the arm for those who believe these points are worth making.” He continues, “People who are captured by the way of thinking of the status quo just think this will never happen, so they don’t worry about it too much. The vote was a reminder that this topic is not going away.”
Proponents of PR claim FPTP is a key source of the UK’s apathetic electorate (why vote if parliament doesn’t resemble the true interests of the voters?). Hughes notes that turnout in New Zealand’s recent elections tends to be far higher than Britain’s (around 80 per cent, compared to 60 per cent here), and that trust in our politics is at dire levels. For Hughes it’s “glaringly obvious” that the oddities of the voting system is feeding into this loss of trust. A type of PR (and there are many options) might seem obscure in Westminster, but to return to Cameron’s assessment, it’s increasingly hard to argue it would be more undemocratic, unfair or crazier than the existing model. “I think it’s very risky to do nothing about that. I don’t really understand why you would run that risk for your country,” Hughes tells me.
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