A projection of how the election results would look if we used Additional Member System (AMS), like in Scotland and Wales.
| Party | AMS | FPTP | Seat change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 236 | 411 | +175 |
| LibDems | 77 | 71 | -6 |
| Green | 42 | 4 | -38 |
| SNP | 18 | 9 | -9 |
| Plaid Cymru | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Reform | 94 | 5 | -89 |
| Conservative | 157 | 121 | -36 |
| Northern Ireland | 18 | 18 | 0 |
| Other | 4 | 6 | +2 |
To be fair, the PR result is far, far worse than what we have - only 4 Reform seats. It’s not a great time to be selling PR.
That’s so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don’t stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it’s going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour’s current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.
Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.
The far right are part of several coalitions in countries with PR, though. It doesn’t vaccinate your political system against that. The main thing you can do to reduce the march of the far right is to make people feel like their lives are getting better and better.
There is an enormous difference between the far-right being part of a coalition under a fair electoral system (for completeness, this rarely happens anyway) - in which the far-right lack a parliamentary majority and can’t do all the awful things they desire - and the far-right having a parliamentary majority on a minority of the vote under a FPTP system.
We have seen that, under FPTP, it’s possible to win a large majority on a 35% vote share - as Labour have done twice this century (2005 and 2024). The Tories + Reform just won a 38% vote share between them, so what do you think happens under FPTP if a Suella Braverman or Priti Patel led Tory party decides to fight the next election in an electoral pact with Reform?
This is the inoculation I am talking about. If the far right get 38% of the votes, I damn well don’t want them getting >50% of the seats as tends to happen in FPTP.
Yes Reform would have far more seats under PR, but I don’t believe that changes the overarching principle of the matter: fair and representative representation based on votes cast.
Singling out a bogeyman doesn’t answer the principle. Do you want people to feel like their vote counts? That’s the important part for me.
The party list system would mean that Nigel Farage was never out of parliament in the last ages. He would win every time.
He would win as long as people want him to win, surely? The question is do you think that’s more democratic or not?
No, with the party list system, any one party which gets north of something like 60,000 votes gets an MP and the party chooses who gets the seat, so the leader cannot lose their seat. They are immune from becoming unelected, no matter how unpopular.
In our current system, if you can’t find a locality that wants you, you lose. Reform might have got a lot of votes, but its candidates are very unpopular, for good reason, and they don’t win elections much. It’s only because the Conservatives have been a total shit show that they got any MPs at all.
If the Tories completely collapse, then next time the FPTP nonsense might favour Reform. If they get in, they’ll do everything they can to undermine democracy, and ensure they never get voted out.
Look at Hungary, and Poland. It took an almighty effort to get the fascists out in Poland, and it will take a lot of work to undo all the damage they did.