The Next Labour Gov' promises to be bold and radical – so why won’t it embrace electoral reform?

By Sean Smyth -

First Past the Post is an archaic, outdated electoral system that has failed its basic litmus test at two of the last three elections. It’s proponents claim it is designed to deliver “strong and stable majority government.” Yet the last three elections have produced two hung parliaments and a Tory majority of 12. It’s clear to many progressives that this can’t go on – so why, as the headline of this article states, hasn’t the Labour Party embraced a change to Britain’s electoral system?

Truthfully, calling FPTP Britain’s electoral system is a lie. In Northern Ireland, all elections except Westminster elections are conducted using the Single Transferable Vote, although this is also partially to deal with the sectarianism there. However, that isn’t the only place STV is used – the Scottish Labour/Lib Dem coalition introduced it to be used in all council elections there. And in the London, Scottish and Welsh assemblies a FPTP and PR hybrid known as the Additional Member System is used, where regional lists supplement FPTP constituencies.

Indeed, the history of the electoral reform movement is one that can be tied to that of the Labour Party. The 1931 minority Labour government introduced a bill to switch to the Alternative Vote (think STV but with 1 winner), but the government fell before it became law. That bill would also be typical of the electoral reform movement, as it was shuttled between the Lords and Commons whilst they argued about which system should be adopted.

And when Labour was returned to power in 1997, the government which I would argue currently holds the title of “most radical” that Corbyn seeks to claim, it introduced electoral reform as a supplement to devolution, as well as switching to using PR in the European Parliament.

New Labour removed FPTP for nearly all elections in the UK, and looked to have ditched it once and for all, but the recommendations of the Jenkins Report were shamefully abandoned by the government following opposition from within the party. Indeed, Labour moved from promising a referendum on electoral reform in 1997, to having dropped it entirely from its manifesto by 2005, before it was readopted by Gordon Brown before 2010.

However it was not Labour, but the Conservatives, who perhaps took the biggest step away from electoral reform, ironically by offering a referendum on it, which was defeated by about 2:1 in 2011, but the campaign was marred by splits in the pro-reform vote because it couldn’t decide if AV was in fact better than FPTP (the electoral reform movement can and frequently does resemble the People’s Front of Judea).

Harold Wilson once said that a week was a long time in politics, and if a week is a long time then imagine what six years is. The world has undergone an unforeseeable shift since reform was last seriously on the table. All three major parties have changed leader, and neither the then Prime Minister or his deputy are MPs in the 2017 parliament. Britain has voted to leave the EU. The host of The Apprentice is President of the United States. Bristol Rovers have been relegated twice and then underwent back to back promotions!

Moving away from the history of electoral reform into the present, only two major parties in Britain are against reform. Unfortunately they are the Conservatives and Labour, who happened to have received over 80% of the vote at the last election. But if anything this illustrates more why electoral reform is a good thing. Nigel Farage may not agree with Caroline Lucas on much, but they are both in favour of electoral reform.

Much like the issue of Europe, the two biggest bedfellows united against reform are the left of the Labour Party and the right of the Tories. Unlike Europe their reasons for their opposition are broadly similar, out and out tribalism and resistance to an end to “us and them” politics.

But it is only by ending tribalism in politics and by building a broad consensus do we bring about progressive change that benefits all. Differentiation in politics is still important, as demonstrated by the recent results for the SPD in Germany, but elections are won by building a broad church of opinion and by consensus and coalition.

Ah, that word coalition is one that pops up a lot. Detractors of reform say that ending FPTP will bring about constant coalition. Again, this is not a bad thing. Whilst the most recent coalition in the UK couldn’t be described as progressive, there is no reason that electoral reform should not lead to a Lib-Lab coalition, or a Lab-SNP (although I’d argue that nationalists by their very nature cannot be progressive!) coalition. Another criticism of reform that has come to the fore after the German election is that any proportional system would allow political representation to extremists such as the AfD. Yes, under pure PR UKIP would have won 82 seats in 2015, but it is wrong to shut out the voice of people who vote in not insignificant numbers for these parties simply because we disagree with their views. Indeed, the best way to combat these ideologies, both far left and right, is to expose them to greater scrutiny, not just screaming “racist” blindly.

Electoral reform would end the dangerous partisanship that global politics is currently facing. Be it Laura Pidcock’s laughable comments that she viewed all Tories as “the enemy,” Hillary Clinton referring to Trump supporters as “deplorables,” or Trump and his supporters chanting “lock her up” at election rallies, this partisanship threatens the democratic socialist policies that I and many others dream of being implemented. Many on the left of Labour (and the right of the Tories), such as Dennis Skinner, reject reform as they continue to insist on conducting politics as a partisan good and evil struggle, but if it wasn’t for this partisanship Donald Trump would not have been able to win the presidency on the platform he stood on, and a candidate like Jeb Bush would have more likely than not become the Republican nominee.

And for those who worry about electoral reform damaging the party that they support, which for the purpose of my argument is Labour, they need not. In 2017 Labour received 40% of the vote, which as it turned out was almost identical (to within five seats) to their share of the seats in Parliament. A projection done by the Electoral Reform Society even predicted that using STV Labour would be the largest party, with 297 seats to the Tories 284, and on those numbers, a Lib-Lab coalition was electorally viable.

This article doesn’t seek to debate which electoral system is the best, just that it is absolutely not First Past the Post (although I do have a preference for AMS). Given that the Labour Party even uses AV to conduct elections internally, right down to CLP and branch level (and without which David, rather than Ed Miliband would have been leader) it is hypocritical for its current policy platform to not embrace even a referendum on electoral reform. Given the 2017 manifesto states that “A Labour government will establish a Constitutional Convention to examine and advise on reforming of the way Britain works at a fundamental level,” it is wrong that the current leadership will not include electoral reform in this convention. So, as it states on the back of the card owned by every one of the 500,000 odd Labour members, given Labour believes that “power, wealth and opportunity should be in the hands of the many and not the few,” given that the Labour Party exists to be bold, to be radical, to take on the establishment and challenge the status quo, why on earth will it not embrace electoral reform?