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LABOUR will win the General Election and likely by a record margin.
The first MRP projection at the start of June suggested that Keir Starmer could be heading to Downing Street with a historic majority of 194 seats – or 422 seats total.
But imagine for a second that the UK used proportional representation (PR) – not first past the post (FPTP) – a system in which the distribution of seats corresponds closely with the proportion of the total votes cast for each party.
A rolling average of UK-wide polls puts Labour on 41%, with the Tories and Reform on 20% and 17% respectively.
That is just a 4% swing if the two right-wing parties signed a pact or (hypothetically) entered into some sort of a coalition. Some polls would even put them ahead.
Hell, Nigel Farage signalled he was open to such an arrangement a few weeks ago. And a YouGov poll last week said that among those who backed the Conservatives in 2019, most (54-57%) would either be happy or at least unbothered by a merger.
I hear what you might be saying. FPTP has been used in the UK since 1950 with no indication that will change anytime soon.
Some might even say this is a pretty solid argument against PR. A common complaint with the system is that it reduces accountability since an ousted party of government can retain office by finding new coalition partners. Another one is that PR can potentially provide a route for extremists to force their way into the political mainstream.
But it's also easily the most popular form of democracy for countries in the world today and, if it were implemented in the UK, certainly paints a different story of the current political reality.
Keir Starmer’s Labour barely beating the Tories and Reform percentage-wise is still hardly a full vote of confidence from the British public.
And it points to a serious point of concern for the party going forward, even if they win by a landslide as expected.
