The vote at Labour conference in 2022 was passed overwhelmingly and to loud cheers: the party should ditch the first past the post electoral system in favour of proportional representation (PR). So what happens next? Almost certainly nothing – at least for now.
When it comes to electoral reform, Labour is politely but completely divided. The members are hugely keen on the idea, with 140 local parties submitting the motion that was passed in autumn 2022. The leadership, in contrast, could barely be less interested.
And even though first past the post has just delivered Keir Starmer a big Commons majority, some in the party wonder whether the relatively shaky foundations of this mighty victory necessitate a rethink on electoral reform, if not immediately then before too long.
Sandy Martin, a former Labour MP who now chairs the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, says thinking about a move to PR should be a priority for the party, despite the way it benefited so handsomely from the current system.
“It would only take Reform and the Conservatives to unite and they might have a majority on the same scale we had this year,” he said. “But under PR, Labour would most likely be able to form a government quite comfortably with the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, and this would be preferable to a Conservative-Reform government.”
As well as self-interest, Martin said, first past the post felt increasingly inappropriate when only 58% of the vote share went to the main two parties: “In England we now have five parties, and in Scotland and Wales you have six. You can’t run a first past the post system – where one party is basically trying to beat the other party – when you’ve got five or six parties to play with.”
Starmer has previously expressed at least some support for electoral reform, saying in 2020 that there was a need to “address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count”.
However, his leadership team have dismissed any chance of action, saying people would be “kidding themselves” if they believed it would find any bandwidth within a first term of government.
Neal Lawson, from the Labour pressure group Compass, said the very way Starmer had won a vast Commons majority on little more than a third of the popular vote had helped to increase the arguments for PR.
“You’ve kind of got an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, in the sense that obviously, the case for PR has been ratcheted up enormously by how disproportionate the outcome of the election was, up against a Labour-ist mindset that means justify ends and it doesn’t really matter, democratically, how you get there.”
The way Labour and the Lib Dems failed to campaign against each other in seats where one had a clearly better chance of winning was “a weird mashup of a two party system in a multiparty reality”, Lawson said.
“They are going to be hard to shift, having won 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote. In self-interest terms it would almost be madness for them to do it. But we just don’t know what’s around the corner. If they don’t deliver stability and enough growth, and things start falling apart, then that irresistible force might start being on the table.”
PR has been a popular cause among Labour members for some years, although party conference motions supporting its introduction had previously been blocked by unions. But several unions have since changed their minds, with the 2022 motion that was passed saying first past the post “has catastrophically failed to represent people’s wishes, needs and votes” and that “Labour must commit to fixing it”.
However, it was not binding, and while Labour do plan to amend the electoral system in some ways, for example by introducing automatic voter registration, there will be no changes to voting.
While the Conservatives also support retaining first past the post, the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, Greens, Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru all back a shift to PR.
Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said that although a change of heart from Starmer’s government seemed unlikely for now, things could change.
“The paradox of this is we have just had an election that is probably the most stark demonstration of the disproportionality and other injustices of our current electoral system, and for that exact reason, we won’t be seeing any action soon,” he said.
“Labour have managed an extraordinary optimisation of their support under first past the post, and having achieved that outcome they’re not likely to want to put it at risk when they don’t see a need to. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.”
However, Ford argued, Labour reformists “will need to be making the groundwork for that argument”, not least because the chances of repeating such an electoral success seemed slim.
“It’s not possible to pull off a triple backflip with pike and land it perfectly every time, electorally. Sometimes you’re going to belly flop, and the same vote share could produce a drastically lower number of seats,” he said.
“You have 70 or so Lib Dem MPs, and all of them are elected in places where Labour are completely out of the running. And you have 40 Labour/Green seats with the Greens in second place, and a whole bunch of Labour/SNP seats.
“It’s perfectly possible to imagine an outcome next time where the Labour vote drops relatively modestly, and the obvious electoral coalition is Labour plus some combination of the parties I’ve just named. And the number one bargaining chip would be electoral reform.
“They really need to think about, ‘Well, how would we negotiate with these other parties when that point arrives?’ And the obvious thing to do would be to offer electoral reform on Labour’s terms rather than letting those parties dictate the terms.”
