A first-past-the-post voting system is a phenomenally crude and democratically weak way of electing MPs. All the prizes go to the party that wins a minority of the votes, with other parties excluded – a route to unchecked, unbalanced, even corrupt, government.
Elsewhere in Europe, only Belarus adopts it, backed by Vladimir Putin, as a way of ensuring that Russia’s puppet president, Alexander Lukashenko, has remained in power since 1994 to ensure Belarus’s fealty.
The Conservative party’s dominance – it has been in power twice as often as Labour since 1918, notwithstanding it never winning a majority of votes – is because the opposition parties fight each other and divide their vote. The only rational response, if not an electoral pact to allow only one candidate against the Tories in each constituency, is some form of informal non-aggression pact. At the very least, Liberal Democrats and Labour should not campaign actively in those seats where neither has a chance of winning and give the other as free a run as possible.
It was thus very welcome news last week that the two parties are discussing precisely that. Labour will not campaign actively in the Lib Dems’ top 30 target seats where they lie a good second, nor will the Lib Dems campaign actively in Labour’s top target seats. Only in Sheffield Hallam and Cambridge is the arrangement threatened, but not enough to imperil the wider enterprise. Given Labour’s challenge – it needs to win 128 seats to form a government – if the Lib Dems can win 15 seats in the Tories’ blue wall it makes a non-Tory government more likely. This is no more than scaling up what was done in the Batley and Spen byelection last summer, where the Lib Dems fought a limited campaign, so allowing Labour to hold a tough seat, and Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire, where only the Lib Dems had the prospect of winning the seats. They duly won.
Most party activists understand and support the argument, although for Labour the memory of Nick Clegg supporting austerity remains a blot on the Lib Dem record, while Lib Dems cannot easily forget or forgive Jeremy Corbyn. Both should relax. Most Lib Dem and Labour members share the same views of both. In the Lib Dems’ case, the prospect of another coalition is toxic: any arrangement will be confined to agreeing to support a minority Labour government on a “supply and motion” basis – voting through the budget and treating each legislative motion on its merits.
Purists will say voters require a choice, that parties should not take their preferences for granted and that the policies are distinct. Wrong. Most voters understand the shortcomings of first past the-post and want to vote wisely, hence the recent byelection results and the growth of tactical voting websites. As for policy, the priorities are shared: clean up politics, repair our broken relationship with the EU, mobilise levelling up, bind our fractured society and reset capitalism. There will even be agreement on reforming the voting system, now trade union opposition that blocked it at Labour’s 2021 party conference has been dropped.
But the parties cannot be too quiet in their non-aggression pact. Voters – and newspapers such as the Observer that have long championed tactical voting – need to know what the parties expect in different seats. The sample sizes to get accurate opinion poll predictions in hundreds of constituencies are too large and expensive and it is easy to make mistakes. Both parties urge open and transparent government. They are right. They should start with open and transparent communication with the electorate about which seats they intend fiercely to contest and those they don’t. Let’s do it properly this time.
