Andy Burnham’s plans for electoral reform could end up boosting Reform UK’s representation in parliament, former No 10 special adviser Cleo Watson has warned.
The prime minister used his Labour Party conference speech to announce a new national commission on electoral reform and invited other parties to take part. He also committed Labour to fighting the next election on a manifesto pledge to change the voting system “so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard”.
Under the UK’s current first-past-the-post system, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins the seat. Proportional systems, by contrast, are designed to make the overall distribution of seats more closely reflect parties’ shares of the vote.
That could have significant consequences for Westminster. At the 2024 general election, Labour won 411 seats with 33.7 per cent of the vote, while Reform took 14.3 per cent but returned just five MPs.
The Liberal Democrats, with 12.2 per cent of the vote, won 72 seats. The Commons Library described the gap between vote share and seat share at that election as the most disproportionate on record.
Reacting to Burnham’s announcement on the latest episode of In The Room, Cleo warned Labour should be careful about what changing the system could mean.
“Imagine if those seats were distributed by actual vote share,” she said. “You should be extremely careful about fiddling around with these kinds of systems.”
Her co-host, former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, questioned Burnham’s approach from another angle.
“If someone wants to get electoral reform to happen, the thing they definitely don’t do is stand up at a party conference, make a speech announcing a commission, and then go, ‘if any other parties want to get involved, then by all means.’”
Helen argued that building genuine cross-party consensus on constitutional change usually requires slower, quieter negotiation rather than a high-profile announcement from the conference stage.
“He’s very clever. He looks so reasonable. His version of cross-party working is: ‘My ideas are great; if anyone wants to come agree with me, then they’re welcome.’”
Listen to the full episode of In The Room on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
