Why Britain needs PR+

In the wake of the general election, Peter Ramsay considers the strongest argument for Britain’s existing electoral system, and explains why it no longer works. He argues that we now need proportional representation, but that won’t be enough to reinvigorate democratic participation in government unless it is part of a larger reform to the electoral system.

Britain’s First-Past-the-Post electoral system has failed. This is not merely because the parliament that it has just produced is wildly unrepresentative of the votes cast. Certainly, a government that has 63 per cent of the seats on only 34 per cent of the votes cast, and the support of less than 20 per cent of those eligible to vote, seems to have a power out of all proportion to its real support among the population. But the failure of First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) runs even deeper than that.

As the political theorist, Richard Tuck pointed out recently in Unherd, the true virtue of FPTP is that, by tending to create a competition between two great parties that are themselves broad coalitions, a FPTP election amounts to something like a referendum on which party should govern, and on what programme. This means that voters are not merely ‘passively represented’ in parliament but we become ‘active participants’ in democratic politics, because our vote gives us some direct responsibility for who governs, and the government in turn feels the weight of this mandate. 

By contrast, Tuck suggests that PR is more like a glorified opinion poll. The seats in parliament may be proportionally distributed but that is unlikely to lead to a majority for one party, and this means that once voters’ opinions have been polled and seats distributed, then coalitions will be formed through backroom deals. In other words, only a few party leaders get to participate actively in or take responsibility for the real political work of deciding who will govern and on what programme, with voters reduced to mere spectators.

There is probably no more important question in a democracy than the one that Tuck raises here. The active participation by the population in the formation of governments is what underpins the political strength and authority of a democratic state. It is the erosion of this living political relationship between citizens and rulers that is the ultimate source of the growing practical incompetence of the state. Our problem, as Tuck recognises, is that this aspect of active participation and political responsibility has already drained away under the FPTP system. In 2019 the electorate was responsible for choosing Boris Johnson’s Tories over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to govern on a very clear mandate: leaving the EU, controlling immigration and levelling up. The first was done but the other two were cast aside, and the Tory Party got rid of Johnson on the basis of opinion polling on a matter unrelated to their electoral mandate. The electorate were only passive spectators to that process; as we also were to the decision to replace Johnson with Liz Truss, and then her with Rishi Sunak.

It is true that the Tories have now paid the electoral price for their failure to respect their 2019 mandate from the electorate. But it is a stretch to argue that the new government is a consequence of voters taking responsibility by actively choosing Labour in preference to the Tories. Tuck notes that the idea of the FPTP election as a referendum on which of two parties should govern has many implications, and he spells out two in particular. 

One of them is that there is a responsibility on great parties to avoid becoming narrow factions, and to present themselves as plausible governments. Another is that there is also a responsibility on citizens who want to think of themselves as legislators to treat their vote as genuinely a contribution to the creation of a government, and not merely as the expression of their feelings.

The 2024 election showed that the major parties have failed completely on these grounds, and that FPTP has failed along with them. The Conservative Party’s record of political delinquency left it entirely implausible as a government: no one voting for it seriously believed they were voting for the next government. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has spent the past three years turning Labour into a narrow centrist faction, first marginalising and then driving out its traditional left-wing. Moreover, since Starmer’s offer was so minimal, vague and evasive, nobody could really be said to be taking responsibility for Labour’s programme or giving it a mandate.  According to survey evidence, only two per cent of voters backed Labour primarily on the basis of its policies. For most, the vote was a negative one, to get the Tories out. Instead of taking responsibility for government more than half of former Tory voters expressed their feelings by staying at home, or voting for Reform (if they were Brexiters) or the Lib Dems (if they were Remainers); Labour’s left and many of its Muslim voters expressed theirs by opting for the Greens or Muslim independents. 

In 2024 FPTP did not bring us a new government with the strength of a popular mandate nor, therefore, with the political authority provided by the active participation of an electorate taking responsibility for its rule. On the contrary, the new government rules over a withdrawn population in which only a tiny group of voters feel any loyalty to it and the smallest proportion of voters in the history of universal suffrage in the UK felt moved enough to vote at all. 

It can be argued that Reform voters were taking responsibility for the future shape of the political opposition and the alternative to Labour in so far as they were making a conscious effort to replace or transform the Tories. However in so doing they voted for a party that is precisely committed to PR, on the explicit grounds that it will improve not only the representation of citizens but also participation in elections.

The old political coalitions that underpinned the Conservative and Labour parties have fragmented so that we now no longer have a two-party system. Depending on how you look at it, we now have four to six electorally significant parties. While in these circumstances PR certainly looks like a fairer system, the deeper question that Tuck raises is whether PR can reverse the decay of active participation and political responsibility among the population. 

Tuck doesn’t think so, but it seems to me to be an essential part of the route to active participation. To understand how PR could help to resolve the fundamental problem, it is first necessary to understand the nature of the problem that has led to FPTP’s failure and then to recognise that on its own PR, while necessary, is not a sufficient reform to the electoral system.

Ultimately the breakdown of the two-party system, which provided the basis for FPTP to facilitate the active participation of the citizenry in government, is a consequence of the underlying exhaustion of the ideological competition that has characterised British politics since the 1840s: liberal v conservative, followed by socialist v conservative. The decay of fundamental ideological competition has been eroding the two-party system electorally for decades as party membership declined, a plurality of voters stopped voting, and secessionist parties and national-populism began their long rise among those who still did. 

In the nearly three decades of declining voter participation and vote share for the duopoly, there is one significant reversal of the latter trend: between 2015 and 2019, the Brexit years. For the first time in a long time, the referendum gave voters the sense that their vote counted for something. Moreover, with Corbyn leading the Labour Party, the two main parties seemed to offer something genuinely different from each other. The Brexit vote gave Westminster the chance to revive the two-party system as voters returned to more active participation in politics. But it was an opportunity that was spurned, first by Labour and subsequently by the Tories. Starmer has repudiated Corbyn’s socialist gestures and returned his party to the Thatcherite doctrine, adopted by Tony Blair, that ‘There is no alternative to the market’. The Tories have been brought down by their devotion to the very same doctrine, and their consequent inability to make anything of the 2019 coalition they briefly created. This process has exposed the political traditions of the two main parties for the zombies they are. 

The politics of the twentieth century are dead, and they cannot solve the problems they have bequeathed to the twenty-first. It is these concrete and novel historical circumstances that have stripped FPTP of the virtue Tuck attributes to it. A large majority of citizens are politically cynical and negative at best, apathetic at worst. If we want voters to be active participants in democratic life, to feel their responsibility for who governs us, we above all need to be able to inspire voters to vote for somebody – or some programme – rather than merely against somebody else. And for that we are going to need new political thinking. 

We can incentivise that new political thinking and experiment in politics by ending the grip of the old duopoly’s dead hand on parliament. Perhaps this might happen eventually under FPTP, but it will be painfully slow. It is now 14 years since the Coalition government admitted that ‘our political system is broken’, and eight since the Brexit earthquake proved the extent of popular dissatisfaction with the political system. PR is the obvious way to help breathe some political life back into the state by lowering the bar to entry onto the national political stage for new ideas.

However, Tuck is sceptical that PR could solve the problem precisely because PR appears to him to lead only to passive representation, with the hard political work being done behind closed doors after the election. The question then is how to ensure that our representatives are sufficiently disciplined by voters for the electoral process under PR to be more than a mere opinion poll prior to an entirely delegated decision-making process about who the government is and what it will do; that is, how to ensure that the voters remain active participants. The key is to build a stronger relation between the citizenry and the legislature by making party members and supporters a weightier part of the political process, so that party leaders and managers are not free from the influence of members and supporters to do what they like after an election. PR on its own cannot do this; it is only a necessary step towards restoring political accountability. 

By incentivising new ideas in parliamentary politics, PR may draw more citizens, and a wider range of citizens, into politics. But as party members and supporters, those citizens need real power over the direction and decision-making of political parties. 

The first way to achieve this would be to outlaw corporate funding of political parties. Only funding by individuals should be permitted, and that should have an annual limit. In this way, party leaderships will be much more dependent on individual members and supporters, and on developing a large and loyal following rather than relying on a few big donors. The second way is to make elected representatives more vulnerable to recall on political grounds or to shorten the electoral cycle significantly. Both these reforms will limit party leaders’ room for manoeuvre after elections requiring them to convince party supporters of big political decisions so that the latter will go out and convince voters. These limitations on political leaderships will incentivise serious vertical political dialogue on the difficult political compromises that politics requires between those elected to govern and those whom they govern, drawing voters in as Tuck’s active participants in government through the mediation of party members.

PR is not a magic bullet. Electoral systems have to be understood in their concrete historical context. The case against FPTP is not that it can never do what Tuck claims for it, but that it has failed because its efficacy depends on an underlying ideological competition that has in fact decayed and lost its purchase on the needs of the nation. Similarly, the case for PR is specific to this moment. In the short run it might well lead to a tired Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition; and it is striking that its most energetic supporter, Nigel Farage, runs a party that grants no influence at all to its ordinary paying supporters. Nevertheless, PR gives electoral houseroom to new political ideas, and if its introduction is campaigned for as part of a wider package of reforms to the political system that we proposed in our book Taking Control, then it will be part of what we need to revive democratic participation and reconstitute the state on a democratic basis before it is too late. Even then, reforms to the political system can only facilitate the revival of democracy if they do in fact incentivise new ideas about what government should do, ideas that are able to inspire the governed to again take responsibility for their government.