Burnham Should Rip Up First Past the Post

A poll at the end of June was remarkable — not for what it said about any one party, but for what it said about all of them. It put Reform at 21%, and Labour and the Conservatives there too.

Polls since have varied, not least with the Burnham bounce. This week's YouGov figures put Reform, Labour and the Conservatives on 23%, 22% and 20% respectively, though it almost no longer matters which exact number attaches to which party.

What those numbers do to the system

First past the post is not a neutral counting method. It is a mechanism with a specific assumption built into it: that two large parties will contest most seats, and the winner in each will command something approaching a majority of the votes cast there.

When three parties sit within three points of one another, that assumption fails completely. Seats begin to be won on low thirties, high twenties, sometimes less. Small swings produce enormous changes in seat totals. Identical national vote shares can deliver wildly different parliaments depending on where the votes happen to fall.

The system stops translating votes into power and starts allocating it, on the basis of geographic accident.

The prime minister's own position

Burnham has supported electoral reform for years, which is what makes this a live question rather than a hypothetical one. A national commission into proportional representation is within his gift.

The resistance is internal. Parts of Labour regard the current system as the party's route back to majority government, and reform as a permanent surrender of the possibility of governing alone.

Why that calculation has stopped working

That argument was coherent when Labour could reasonably expect 40% of the vote. At 22% in a fragmented field, first past the post is no longer a reliable friend — it is a lottery ticket that occasionally pays out enormously and frequently pays nothing.

A party polling in the low twenties under this system can win a landslide majority or be reduced to a rump, on similar vote shares, depending on the distribution of everyone else's support. That is not a strategic asset. It is exposure to variance, dressed up as an advantage.

The argument that should actually decide it

The self-interested case is available and it is not the important one.

A government elected on a quarter of the vote, in a country where three-quarters voted for someone else, has a legitimacy problem that no amount of parliamentary arithmetic resolves. That is true whichever party it is, which is precisely why it should be fixed by whoever happens to hold the pen — and why the objection that reform helps opponents misses the point.

Rearguard reactionaries will try to block a commission. They may succeed. But the argument they are making is that a system should be retained because it might one day misallocate power in their favour, and that is a difficult thing to say out loud.

We should want more democracy, not less. A commission does not settle the question; it opens it, which is the least a country in this position should expect.

What a commission would actually have to settle

Proportional representation is not one system, and the choice between versions matters more than the principle.

A closed list hands power to party selectors. A single transferable vote preserves a constituency link at the cost of complexity. An additional member system, as used in Scotland and Wales, produces two classes of representative with different mandates.

Each has a real record in a real country, which is precisely why a commission is the right instrument rather than a referendum. The last British attempt at reform failed partly because the vote was held on a single option that few of its own advocates actually wanted, and the defeat was then treated as having settled the wider question for a generation.