electoral reform – thinking liberal

Britain’s politics is a function of its electoral system

The changed electoral map. Source: the Liberal Democrats

It was a dull election campaign but an earthquake of a result – not less significant for it having been widely predicted. Above all it shows just how much the country’s electoral system dictates its politics. That is how Labour won, and that is how they will stay in power.

I resisted the temptation to update my electoral predictions last week, as I didn’t have much more to add. If I had I would have talked up the Greens a bit, and also predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would win his seat of Islington North – notwithstanding a very dodgy local poll saying that he was well behind. I sensed that as people became more assured of a substantial Labour victory, with even the Tories saying so, that left-leaning voters, unenthused by the party’s relentless centrism, would vote for alternatives. The Tory tack of talking up Labour, referred to as the “Queensland Strategy”, to try and persuade people to vote Conservative to provide an opposition to Labour, was laughable. The Tories showed much more interest in fighting each other than opposing Labour.

The results proved me broadly correct, including those late predictions I didn’t publish – though I was surprised about how well the pro-Gaza independents did, unseating the prominent Labour front-bencher Jonathan Ashworth, for example, and nearly doing so to Labour big-hitter Wes Streeting. There were two main surprises for me though. The first was just how low was the overall share of the vote that Labour eventually got (about 35%) – much lower than the polling predictions, and with a much lower lead over the Conservatives (10% compared to a consistent 20%, though this dropped a bit in the last polls). This did not have much impact on the result in seats, though; a lot of this dynamic was happening in safe Labour seats, with Labour supporters moving to Greens and Independents, or not showing up to vote. The other surprise was quite how many seats the Liberal Democrats won. My argument had been that weakness on the ground would place an upper limit on the party’s performance of about 50 seats; in the event they won 72 – and nearly won a slew of others. There is an upper bound to Lib Dem performance – but it’s quite a bit higher than I thought it was. In about half the seats the Lib Dems won, pre-election campaigning was weak – but there was enough local council strength for the party to make the case for tactical votes, and there must also have been a bit of help from the national campaign, which managed to increase support for the party overall, over the course of the campaign (though it ended up in vote share more or less where it was in 2019).

Interestingly, the MRP polls, a big feature of this campaign, did not come off as badly as the ordinary ones, though they made similar mistakes with the overall vote shares for Labour and the Conservatives. The Labour victory was at the lower end of the range of these projections, but at least it was within it. They picked up more of a sense of how efficient the Labour and Lib Dem polling was in electoral terms, and inefficient was that for Reform UK and the Greens. They didn’t see the rise of the independents, and the projections for individual seats were often wayward, especially for the distribution of votes between the parties. As I suggested in my comments during the campaign, they exaggerated Labour strength in Lib Dem targets – allowing many a Labour leaflet to suggest that the party was in contention when it was in fact a distant third.

So the Labour victory was big but shallow, with many close results. Indeed, supporters of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, noted that the party won fewer votes than when their man was leading – making the narrative of why Sir Keir Starmer’s stewardship proved so successful much more complicated than the mainstream explanation suggests. Labour did not win, so much as the Tories lost. Sir Keir Starmer did not win over many people to his party (and he lost a good few), but he did not scare as many Tory voters as his predecessor – allowing them to stay at home or vote for Reform.

To be fair on Sir Keir, he seems to understand the thinness of his mandate. He is not using the scale of his victory to suggest that he has public support for radical policies. He is trying to establish a reputation for competence – something the Conservatives lost in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Labour will, of course, relentlessly blame the country’s “14 years of Tory chaos” – never mind that these followed three years of Labour chaos, and that the first six years were not especially chaotic. But whether it was 8 years of chaos or 14 makes no real difference to voters. This is a sensible strategy. The populist right plan a relentless attack on Labour for being “woke” – attending to the “luxury beliefs” of liberals and the identity politics of some ethnic minority politicians. Sir Keir’s best hope of winning the next election is to contrast the wildness of these attacks with the unfussy competence of reality. Good luck with that. He has the discouraging examples of Francois Hollande in France, and Gerhard Schroder in Germany. Two uncharismatic but competent left-of-centre politicians who were/are unable to manage the stresses of modern politics. Still, those leaders were operating in a very different political systems. So long as Labour can keep the right divided, its chances are good.

On the question of the right, I continue to follow the writings of populist promoter Matt Goodwin. I like him because he is reasonably factual, unlike many of his fellow travellers, who trade in conspiracy theories and lies. He did not have a particularly good election. He was elated by the Reform surge after its leader, Nigel Farage, started to seriously engage in the campaign. He went on to breathlessly call an inflection point, with Reform surpassing the Conservatives, backed up his own polling organisation, which proved by some margin to be the least accurate of all those publishing polls. But then Reform flatlined, and Mr Goodwin started to talk about the French elections instead. Looking back on the election, he is now calling the Reform glass half full. It has indeed peeled off the working class/lower middle class part of the Tory 2019 coalition, but it is making little progress beyond that. The Conservatives outpolled them by 10% – and its much stronger ground organisation showed. A pile of second places is no use in the British electoral system – and you need a strong ground operation to turn those second places into wins – just ask the Liberal Democrats. Complaining about the electoral system doesn’t cut it. The chances of Reform doing that on their own in more than a handful of places looks thin.

That leaves a stalemate on the right. Clearly it needs to rebuild the 2019 coalition, across working class and middle class voters, and in the north, south, east and west of England and Wales. Reform can’t do that. The Conservatives have two strategies open to them: the first is to displace Reform from the ground they now hold, and then rope in the middle classes and professionals later. But that will be hard: they have lost trust, and now that Mr Farage is in parliament he is in a strong position to fight them off – unless they can find a way of bringing him on board. The other strategy is to regain the middle ground, and then attack and squeeze Reform nearer to the next election, rather as David Cameron successfully did in 2015 to Ukip, a Reform forerunner. But Tory grassroots seem to have little patience for such a strategy, and they need somebody to lead it who is untainted by the Johnson, Truss and Sunak regimes – their own Keir Starmer. The likelihood is that the party will tear itself apart while trying to decide. This is Labour’s best hope, as they inevitably get bogged down in the mid-term.

What of the Lib Dems? Their large slew of MPs will give them more money, and more clout in parliament. It is a very different party from the ill-disciplined and eclectic group of local activists of the early 2000s, who often opposed Labour from the left. The centre is much stronger – this year’s campaign was notable for the strength of its central campaign, and consistency of its message across the country. They will seek to consolidate their gains, and build up new prospects. Their campaigning will continue with the same voter-led messages (health, care and the environment). But there is a hunger within the party for something more idealistic, defining what the party is all about. There will also be pressure to ramp up messaging around Europe. Perhaps they are shaping up to be part of a coalition with Labour in 2028/29.

But the big message of this campaign, demonstrated by both Labour and the Lib Dems, and in reverse by Reform and the Greens, is that elections are won by constituency-led targeting. The electoral system is shaping politics as completely as ever. Will electoral reform come back onto the political agenda? There are three broad options. The first is the Alternative Vote, which is not much more than a tweak to the existing system, but one which would allow those disenfranchised Reform and Green voters (to say nothing of third-placed Conservatives and Labour ones) more of a say. This would suit the Conservatives best – the Australian experience is that such a system ultimately reinforces the power to the two main established parties. And yet they united in opposing exactly this system when it was put to a referendum in 2011. The more radical alternative is proportional representation, which would suit Reform and the Greens best. This would have Lib Dem support too, though it is unclear that the party would benefit much, and it also has the support of many Labour grassroots.

But such chatter is irrelevant. The Labour leadership is focused on its core “missions”, which do not include political reform – and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Until there is a public groundswell to change the system, as there was in New Zealand in the 1990s, there will be no serious move to change things. The British electorate is very conservative, as that 2011 referendum showed. And if such a groundswell was going to happen, I think it would have happened already. Reform and the Greens need to learn from the Lib Dems and embrace local politics.

Electoral efficiency in British elections. From *The Economist*

Electoral reform: is there any hope?

The British parliament will soon debate electoral reform, thanks to a citizens’ petition. This campaign looks hopeless, but then so did Brexit not that long ago – so am I being too pessimistic?

This was one of the issues that first drew me into politics, back in the 1970s, along with Europe (I was an enthusiastic pro-European from the start). However, since the referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) in 2011, I have found the topic deeply depressing. That referendum showed how low the forces of conservatism could sink in order to defend what they thought was in their interests. And then The Economist, the paper that originally persuaded me of the virtues of AV, turned against it, simply because they didn’t want to back a loser. That showed just how hard reform will be.

Is it worth getting excited about? My chief objection to the current system is that it is undemocratic – not so much in the overall result, but in how the results are achieved at constituency level, where an MP can be picked on a minority of the vote. And then there is the issue of safe seats, which mean that so many people have no meaningful choice. Travelling across southern England during the June election was to witness a depressing sea of blue. Supporters of other parties were effectively being disenfranchised, as it was not worth these parties putting any serious resources into these contests. I received not one single piece of literature from either of the two main parties where I lived, because neither thought it was worthwhile campaigning there. As it happens they were mistaken – Labour took the seat off the Conservatives. It pays political parties to concentrate on a small minority of seats; the problem for the Conservatives in June was that they picked the wrong ones.

Still, other electoral systems have their disadvantages too, and it is hard to argue that they engage their voters more effectively. Political disenchantment is widespread, and largely independent of electoral system. Still, injustice is injustice. The British system excludes more people than it should, and all too often it empowers the mediocre, rewarding schmoozing with activists rather than dialogue with ordinary electors.

Proportional representation (PR) has been brought into British politics since 1997 (and earlier in Northern Ireland). This was first in the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales, and then the largely powerless London Assembly. Elections to the European Parliament were also changed to a proportional system. This has given oxygen to smaller political parties, provided that they achieve a certain critical mass – which few manage. Ukip was obviously a big beneficiary, and also the Greens; less so the Liberal Democrats, in spite of their ardent support – the party has had little idea of how to campaign under proportional systems – preferring locally targeted messages to broad ones. But perhaps the biggest beneficiary has been the Conservatives. The party was practically wiped out in Scotland under First Past the Post – they won no seats there in the UK parliament in 1997, and hung on to just one from 2001 until this year. That is enough to suffocate a political party – as Labour have found in the south of England, outside London. But with PR the Conservatives established a substantial presence in the Scottish Parliament, and led a fightback from there. The party is now in second place, and gained 12 seats in the UK parliament – without which the party nationally would have been sunk.

But implementing PR at UK level involves some tricky calculations for the main political parties. Actually not so tricky for the Conservatives; they have been so consistently opposed to reform in the past that a change of mind would cause major ructions they don’t need – even if it would be a good way to build the party up in north England. Labour would stand to gain hugely in southern England, where it struggles to get traction under the current system. The party has a strong brand with wide appeal, and it could use this like the Tories have in Scotland. But it also reduces their chances of achieving an overall majority in Westminster. And to many in the party, nothing matters more than the possibility of monopoly power at national level.

But there is a possible compromise, which might appeal to the more strategic Labour and Conservative leaders: PR for local government. Far too many local authorities are run as one party states, to the huge detriment of the quality of government. PR would tackle this, and give both parties a chance to establish themselves in areas where the other dominates. And it might even make life easier for parties in those areas where they do have monopolies: they do not have to stuff their benches with mediocrities to make the numbers up – and it should sharpen them up generally, as competition usually does. I think it was Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s biggest mistake not to go for local electoral reform in the coalition negotiations with the Conservatives in 2010, instead of what turned out to be that hopeless referendum on AV. David Cameron and George Osborne might just have gone for it. Whether it would have done the Lib Dems much good is another matter – but democracy would have been a winner. The party must not make that mistake again, and it should make local electoral reform a major plank of its policy platform. There is a precedent: the Lib Dems forced local electoral reform in Scotland on a reluctant Labour Party as part of a coalition deal.

That’s one small hope. I don’t see either Labour or Tory establishments having the guts to take such a reform forward by themselves however. The only possibility I can see is if Labour’s newly recruited younger activists take an interest in the issue: such people tend to mistrust systems handed down by their elders. The parliamentary debate will hopefully flush the Labour leadership out. As more younger activists get involved with the injustices of the current system, that could create some real pressure. especially if the Lib Dems can become competitive to Labour leaning voters again.

Long shots. But that is all advocates of electoral reform have.

Parliamentary boundary changes: good idea, could be better

People grow attached to the status quo. There used to be a large packing crate in our garden when I was a boy. When my elder brother problem objected that it was unsightly and we should get rid of it, my mother countered that: “But the cat likes to sit on it!”. This was too much for my brother who took an axe to the crate shortly afterwards. An unsightly item was removed, and the cat had no difficulty in adapting.

So it is with the British parliamentary boundary reviews. There’s a lot of fuss, with many saying that fundamental democratic principles are being undermined. But the arguments offered against them are little better than that offered by my mother (who did come to see the humour of it) of our packing crate.

The idea behind the reforms is that all constituencies should have roughly the same number of electors, so that everybody’s vote carries the same weight in the political process. That is a solid democratic principle. The problem is that equal constituency size implies arbitrary boundaries. Under the current arrangements quite a lot of weight is put on natural geographical or administrative boundaries. That can lead to some quite big variations in size. In my local borough of Wandsworth we get three seats, but two of them are 15% bigger than the third. Across the country the variations can be much bigger, even excluding the peripheral highlands and islands (Western Isles is very small; Isle of Wight very big). A further principle is to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600, which is still large by international standards.

The main argument offered against the new boundaries is that they are too arbitrary, and, to listen to the rhetoric, you would think they would tear communities apart, with half a village represented by one MP and half by another, say. I really struggle to understand this. MPs may be moderately important community figures, but they hardly define communities. If they did we would already be in deep trouble. In Wandsworth the local parliamentary seats are all very well for the residents of Battersea, Putney and Tooting – but the communities that lie between these (Wandsworth Town and Balham) are carved up between three different constituencies each. Life goes on.

A related issue is that the new seats will cross local authority boundaries much more often. In Wandsworth none of the three current seats crosses a boundary. Under the new proposals the borough will be split between four seats, all shared with neighbouring boroughs. No doubt this will make constituency casework a bit harder. But frankly I’m not sure it is entirely healthy for parliamentarians to get too closely associated with their local governments – they are meant to sit above that layer of government and judge in the common interest. They may even gain from comparing the way different authorities handle things.

Another issue is that boundaries will change more frequently and by larger amounts, to reflect population changes. Locally we have a major development that will be smack in the middle of one of the new seats; when all these new people move in this will cause the boundaries to be changed – knocking on into neighbouring seats. But there’s too much job security with MPs as it is – it’s good for them to have to sell themselves in new areas every so often. There are too many safe seats as it is.

A more subtle argument is that new areas represent equal electorates but not equal populations. Quite a few people aren’t on the register, or don’t count because they aren’t allowed to vote in parliamentary elections (through not being UK citizens). Surely the interests of these people should be represented too? But it is hard to overcome the principle of equal rights for all those entitled to vote. And frankly, those who deliberately avoid being registered (which is in fact illegal) shouldn’t be given weight. The running of a democratic society requires a degree of active engagement by citizens; people have a perfect right to say they aren’t interested and not vote – but if they can’t even be bothered to register, how hard are we to fight for their democratic entitlement? And why should their neighbours be empowered in their place? There is an issue for MPs with a lot of non-voting constituents generating a bigger case load – but if that really is a problem, they should simply be paid more.

Mind you, the Boundary Commission’s current proposals could be less arbitrary. They have created some rather silly looking constituencies. But the consultation and appeal process should help a lot here. It’s not too hard to come up with some better looking alternatives. One idea I have seen in our area does an even better job than the existing boundaries, though this may knock on badly further afield, managing to reunite the currently split communities of Wandsworth Town, Balham and Clapham, while keeping Putney, Tooting and Battersea together.

Better still would be to have a system of proportional presentation, where party representations would be based directly on votes cast. You could have less arbitrary constituencies then. But the British political class has set its face against such radical ideas; they should accept the consequences.