Out of the box: the Tory case for electoral reform
6 min read
The Tories’ attachment to first-past-the-post is bound to come under immense strain following the election. Tim Bale argues they should think carefully before rejecting the case for reform
Britain’s first-past-thepost (FPTP) electoral system has always been something of a sacred cow to the country’s Conservatives. But it’s one they now need to think seriously about slaughtering.
At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the Conservative Party’s continental counterparts, convinced that FPTP would otherwise see them overwhelmed by parties representing Europe’s newly-enfranchised working class masses, were busily embracing proportional representation (PR).
Not so the Tories. Instead, they gambled on being able to appeal to the widespread nationalism and natural scepticism of ordinary working people. As long as they could simultaneously lock in the support of the country’s anxious, anti-socialist middle class, then they still stood a decent chance of beating a Labour Party that was well on the way to displacing the Liberals as their main competition.
And they were right. The odd interruption aside, the Conservatives could convincingly claim to be the country’s ‘natural party of government’ for decade upon decade. And even when the rise of Ukip meant they were finally faced with a serious competitor on their right flank, they assumed they could rely on FPTP to deny it the sort of parliamentary representation that populist radical right parties were beginning to enjoy all over Scandinavia and mainland Europe.
In 2015, for example, Ukip won its first (and, it turned out, only) seat at a general election – in Clacton, as it happens. But that was after it had attracted nearly 4m votes – a haul which, under PR, might have entitled it to around 80 MPs.
Had the Conservatives not managed (mainly by crucifying and cannibalising their Lib Dem coalition partners) to win an unexpected overall majority at that election – and had they not felt confident that their in-out EU referendum would ultimately do for Nigel Farage’s ‘people’s army’ – then they might, perhaps, have been more spooked by the fact that a large proportion of the votes that Ukip won had come from disillusioned Tories.
The elections of 2017 and 2019, however, went some way to assuage any such concerns. True, the party’s loss of its majority in 2017 after the United Kingdom voted for Brexit the year before was deeply disappointing. But it was difficult to argue that the paltry two per cent of the vote won by Ukip (led at the time by the hapless Paul Nuttall) had much to do with it – especially not when Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had surged so alarmingly to 40 per cent of the vote.
The 2019 election, however, looked like an out-and-out triumph – and not just over Labour (which dropped to just 32 per cent). The forerunner of Reform UK, the Brexit Party, which, having won getting on for a third of the vote in the European elections in May, was, come December, bulldozed back down to two per cent by a Tory leader, Boris Johnson, happy to play Farage at his own radical right-wing populist game.
It needed just 33,000 votes to elect a left-leaning MP, but 87,000 votes to elect their right-leaning counterpart
The comforting assumption that the country had returned to the two-party politics of old, however, has proved all-too premature. Whatever else the results this time have shown, they indicate that Britain’s long-term trend toward multiparty politics has resumed – and with a vengeance.
As a consequence, the mismatch between vote share and seat share is arguably more glaring than it has ever been. And now it is the right, rather than the left, which is suffering most.
Liberal progressives, disgusted by some of the rhetoric used by both the Conservatives and Reform during the campaign, might well feel that, morally speaking, they got exactly what they deserved. Arithmetically, however, that is clearly far from being the case.
Taken together, the Conservatives and Reform won 38 per cent of the vote – more than Labour’s 34 per cent. Yet they have only 30 per cent of Labour’s total of MPs to show for it. Moreover, if we look at the share of Conservative votes that were cast in seats that are now represented by a Conservative MP, then fewer than a third of Tory voters are set to have a voice of their choice in Parliament, and for Reform it’s even worse.
Even more starkly, if we play a notional game of left v right (ie Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens v the Conservatives and Reform) by totalling their respective vote hauls and then dividing by their respective hauls of MPs, then at this election it needed just 33,000 votes to elect a left-leaning MP, but 87,000 votes to elect their right-leaning counterpart.
Some Conservatives argue that this is all the more reason to ‘unite the right’. But that won’t be plain sailing: just look at the damage already done by internal divisions within the Conservative Party, and then think how much more bitter those arguments might become should it try to merge with or absorb Reform UK.
Rather than accepting some sort of ‘reverse takeover’ by Nigel Farage, or else continuing to shift ever further to the right in order to counter his insurgency – a strategy that (unless Labour messes up big time) will likely strand the party in opposition for years – a far better course of action would surely be to keep him at arm’s length but to surprise everyone by backing his call for electoral reform.
At the moment, as this election has clearly demonstrated, support for a party like Reform simply doesn’t translate into seats – and probably never will do if the UK persists with FPTP. A more proportional system, however, would see it get a truly significant number of MPs elected – MPs who could either join the Conservatives in a coalition or, as happens in many continental European countries, help it into office via a confidence and supply arrangement.
Tories out there should think carefully before responding with a crushingly predictable knee-jerk ‘no’. It took a quarter of a century last time for FPTP’s pendulum to swing back to benefitting them more than it did Labour. Do they really want to risk that happening again? After an absurdly disproportional result that has seen the Conservative Party’s Westminster contingent fall to a historic low, surely now is the time to think outside the box.
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