this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Aaaaaand this is why Labour will never countenance this within this parliament.
Despite still being the largest party they'd have to cooperate and form alliances with other parties. Why would they want to do that when they don't have to.
I fear the only way to PR of any sort is to have a situation with a hung parliament where Labour / Conservative parties hold no sway over the eventual coalition that would need to form. Instead a Green / Lib Dem coalition would need to introduce this. And 🤣 that will never happen.
To be fair, the PR result is far, far worse than what we have - only 4 Reform seats. It's not a great time to be selling PR.
That's so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don't stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it's going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour's current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.
Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.
The far right are part of several coalitions in countries with PR, though. It doesn't vaccinate your political system against that. The main thing you can do to reduce the march of the far right is to make people feel like their lives are getting better and better.
There is an enormous difference between the far-right being part of a coalition under a fair electoral system (for completeness, this rarely happens anyway) - in which the far-right lack a parliamentary majority and can't do all the awful things they desire - and the far-right having a parliamentary majority on a minority of the vote under a FPTP system.
We have seen that, under FPTP, it's possible to win a large majority on a 35% vote share - as Labour have done twice this century (2005 and 2024). The Tories + Reform just won a 38% vote share between them, so what do you think happens under FPTP if a Suella Braverman or Priti Patel led Tory party decides to fight the next election in an electoral pact with Reform?
This is the inoculation I am talking about. If the far right get 38% of the votes, I damn well don't want them getting >50% of the seats as tends to happen in FPTP.