If there was any bigger loser of last Thursday’s elections than the Labour Party then it was surely the UK’s First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system.
FPTP has long been a punchbag of the UK’s progressives, especially supporters of the Greens and Lib Dems, who feel it unfairly limits the number of seats they win relative to their vote. But as electoral systems go, it is not entirely without merit.
When elections are contests between two, or perhaps three, political parties, FPTP works reasonably well: whichever candidate in a given constituency gets the most votes, wins. It is easy to explain and easy to understand, counting is straightforward, and it helps maintain a connection between MPs and constituencies, giving strong local MPs some independence from their party leadership.
It’s not a system entirely without strengths. But Thursday’s council elections showed exactly how chaotic it becomes when there are more than five parties polling roughly equally to one another across much of the country.
Especially when several of those parties are new, or at least polling far more successfully than once they did, it becomes almost impossible for voters to know which candidates are viable in their area. With three left-leaning parties (not counting Plaid Cymru or the SNP) and two right-leaning ones, split votes mean that areas can end up with unrepresentative candidates with very low shares of the vote.
First Past the Post had the benefits of simplicity and stability. With the UK’s current political backdrop, it delivers on neither of these promises. It is, quite simply, no longer fit for purpose.
Lots of people from across the political spectrum agree on that part. The more difficult questions come next: how can FPTP actually be replaced – and what should we use instead?
There is no perfect voting system: they all have upsides and downsides. Some make it easy to block extremist candidates, but often at the cost of excluding radical or unconventional candidates you might want to vote for. Some hand lots of power to party bosses, making it impossible to have the type of independently-minded politicians that we often value. Some systems abolish the idea of having MPs for individual constituencies – removing a safety valve many rely on for help as public services struggle after years of cuts. Let’s take a look at the options.
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Alternative Vote / Supplementary Vote / Two-round system
The simplest alternatives to FPTP aren’t, strictly speaking, proportional representation – but they would allow parliament to keep its current constituencies, people would still have a single MP to represent them, and they would be more suitable for a multi-party system.
France uses a two-round system to elect almost all of its parliamentary representatives. If no candidate gets more than 50% of voters in the first round, there is a second election, usually a week later, between the top candidates only (usually the top two, but sometimes more). This has been a useful firewall against National Rally – the party once known as the National Front – as traditionally, French voters have been willing to hold their noses and vote for whoever makes it to the last two against their candidates.
A two-round system draws out an election for weeks longer, and so adds cost and extra campaigning – and involves lots of voters having to go out just to vote for someone they don’t like to stop someone they really hate, which doesn’t inspire a deep love of democracy.
Supplementary vote is a system that essentially tries to hold both rounds at once: you can make a first choice and a second choice. After the first-choice votes are counted, all but the top two candidates are eliminated, and the second preferences of their voters are totalled. This is the system the UK used for most of its directly-elected mayors, until the Conservatives shifted it back to FPTP in recent years.
Unlike the two-round system, it’s relatively easy to ‘waste’ a vote under the system: if you can’t guess who is going to be in the last two, your second preference might go to another eliminated candidate, and so be thrown away. There is a lot of second guessing needed, and the system doesn’t necessarily help smaller parties.
The final system that would keep existing constituencies is Alternative Vote, which allows voters to rank as many candidates as they like in order of preference. At each round, votes are counted and the worst-performing one is eliminated. Their votes are then reallocated to the remaining candidates, until someone amasses more than 50% of the total.
This is relatively simple, it is hard to ‘waste’ a vote, and it lets people vote for whichever candidate they like best without worrying that doing so will let an extremist candidate win by splitting the vote.
This might make it seem like AV is straightforwardly superior to SV on almost every front, up to and including simplicity. This might be true, but it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a winner with the UK public. AV was the system rejected in the 2011 referendum, which the Lib Dems had required as a condition for joining the coalition government with the Conservatives.
A No2AV campaign, led by several of the people who went on to campaign for Brexit, convinced the public AV was too complicated and unnecessary, decisively beating the Yes campaign 68% to 32%.
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Proportional representation
All of the systems until now allow parliament to keep the idea of MPs having their own constituency – but if that is thrown aside, it is possible to introduce systems that much more faithfully translate the percentage of the vote into percentages of seats.
Most of these rely on list systems: if there are ten seats up for grabs, parties submit a list of ten candidates in order. When the votes are totalled, whichever party came first gets their first-choice candidate elected, and then their vote count is halved. The process is repeated until ten candidates are selected. (The process used is typically called modified D’Hondt, for those who want to look up the fine details).
This system gives party bosses a lot of control. They are likely to put the most loyal and reliable supporters in the top slots, knowing this virtually guarantees that they’ll be elected, and those who have upset them will be put low on the list, where they are all but guaranteed to lose. Voters can no longer kick out specific candidates, and local parties lose all power.
List-based systems can also be helpful to fringe parties. Depending on the size of constituencies the country is split into, parties like Tommy Robinson’s or Rupert Lowe’s might win parliamentary power. Wales uses this kind of list system at present, though with constituencies of just six members, which restricts fringe parties.
Mixed-member representation
This is the system used in Scotland, and combines FPTP with a regional top-up to make the result more proportionate. To an extent, this brings the best of both worlds: local parties can still pick their favourite candidates, and some MPs still have constituencies (though expecting them to support constituents creates an unfair workload divide versus ‘list’ MPs).
The result is always more proportionate, as a party that wins lots of constituency races will get no top-up whatsoever from the list system – as happened last week with the SNP. These systems rarely deliver majority governments, and the list allows party bosses to install loyalists, but it does avoid the endless second guessing of FPTP.
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Getting to a new system
Previous efforts to replace FPTP have foundered because they failed to win the support of either Labour or the Tories – why should either big party want to collapse the electoral system that has helped them both for a century or more? That, finally, is breaking down: Labour members now support electoral reform, and the realities of British politics have changed in recent years. What worked in the 20th century may not work in the 21st.
Actually getting a government to change the voting system, though, might be more complicated. Labour did not put electoral reform in its 2024 manifesto, and to date has been unwilling to even attempt anything radical.
For electoral reform to be successful, it can’t be seen as partisan – the change should be for legitimacy, not simply to stop Reform – and it must have public buy-in. This might require a referendum, or at a minimum to be included clearly within a party’s manifesto. Absent that, a change could be seen as illegitimate, or could be easily reversed.
These are serious hurdles to clear, and that’s without the glaring one: deciding which of the many systems on offer we should use instead of FPTP. Trying to address all that in the current government’s last 2-3 years seems unlikely.
That means that the next election will almost certainly be fought using FPTP and it will almost certainly be chaotic and unpredictable as a result. The time until then need not be wasted, though: parties could start conversations as to what electoral system might work, and which options they’d include in their manifestos.
Building consensus takes time. We have a few years until the next election. Several parties already agree that FPTP should go. If by the next election they agree what should replace it, and put it in their manifestos, perhaps a referendum could be avoided.
We’re likely to have at least one extremely chaotic general election. We need not accept that as our future forever.
