Whatever Happend to Electoral Reform?

The Labour Party won the 2024 general election on only 34% of the popular vote. This translated into 411 seats, a majority of 86, or 63% of the total in the House of Commons. This is as good an example of the perversity of first-past-the-post (FPTP) as you'll ever see. The Conservative Party got 24% of the popular vote, Reform 14% and the Liberal Democrats 12%. The reason for Labour's disproportionate number of seats is no mystery. In those constituencies that traditionally lean towards the political right, the vote was split by the presence of Reform and, to a lesser extent, by the Liberal Democrats. The consequence has been a significant increase in marginality, which promises even greater volatility next time round. A small shift in the popular vote share could result in a dramatic change in the allocation of seats. This is particularly acute in the case of the seats Labour won with a narrow margin, which means that a substantial number of MPs, many of them elected for the first time, are facing almost certain ejection at the next general election.

In the circumstances - a wildly disproportionate result and the near-certainty of future volatility - you might have expected the perennial issue of electoral reform to have become more prominent. MPs, including Labour backbenchers and not just the usual Liberal Democrat suspects, are certainly sensitive to it, but it's also clear that none of the parties intend to make it a primary issue, not even the Liberal Democrats themselves. Wh byy is this? One explanation is that the Liberal Democrats are currently more focused on winning Tory seats by leveraging FPTP. In other words, they are relying on Reform to continue splitting the right-wing vote and for Labour to suffer a drop in popularity due to its record in government. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy, but the party isn't likely to improve its vote share much beyond 15%. The heady days of 23% in 2010 depended not only on a tired Labour government but on the fact that some rightwing voters preferred the Liberal Democrats to the Tories, and much of that promiscuous voting bloc has now been attracted by Reform.

The opinion polls currently suggest a three-way split between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, at 20-25% of the vote each, with the Liberal Democrats nearing 15% and the Greens nearing 10%. It still makes sense for the Liberal Democrats to push for proportional representation, even though ironically their share of seats was pretty proportional in 2024: 11% versus a 12% vote. What they should really be drawing attention to is that Reform could be the beneficiaries of disproportion next time round, picking up a majority in the Commons on 30% of the vote should Labour and the Conservatives fall to around 25%. Even if they don't win an outright majority, and assuming they don't collapse due to incompetence and infighting in the manner of UKIP, they are likely to win a large number of seats, probably sufficient to ensure a hung parliament and perhaps even enough to become the official opposition. What this means in practical terms is Nigel Farage becoming the king-maker of British politics. We will never get him off our TV screens.

The UK electoral system has long been geared to the maintenance of a party duopoly, with the minor parties exercising influence only when neither of the big two has been able to command a majority. But that political dynamic was contained at Westminster, e.g. the theatrical votes by the SNP in 1979, the speed dating by the Liberal Democrats in the formation of a coalition government in 2010, and Theresa May's negotiations with the DUP in 2017. Though presented as exercises in representative democracy, these were simply the workings of the cartel being exposed to public view. Should we end up with a fragmented party system, and the volatility that FPTP almost guarantees in that situation, then British politics may descend to being little more than public horse-trading against a background of weak administrations. We will finally have become Italy. You might imagine that this would prompt electoral reform and the adoption of PR, but of course that would simply cement the new reality, not avoid it. It would also open the door to smaller parties, maybe even a socialist alternative to Labour, and for that reason the cartel would undoubtedly close ranks against it. The more likely outcome is the emergence of centre-right and right-wing electoral pacts: Labour and the Liberal Democrats vs the Tories and Reform. In other words, restricting the choice of voters.

Fascism, in the sense of a latent predisposition to anti-democratic authoritarianism, commands a hardcore of around 5% of the population, but this can be boosted to a third of the vote with the support of conservative voters (attracted by the authoritarianism) and the populist mobilisation of a fraction of the unthinking centre (attracted by the bypassing of democracy). Fascism does not require an overtly Fascist party, with a uniformed vanguard and an explicit Führerprinzip. Its success depends on acceptance and absorption by the conservative establishment. What matters is the dynamic once in power: whether Fascism breaks loose and goes on the rampage, as happened in Germany after 1933, whether conservatives abandon it when it fails, as happened in Italy in 1943, or whether the establishment manages to muzzle it, as can been seen in varying degrees from Hungary to India today. Contrary to the liberal myths that obscure its imbrication with establishment politics, Fascism normally reveals itself in power, not by an outright assault on the political order. It isn't an outsider.

In these circumstances, you might expect the danger of an avowedly populist rightwing party, many of whose supporters clearly fit the bill of either the Fascist hardcore or their willing conservative accomplices, to lead to some caution by UK liberals. Its absence suggests two possibilities. One is that Reform is considered so unthreatening by that it will eventually be welcomed into the political cartel as just another species of national conservatism. This is the "de-demonisation" strategy pursued by Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National in France, though that has hit the buffers with her debarring from standing for office for five years, an example of the conservative establishment muzzling the far-right. That Nigel Farage has previous for defrauding the European Parliament is not considered relevant on this side of Le Manche. The other is that liberalism has been so corrupted by its obsessive misinterpretation of populism as a lack of virtue, as much as by its perennial hatred of the left, that it can no longer see the danger.

There is a third, more cynical possibility, and that is the belief that Reform can actually be used rather than tamed: that it can be compromised with, that it may even provide useful cover for a further shift of policy to the right. While the "Republican Front" remains in place in France, that is simply a product of the Presidential electoral system, which typically requires a second round run-off, rather than a determination to isolate the RN. The traditional cordon sanitaire against the far-right is fraying, and that is happening across Europe. There is no structural incentive to isolate Reform in the UK, and arguably an incentive under FPTP to cut electoral pacts, if only informally. In recent weeks the Conservative Party has taken the initiative to suggest a closer working relationship with Reform. While Nigel Farage will not unreasonably keep his distance from the Tories to maintain strategic flexibility, this simply raises the possibility that the party most likely to see advantage in cutting a deal behind the scenes, to the disadvantage of the Tories, will be Labour, whose MPs in marginal seats now consider Reform to be the main threat to their fledgling political careers.