Presented with the opportunity to kick an inflatable replica of an MP’s backside, would you give it a boot?
One person who seemed to think that the masses would enjoy nothing more than wellying the proxy posterior of their honourable representative was Nick Tyrone, director of operations for the ‘Yes’ campaign in the UK’s 2011 referendum on whether to switch to an alternative voting (AV) model in general elections.
The idea to tour this effigy around the country as a publicity stunt, which was only revealed by Tyrone in passing to a journalist years later, had been dreamed up in the planning phase of the ‘Yes’ campaign operation. The referendum had been about whether or not to reform an electoral system that seemed to hand power to some very unsuitable people simply through the luck of geography. There was also a significant amount of anger towards MPs as a class at that time, in the wake of the 2009 expenses scandal, a suitable vent for which could well have been the public kicking of an inflatable pinstripe tush.
The idea would never become a reality. Sadly for Tyrone and others on the ‘Yes’ side, nor did the referendum result they’d been hoping for. In what the BBC has dubbed ‘the forgotten referendum’ – although I’m not sure any of us immersed in politics have forgotten it – the result was a resounding ‘No’, with 68% voting to keep the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system over an alternative which, at least in theory, promised a fairer outcome.
Not many were surprised by the result, with the polls predicting a ‘No’ result for around a month before the day of the vote. But things had looked very different when the idea of holding the referendum had been put forward a year or so before. Support for electoral reform had been riding high at around 60% when both Labour and the Lib Dems had committed to a referendum during their election campaigns in the spring of 2010. After the vote, the notion of electoral reform was banished far away to think about what a wet rag it had been, and was not spoken of again for years.
But it seems now that it may be back from its long exile, if the findings of a report published last week by the highly-respected social research company NatCen are to be believed. Drawing on data from the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running since the 1980s, NatCen reported that, for the first time, their results show a sustained – and indeed rising – majority in favour of changing the way we vote in general elections.
The trend lines have shifted around quite a bit in recent years, with ‘change the voting system’ going from its lowest ever level of support in 2011 (27%) to overtaking ‘keep the system as it is’ as the majority opinion (51%) just ten years later. Interestingly, support for change was already at its highest level to date in 2015, following a general election in which the third largest party UKIP only secured 1 seat for its nearly 4 million votes.
Coalition is no longer a dirty word
One of the first arguments generally used against electoral reform is that it is less likely to provide a clean and convincing answer as to who should lead, like one party having an overall majority in terms of number of seats in Parliament.
Switching from FPTP now, people claim, would have the effect of lifting two giant logs which have stood in place for decades. Out would scurry a horde of alternative parties representing all possible interest groups, ideologies, lifestyles, identities, and shades of eccentric weirdness – and the subsequent splitting of the vote in all directions would make a coalition government all but inevitable. And we’re wary of coalitions in the UK, we find them a bit too European – or at least the received wisdom goes.
The curious thing though is that people, according to the NatCen survey, seem to not only have accepted this as a consequence of wanting electoral reform but are now actively keen on the idea of coalitions. In their latest round of polling, 57% of people said they’d prefer a coalition government in Westminster, to 41% who favoured single party rule.
What’s striking here is that there was quite a long period in the 1990s and 2000s when the public already favoured the idea of a coalition, only for that to support to evaporate the moment we did have a coalition in 2010.
Now, in 2024, the stars are aligned in the sense that, for the first time, people back electoral reform and favour the idea of a coalition government, which a more proportional voting system would almost certainly produce.
A judgment on politicians
These polling results need to be seen as part of a wider trend of declining trust and confidence in government and politicians. NatCen’s research has also shown a steady decline in how much people trust politicians over the past fifty years. Most people have also failed to see a great difference between the Conservative and Labour parties since 1992.
As I pointed out in a previous post, this decline in trust of politicians and confidence in the establishment is not something unique to the UK.
But combine this general disillusionment with a general election in 2024 that produced the most unfair election result in British history and you can see why a lot of people appear to have been swayed in favour of change. In the 2024 election, Labour won 63% of seats with 34% of the vote. Reform UK, the third largest party in terms of votes, won 1% of seats with 14% of the vote.
It’s not just because ‘third’ parties like Reform and the Green Party have increased their share of the vote that we’re seeing shifts in the overall appetite for electoral reform. For the first time, NatCen has found that a majority of voters across all five of Britain’s biggest parties would support it. Their full analysis is worth reading, if you have the time.
“In practice, there has only been a small decline in support for reform among those who identify as Labour supporters – 60% backed change in 2023, while this proportion has now slipped to 55%. On the other hand, backing for change among Liberal Democrat supporters has fallen markedly from 71% in 2023 to 56% now. So, support for change has weakened somewhat among those who profited from the current system in the 2024 election. Meanwhile, the opposite has happened among those who lost out from the current system. The outlook of those who identify as Conservative has changed significantly. In 2023, only 24% were in favour of changing the voting system, but that proportion has now more than doubled to 52%. At the same time, substantial majorities of both Reform (78%) and Green (90%) supporters are in favour of change. As a result of these trends, there is now majority support for change among supporters of all five of Britain’s biggest parties. The heavily disproportional outcome of the 2024 election appears to have helped create – for the time being at least – a public that, irrespective of partisanship, is questioning the current electoral system to an unprecedented degree.”
Could it really happen? It’s not clear whether the current Labour government still supports a move to proportional representation (PR), as it did in 2022 [edit: the conference voted for it; Starmer has appeared to reject the idea]. It would be tempting to conclude that support has been quietly paused, given FPTP meant it gained 209 seats at the last election, more than double its previous tally, while overall losing more than half a million votes.
It’s also entirely possible that if we were to have another referendum – perhaps on PR this time – people could change their minds. There’s a long history of this happening with referendums on major constitutional changes: look at Canada in 2017, where a referendum never even happened in the end because polls suggested the momentum had already been lost. People get cold feet, and tactical voting can happen because people don’t want a specific political party to profit.
For now though, it seems like the moment has come to have a serious conversation, at the very least.
Originally published on Substack: https://georginasturge.substack.com/p/electoral-reform-in-the-uk-feels