Sir Keir Starmer has a career-defining choice ahead. What he decides could determine the votes of millions and indeed our political culture for decades to come.
Option 1: He could choose to act on the unambiguous decision of delegates and trade unions at this week’s Labour Party conference to ditch the archaic first past the post (FPTP) voting system and to make a manifesto commitment to proportional representation (PR).
This was a clear victory for progressive forces, a chance to win “power for the many, not just for the few”, as one young delegate put it on Monday from the conference lectern. Starmer building on this by making a manifesto commitment to PR would be a huge step forward for democratic renewal.
Option 2: to keep siding with the Tories; to keep in place the antiquated electoral duopoly of FPTP that only Labour or the Tories can win, and to keep on ensuring that parties getting as low as 35 per cent of the overall vote can keep on winning a majority of seats at Westminster. Both Blair (35 per cent in 2005) and Cameron (37 per cent in 2015) clocked up a majority of seats with less than 40 per cent of the total vote.
Sadly, Starmer seems determined to ignore Monday’s clear decision of the party he is supposed to lead. And by sticking with FPTP, he will be following the wisdom that the Daily Mail dished out last month: “Scrapping first past the post could put the Tories out of power for a generation.”
In a word, Starmer has become an enabler. He will be complicit in maintaining the same old 18th-century two-party politics from an era when land-owning aristocrats dominated parliament and voting was restricted to property-owning men….and when FPTP was born.
Since he was chosen as Labour leader, Starmer has repeatedly said PR was not on his agenda for the next election.
Why not? A staggering total of 192 parliamentary seats have not switched parties since World War Two and millions are totally alienated from politics and disenfranchised. FPTP is grossly unfair. It takes more than 850,000 votes to elect a single Green MP but, on average, only 35,000 to elect a Tory MP.
And on the left, in particular, many are totally turned off by Labour’s rightward turn. Who to support? Unlike in most European countries that employ PR for their elections, we have no true socialist party to vote for. Moreover, our backward “winner takes all” voting system prevents such a party from even putting down electoral roots here.
Under PR, an independent UK socialist party might get 6 per cent – 8 per cent of the overall vote in its first electoral outing. That would mean 6 per cent to 8 per cent of the seats at Westminster.
Without a doubt, the next election will be an FPTP-based vote. But If Starmer backed PR and if Labour won this election —- with a hung parliament the likely result according to many commentators — PR could be enacted in that parliament. Then the election afterwards would be the first country-wide vote in British history where seats won matched votes cast. A real democratic breakthrough.
With electoral reform in place, tactical voting would go the way of the dodo, safe seats would also disappear, and the chances of a parliament that might begin to reflect voters’ wishes could start to become a serious possibility.
Starmer appears to want none of this. Based in a safe Labour seat in London, he seems to think that endorsing PR would be a sign of weakness.
The reverse is true. If Starmer were to back PR, he would be acting in the best interests of the entire country. The chances of the UK suffering under further reactionary and cruel Tory governments would be effectively reduced to zero.
It is far from impossible, for example, that Liz Truss and her Tory cronies could have their 43 per cent overall vote total in 2019 reduced to 35 per cent in the next election and still be returned to power again with a majority. If not in the 2023/34 election, then perhaps in 2028.
While FPTP once helped Labour, it is now a key part of the Tory’s electoral arsenal. The Tory vote is spread across the UK while the Labour vote is heavily concentrated in cities.
Here’s how it works. It is all very fine for Labour to win +80 per cent of the vote in constituencies such as Liverpool Walton. But that only gains it one seat. FPTP is far preferred by the Tories because, for example, they can sweep all of the 12 seats in Staffordshire with only 61 per cent of the total vote across that county. Reproduce those statistics across Kent, Cornwall, Somerset and others and it is not hard to figure out how the Conservatives can win more than 360 seats in Westminster. It’s what you get with the winner taking all and runners up —- in fact, hundreds of runners up – getting nothing and many voters even less.
There is a depressing symmetry to this week’s developments. Labour members and trade union delegates have finally grasped the nettle. By a wide majority, they have overturned a century-old Labour Party policy that maintained a hugely undemocratic barrier to democratic elections, namely FPTP.
Now Keir Starmer has said, “no dice” to both Labour Party democracy and to a far fairer democracy for all voters. Unless he acts, FPTP will remain in place like a floundering dinosaur. Yes, “Keir the enabler” is about right.
Alan Story is co-founder of the cross party/ no party campaign group GET PR DONE!
