The Greens stand ready to work as part of a truly progressive alliance. Image credit: LabourList
The starting gun has been fired, and six candidates will now try to convince fellow MPs, unions and party members that they are best placed to effectively oppose the Johnson government and lead the Labour Party to electoral victory.
But before any of them get anywhere near the seat of power they will need not only to persuade the public but end tribal politics, embrace cooperative working and back a fair and proportional electoral system.
Our iniquitous first-past-the-post electoral system has delivered yet another election result where most votes were wasted and mass tactical voting concealed most people’s true preference. Although those who voted for non-Tory parties formed the majority, they were the losers.
Comparing vote share and seats won brings home the scale of the injustice inherent in our electoral system. The Tory vote grew by just 1.2% compared to their 2017 result but they gained 48 extra seats.
Meanwhile, the Green vote increased by 65% – the largest increase of any party – but no extra seats were won. This means close to a million votes elected just one Green MP, while on average only 38,000 votes were needed to elect each Tory MP. Also worthy of note is the fact the SNP won 48 seats with just 1% more of the national vote than the Greens.
All democratic systems create advantages and disadvantages, but in few other countries does the electoral system ensure that most voters are not represented.
This is nothing new. Conservative and Labour politicians have been exploiting our majoritarian electoral system for decades. But in 2019 this system began to backfire on Labour, where the party required 51,000 votes per MP elected.
This, and the fact that this was the fourth loss for Labour, must be a rude wakeup call. Labour have become gradually weaker since Tony Blair’s triumphant election victory in 1997.
So how did Labour manage to buck the electoral system that time?
There was considerable policy discussion between Blair and Paddy Ashdown, who was leader of the Liberal Democrats at the time. Strategic cooperation enabled the Lib Dems to take seats that could never be won by Labour – especially in the South West, while Lib Dem voters were encouraged to vote tactically for Labour elsewhere.
The key prize was constitutional reform, but Labour’s manifesto promise, to switch to a fair voting system, was delegated to the Jenkins Commission that was then ignored. Meanwhile, Labour folklorists painted this election as a triumphant lone victory.
As the third party, the Liberal Democrats have had to go through extraordinary contortions to gain a sniff of power. The story here is again a response to the electoral system, with the party surging in support under Clegg in 2010 but destined not to achieve the share of seats their electoral support merited. So they were forced to deal with the Tories from a position of weakness and caved on both tuition fees and a shift to PR, settling instead for a referendum on a non-proportional system that was then lost.
In 2017, Greens worked hard to achieve electoral cooperation, standing aside in some seats and dialling down our campaigns where Labour were vulnerable. Although this helped to undermine the Tory majority it was a kamikaze strategy for the party: we lost half our votes and faced mockery from Labour activists.
Unite to Remain – an electoral agreement in 2019 between the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru – was similarly shunned by Labour, who continued campaigning in seats like Cheltenham where a Liberal Democrat victory would otherwise have been achievable.
For those of us who were trying so desperately to persuade Labour to cooperate in this most vital general election, it was deeply disappointing that they preferred to buy into the delusion that somehow they could win and win alone if they just believed hard enough. Narratives matter in politics; but hard facts matter more. And the hardest fact is that it is a very long time since Labour won an election without support from other parties.
No electoral system is perfect, but the UK is unusual in accepting a system designed to create an unrepresentative outcome. In our so-called democracy it is not any party; any group of voters or special interest that dominates, but first past the post itself.
The UK has suffered distorted electoral outcomes for too long. We desperately need all six Labour leadership candidates to embrace a system that genuinely facilitates democratic choices. And cooperating with other progressive parties to ensure this happens will be vital if Labour is ever to have a chance of taking back control from the Tories.
Molly Scott Cato is Green MEP for the South West of England.
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32 Responses to “Westminster’s political system pits progressives against each other. Labour’s next leader must back an electoral overhaul”
Steven
Tom Watson ex MP, you are wrong to equate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism not least for the fact that you don’t have to be ethnically Jewish to be a Zionist and some Jews are anti-Zionist ie many of the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews living in Stamford Hill in Hackney.
Steven
Sadly, the media didn’t report the fact the Union of Orthodox Congregations in Britain condemned Rabbi Mirvis of the Board of Deputies for his intemperate and untrue remarks during that farcical election campaign. I wonder why they didn’t?
Elizabeth Chell
For those of us living in a blue part of the country, electorally speaking, FPTP makes no sense. There are many parts of the country where people similarly are disenfranchised and where some sort of transferable voting system would make electoral sense. FPTP is totally undemocratic & the sooner both Tories & Labour admit to it & agree changes the better. One good thing about the European Parliamentary system is that there is far more cross party cross country debate and decision-making. We should get into the 21st century & reform our political system.
Steven
There is no need for any transferable voting system (ranked ballots are more appropriate for electing a President as many countries use or Mayors of cities etc) but there is for the voters to have votes which have roughly the same value to them no matter where in the country they are cast or for whatever party. A fundamental and INHERENT inequality in the value of people’s votes festers like a bad odour at the VERY HEART of this archaic electoral system and that MUST END or we will see an even further rise in dangerous political disillusionment and our politics will be continue to be dysfunctional beyond belief. Put simply, Britain can’t have normal politics whilst we continue with this unfair system.
My preference would be to adopt a system like Germany’s Mixed-Member Proportional Representation system but with one important improvement ie instead of having ‘closed’ regional lists have flexible ‘open’ ones where voters can either endorse their favourite party’s list of candidates as a whole OR vote for an individual candidate within that favourite party list thus being able to move a candidate up the list and override that party’s pre-election order.
That should answer the main objection to party lists. This was meant to have happened to reform the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system but sadly hasn’t so far.
Michael McManus
STEVEN. You need to inform yourself. You know nothing about Israel or the middle east. Israel is due trillions in compensation or the right of return to its ancestral lands in north Africa and the ME, lost to Muslim genocide over the centuries. Israel is the only place in the ME or the ummah for that matter where Muslims are safe from each other and the implementation of sharia hatred and repression.
You’re obviously not a reading man so look at the DVD In between, a film about life in Israel for Palestinians. Maysaloun Hamoud got death threats from Muslims and a fatwa for her work of course – the Islamic attitude to truth, evidence and reason shared by the anti-Semitic left.
If I’m wrong, and you can manage a whole book, Martin Gilbert’s In the House of Ismael, or Uprooted by Lyn Julius might help you.
There’s only two possible reasons for being anti-zionist or criticising Israel, a democratic, pluralist beacon in a sea of sectarian hate, the only place in the ME where Muslims have a free vote and can be part of the government, and those are Jew-hate or pig-ignorance. Take your piuck. The voters worked out what was motivating some labour members as you’d know if you bothered to talk to them.