Why Westminster’s biggest parliamentary group is calling for a commission on electoral reform
Polling station, Preston (Credit: Jon Super/Xinhua/Alamy Live News)
5 min read
Last week’s elections were a wake-up call for more reasons than one.
Reform UK’s surge is seen by many as a cause for concern, but the growing volatility and fragmentation of the electorate itself should also worry us. This is a continuation of the trend that we saw in last year’s general election, when fewer people voted Labour or Tory – and more people voted for smaller parties – than ever before.
This fragmentation is integrally linked to the collapse of trust in politics, which hit an all-time low during the 2024 general election campaign. On taking up office, the Prime Minister rightly identified the fight for trust as “the battle that defines our age”. Yet, almost a year on, new polling finds there is even less trust in politics than there was before the change of government: 45 per cent of people say they have less trust than they did a year ago, with just 25 per cent saying they have more.
The government has not yet announced plans to change the mayoral system back to how it was before. Now we see the consequences of that inaction
In other words, the important steps the government is taking towards national renewal – which we stand firmly behind – are clearly not, on their own, enough to restore people’s confidence that politics can serve and represent them. One of the missing ingredients has been any real sense, since taking office, that our discredited political system is in need of fundamental reform.
“The flaws in the current voting system are contributing to the distrust and alienation we see in politics”. That’s not just our view; it’s the official position signed off by the Labour Party ahead of the last general election. If the government is to restore this trust, it cannot be the defender of a broken system.
There is now huge support for addressing this, not only amongst the public – whom polling now consistently shows are in favour of adopting a fairer, proportional voting system – but across Parliament. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections, whose objectives include replacing first past the post with a form of proportional representation (PR), is now the biggest such group in Westminster, with over 150 members. A majority of our members are Labour – and with 134 MPs from across the House, we now have more MPs in the Commons than the official opposition.
What we are calling for is a modest, first step towards addressing what everyone can see is an indefensibly broken voting system. We believe the government needs to set up a ‘National Commission for Electoral Reform’ – an independent commission tasked with reviewing the performance of first past the post, evaluating the options, and finding a way forward that would command public trust and confidence.
There is nothing to fear from such a process. On the contrary, it would be an opportunity to seek the views of the public, as well as experts, and to learn from the experiences of devolved bodies and other democracies. Polling, released today, shows that a majority of the public (52 per cent) would support such a National Commission, with just 10 per cent opposed.
It’s vital that any government learns from its mistakes: hesitating to reverse the Tories’ imposition of first past the post on mayoral contests was an error, as commentators from across the political spectrum have noted in recent days. There was never any mandate for the Conservatives to scrap the old preferential system, which helped ensure mayors enjoyed the support of most of their voters, and it was done in a way designed to minimise parliamentary and expert scrutiny.
On taking office, Labour could have moved to reverse this change. Instead, despite some early hints to the contrary, the government has not yet announced plans to change the mayoral system back to how it was before.
Now we see the consequences of that inaction. Labour may have won three of the mayoralties last week, but all six were elected with the support of only a minority of votes cast by the communities they are now supposed to represent. The bar for achieving victory has fallen as low as 25 per cent in the West of England, prompting incredulity from BBC interviewers, and threatening to undermine legitimacy.
The government risks making the same mistake again about the system we use for general elections. Last week confirmed that first past the post is no defence against extreme politics – instead handing out total power on a minority of the vote. If the next general election were to bring anything like the projected national vote share, our disproportional system could hand Nigel Farage a landslide majority on the smallest share of the vote that such a victory has ever required.
What such an unrepresentative and divisive result would do to Britain is almost unthinkable. The government is rightly determined to head off such an outcome by showing that it is delivering for the public. It must also address a voting system that is corroding trust in politics – and allows the possibility of turning the country over to the far right on 30 per cent of the vote or less.
Alex Sobel is Labour MP for Leeds Central and Headingley and chair of the APPG for Fair Elections. Lizzi Collinge is Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale and a member of the APPG for Fair Elections.
