The votes from last week’s local council elections across England have now been counted, and one thing is clear: First Past the Post is yet again failing to reflect voters’ views on who should run their local council.

People vote in local elections because they want to shape what happens where they live. Whether it’s protecting local services, improving their neighbourhoods, or changing the direction of their area, voters head to the ballot box expecting their voice to matter.

But once again, the results across England are showing how badly the First Past the Post voting system fails to reflect what voters actually wanted. Instead of councils that are shaped by the views of the communities they serve, England’s voting system too often produces results that hand overwhelming power to one party without majority support from voters.

Too many council results simply do not reflect how people voted

Our team has been analysing the results and there are some key examples of where the councils bear very little resemblance to how people actually voted.

In Hammersmith and Fulham, Labour have over three quarters of the seats on little over a third of the vote.

It’s a similar story in Havering, as Reform picked up 71% of the seats on just 36% of the vote share.

And in Sutton, the results are stark. The Liberal Democrats have taken almost all the seats on the Council with a minority share of the vote.

In Lewisham, the Green Party secured nearly three quarters of seats with just 42% of the votes in the area.

These are very different political stories, but they point to the same problem: First Past the Post distorts election results no matter which party benefits. Ultimately, the voting system is just failing to deliver for the voters.

When coming in second means you come first

First Past the Post is often dubbed a ‘winner takes all system’. The idea is simple: the party that comes first gets the power, even if the majority didn’t vote for them. But remarkably, it cannot even guarantee that the party with the most votes will win the most seats.

This is what happened in Wandsworth, as the Conservatives managed to turn a second place in votes to the most seats in the council.

Because the system counts results ward by ward rather than looking at how people voted across the council area as a whole, seat totals can end up badly distorted. What matters is not simply how many votes a party wins, but where those votes are won and how ‘efficiently’ they are distributed.

First Past the Post is failing voters

When election after election produces the same distorted outcomes, local elections can start to feel less like a meaningful expression of voters’ choices and more like a lottery shaped by the quirks of the voting system.

It’s no wonder that people are left frustrated, feeling powerless. The voting system is creating a disconnect between communities and the councils that represent them.

England doesn’t need to settle for a broken voting system

Across the UK, there are already voting systems that better reflect how people vote.

Northern Ireland has used proportional representation for local council elections since 1973, while Scotland adopted it in 2007. These systems are designed to ensure seats more closely match the votes cast, giving more people a meaningful voice in local decision-making.

It’s high time voters in England got the representation they deserve. Local democracy should be something people can actually use to change their area, not something that leaves them feeling shut out. We need a voting system where local election results better reflect how people vote.

If we want local people to feel connected to the decisions shaping their communities, it’s time to scrap first past the post and finally fairly represent us all in English local government.

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Discussions around changing the voting system often refer to Westminster, yet the same problems that stifle the government of the UK apply at a much more local level. Just like in Parliament, councils across England and Wales use the First Past the Post system, or slight variations of it. And just like in Parliament, councils rarely reflect how their local residents voted.

The 2022 local elections in Lewisham, for instance, saw Labour win every single councillor on just over half the vote. The same year, also in London, the Conservatives won 70.0% of seats on Kensington & Chelsea Council, from 44% of votes and the Liberal Democrats won 89% of seats on St Albans Council, in Hertfordshire, from 48% of votes.

At the Electoral Reform Society, we want to see local councils that more closely reflect how their local areas voted – a party on half the vote should get roughly half the seats. This isn’t just an issue of fairness to all the residents who aren’t being represented currently, though; it would have a real impact on how our local councils function.

Local councils should be responsive to voters

When local councils don’t reflect how local people voted, changes to how people vote don’t always have an impact on the council.

Democracy works when elections function as a feedback loop between voters and their representatives. If the streets are getting cleaner and the quality of social care is improving in your local area, the party in charge might expect to increase their vote share and win more councillors to continue their good work. Likewise, if there are piles of fly-tipped waste on every corner and constant scandals at the council, their vote share might drop, and they start to lose councillors

But this isn’t how First Past the Post works.

To get elected under First Past the Post, the candidate needs to get one more vote than the person in second place. Say your area is improving and your councillor’s vote share increases – but as they have already won, this increase makes no difference to the make-up of the council. Say your neighbourhood is getting worse and their vote share goes down – as long as they still have one vote more than the person in second place, this drop in support also makes no difference.

Rather than a responsive ebb and flow, you get parties that slowly hollow out support before collapsing. While it might feel satisfying for their opponents, replacing one tranche of experienced councillors all at once with a whole new set of inexperienced ones inevitably will impact how the council functions.

Councillors shouldn’t mark their own homework

The other impact of one party winning the bulk of seats on a minority of the vote, is that councillors scrutinise each other on council decisions and annual budgets. When the scrutiny committee is dominated by councillors of the same party as the people they are scrutinising, there is little incentive to look too deeply into councillors’ behaviour.

Likewise, while it might be easy to pass a council budget when one party is in overall control, there is little incentive for that budget to be properly scrutinised. We are not talking about small sums of money here either; Birmingham City Council set a £4.4 billion budget in 2026, and even smaller councils are spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Councils need enough opposition councillors to properly scrutinise this spending.

The tried and tested alternative

In local elections across England and Wales, some people live in wards that elect a single councillor while others have two or three. Yet, due to First Past the Post the same party will typically pick up all the seats. What if, rather than going to the single party with the most votes, these seats represented the spread of opinion in the ward? A councillor who is doing a good job and saw their vote share increase could get a colleague from the same party elected to carry on their work. Likewise, if a party were losing support, they could go down from two to one councillor – without having to wait for their party to collapse off a cliff.

This is how local elections have worked in Scotland since 2007. They use a system called the Single Transferable Vote that means the political make-up of councils change in response to voters, and councillors have to work together for their local area, rather than rubberstamping a budget from one party.

The question is why England and Wales should continue to settle for less.

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Since February 2025, we at the Electoral Reform Society have been collecting data on UK general election voting intention polls published by British Polling Council (BPC) members.

The year since has seen the continuation of a trend decades in the making but which has now reached unprecedented levels: the breakdown of the UK’s post-war two-party political system and its replacement with a multi-party system, which is the norm throughout Europe.

Unfortunately, unlike in the rest of Europe, we have a voting system – First Past the Post – designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to sputter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted.

To see evidence of the extent to which the UK is becoming a multi-party nation, let’s turn our attention to the polling data for March 2026. This month saw a bumper crop of polls from BPC members. Twelve different companies published polls, a monthly high since the ERS started collecting this data a year ago.

March UK Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent March poll by each of those twelve companies, is as follows:

* Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters. There is only a 15-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data. The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.1%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.

The Green Party’s vote share represents its highest monthly average vote share since the party’s formation. Indeed, this week’s YouGov poll had the Greens in joint 2^nd place, behind Reform UK.

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First Past the Post: A system under strain

The days of a vast majority of people voting for one of two ‘major parties’ are gone. Unfortunately, the electoral system designed for those days, First Past The Post (FPTP), is still very much with us for UK general elections.

First Past the Post resulted in the most disproportional general election result ever in 2024, when Labour won almost two-thirds of seats, from just over one-third of votes. With the continued rise of multi-party politics since then, it is likely to result in even more random and chaotic results in future.

This outdated system simply cannot cope with how people are expressing their democratic preferences in 2026. We are seeing increasing numbers of MPs and councillors elected with under one-third of votes, meaning the views of over two-thirds of voters are simply ignored.

In addition, First Past the Post often causes voters to feel under pressure to vote ‘tactically’, where they have to consider voting for a party that is not their favourite, to try to stop a party they really dislike from winning. This is not how democracy should work but there is a real danger that our next general election will be dominated by tactical discussions of who people should vote for to keep out other parties, rather than a debate about competing visions for the country.

Now is the time to make the case for change

We need a new proportional voting system, one that reflects the new realities of multi-party politics in the UK and which would mean people could express the genuine democratic preferences without having to worry about tactical considerations.

The Representation of the People Bill is currently making its way through parliament. This bill includes several important changes we’ve long campaigned for – this is real progress. But there is a huge missing piece.

If this Bill is going to live up to its name, it must replace the outdated First Past the Post system with a proportional one – where seats in Parliament actually reflect how people vote.

March’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Focaldata; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Survation; Techne; Verian; YouGov.

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There has been a significant intervention in the debate around electoral reform recently, in the guise of former Prime Minister John Major. The Conservative politician has questioned the “validity” of the First Past the Post system for Westminster and said the case for examining its role is “growing”.

This is the latest in a growing drum beat of politicians on the right of British politics asking whether it’s time to ditch First Past the Post and move to a more proportional voting system. The case has long been made by Conservative Action for Electoral Reform, and since the last election figures such as Tobias Ellwood and Nigel Evans have both made the case for electoral reform.

Major’s intervention adds to this momentum, not least as it comes from a PM who directly benefited from Westminster’s voting system. His comments came when he gave the latest Attlee Foundation Lecture at King’s College London last month. The speech’s theme was that we are in the midst of a pivotal moment for democracy at home and abroad.

The former PM pointed out that democracy is in retreat in many parts of the world with only around a quarter of the globe living under a system where they get to genuinely choose who governs them.

Against such a backdrop, Major urged us not to take our own liberal democratic settlement for granted and warned that not addressing the declining faith in our political institutions could open up a vacuum into which a future autocrat could step.

‘Our democracy has fallen short of expectations’

He praised British democracy as a system that has been ‘an enabler’ for peace, as well as one that promotes justice, wellbeing and the transformation of life opportunities.

Yet, he warned:

“Along the way it makes mistakes, but its purpose is to extend freedoms of choice and action that more extreme politicians would curtail.

“But … but … we cannot ignore the uncomfortable truth that, in recent years, our democracy has fallen short of expectations.” 

The speech noted that many parts of our political settlement are now under strain, a theme typified by the waning dominance of the two traditional main parties. This can be seen in the fact that the last general election was the first time we saw four parties get over 10% of the vote, and since then that trend has only advanced and we now have five parties consistently polling over 10%.

In 2024 this helped create the most disproportional election result in UK history as Labour received two-thirds of the seats on a third of a vote, and the Greens and Reform together received less than 2% of the seats in Parliament despite garnering more than 20% of the vote combined. This means the current parliament is the most unrepresentative of how the country voted in history.

As voting preferences spread more widely First Past the Post provides distorted results

Major acknowledged in his speech that First Past the Post, which is designed for two parties, is acting more erratically as it struggles to cope in the current multiparty environment.

He said:

“Recent General Elections have thrown into doubt the continuing validity of the “first past the post” system of voting.  

“As voting preferences spread more widely it provides distorted results. The democratic case for examining this is growing, although changes would come with distinct drawbacks.” 

While the former Tory leader stopped short of voicing support for electoral reform or moving to a more proportional system, it is significant to have a former Conservative prime minster openly question the ‘validity’ of the Westminster voting system.

In 1992, Major was the beneficiary of First Past the Post’s disproportional winner’s bonus, as his 41.9% of the vote was boosted into 51.6% of the seats in Parliament. However, his comments also make sense in terms of his thesis that democracy needs to be seen to be serving the interests and meeting the needs of its citizens.

If First Past the Post continues to behave in a chaotic way, then we risk having an even more disproportional result and an even more unrepresentative parliament after the next election. The Institute for Government recently warned that voters will become “ever more frustrated” if “casting a vote starts to feel more like participating in a lottery”.

We have argued that this concern is particularly acute when trust in politics has already slumped to record lows in recent years. The case for moving to an electoral system that ensures seats in parliament properly represent how people voted is becoming stronger by the day.

Major calls for a cap on political donations

In his speech, John Major also called for a wider ‘updating’ of our politics, starting with a clean-up of donations and honours.

He said:

“Politics has a grubby underbelly that can make it look seedy. We need a spring clean.

Is political funding corrupted if ‒ with no qualifications other than money ‒ donors receive honours or preferential access to Ministers?  

“Should political donations be capped to protect against undue influence?  I believe the answer is – yes.”

This is an area where we also agree with the former prime minister, as we’ve called for a donations cap to stop money pouring into our politics and further corroding public trust. There has been some movement on this front, with the government pledging to cap overseas donations at £100,000 a year following the recommendations in the recent Rycroft report.

This is a welcome step in itself, but a cap needs to be applied to domestic donations as well, especially as massive donations from ultra-wealthy individuals are becoming an increasing feature of our politics.

Aside from his policy suggestions, one of the most striking messages from Major’s speech was his message on how democracy binds a society together while allowing it to work out its differences and find a way forward. He underscored this by addressing the optics of a Conservative prime minister giving a speech in honour of a Labour PM. Major said despite their differing political philosophies he admired many of Attlee’s achievements, from the creation of the NHS to his commitment to public service.

He added: “Of course, where he and I both active in politics today – there would be differences of policy, of priority, of philosophy. We are political opponents. But mark this: Opponents, Yes. Enemies, No.”

Have you been ‘questioning the validity of First Past the Post’?

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Where elections often used to be a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, voters are now spreading their support across an increasingly crowded field – and our voting system is struggling to keep up.

The latest polling data, including a striking new YouGov survey and a roundup of recent polling from eight major polling firms, paints a vivid picture of a country whose political allegiances have shifted dramatically. The question is no longer whether multi-party politics has arrived in the UK – it’s whether our outdated electoral system can survive it.

YouGov showing a snapshot of a fragmented electorate

A voting intention poll published by YouGov this week (fieldwork: 1-2 March), produced findings that shine a light on the multi-party politics that now exists in the UK.

Here are some of those data:

• The party with the highest level of support (Reform UK) on just 23% (fewer than a quarter of voters).
• Five parties within just nine percentage points of each other (the Liberal Democrats were in 5th place, on 14%).
• Neither of the traditional ‘big two’ parties of British politics (Labour and the Conservatives) in the top two positions (the Greens were in 2nd place, on 21%).

This was a Great Britain-wide poll but recent polling in Scotland and Wales show two other parties (the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru) as the best supported parties in each of those countries.

This week’s YouGov poll is just one poll and like any poll in isolation should be treated with caution. However, we at the Electoral Reform Society monitor opinion polling on an ongoing basis and the broad themes of the YouGov poll are in line with what we have seen from other polling.

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The streets of Gorton and Denton will be much quieter this week after the flashmob of party activists has now departed. Last Thursday’s poll saw a historic win for the Greens and their first ever parliamentary by-election victory. This prompted widespread debate about the collapse of two-party politics and the suitability of Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system to cope with the new multi-party electoral reality.

The risk with by-elections is always overinterpretation. They are a snapshot of a single constituency, and voters can often behave differently in a one-off, mid-term by-election compared to a general election. However, the Gorton and Denton result reinforced a trend we have been seeing for over a year now: that voting intention is splitting between multiple parties in a way we’ve not seen before in British politics. This trend emerged in the 2024 General Election, where four parties received over 10 per cent of the vote for the first time ever. We now have five parties polling consistently at over 10 per cent.

This has profound implications for Westminster’s First Past the Post system, which is designed for a two-party system and cannot cope with multi-party politics. We saw this at the last general election, where it produced the most disproportional result in British history. The danger we now face is the risk of it behaving in an even more chaotic and distorting way at the next election. This is not just a concern held here at the ERS.

First Past the Post is ‘creaking at the seams’

After the Gorton and Denton result, the Institute for Government said the by-election showed the voting system is “creaking at the seams”, and it is time to “seriously consider whether our electoral system is fit for purpose”.

It warned: “If casting a vote starts to feel more like participating in a lottery than making a positive and principled decision, then voters are going to become ever more frustrated. This is dangerous. At the very least it will drive down turnout and engagement, at the worst it will undermine the legitimacy of the future governments it delivers.”

The visible wobbling of First Past the Post has prompted some supporters of the status quo to come to its defence in recent days, such as Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff. In a reasoned column, she laid out what she saw as the pros and cons of the system versus switching to a proportional one for Westminster, citing that she feels First Past the Post does a good job ‘keeping extremists out’ and that proportional representation would not remove some of the grubbier aspects of politics.

The ‘extremist’ point is an often cited one, but it skips over the fact that we have proportional systems in Scotland and Wales and no ‘extremist’ parties represented in either of those parliaments.

Opponents of PR will also often point to countries that have proportional systems but not particularly stable politics. It is not hard to find outliers, as pretty much every democratic country has some form of PR. They forget to mention the vast majority of relatively stable countries with PR, from Germany to New Zealand to the Republic of Ireland. Or that PR, far from being some exotic import, has been in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for decades. This is not something new to the UK, just SW1.

France is cited as a cautionary tale for electoral reform, although this is a red herring, as France doesn’t have a proportional system (i.e. one that aims to accurately represent how people voted) but effectively two rounds of First Past the Post. It may sound like a technical point, but it is important.

People clearly want a politics that better reflects their lives

The next question often asked is ‘what kind of governments would that produce?’ That should be up to the voters of this country. It should be simple: People vote, parliament represents that vote accurately, and politicians deal with the mandate they are given. The only bias the voting system should have is to the voter.

Meanwhile, public support for electoral reform is growing in this country, as the British Social Attitudes survey has recorded a consistent majority in support in recent years. There is a clear desire from the public for a politics that better reflects their lives. A good place to start is a parliament that properly reflects how they voted.

What is clear is that pressure will only continue to build on a Westminster voting system that simply cannot cope with the reality of multi-party politics. People are already voting as if we have PR, it’s time for a voting system that accurately represents that in Parliament.

Do you think parliament should represent how we vote?

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The Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election, scheduled for Thursday 26 February, has garnered much media attention. The outcome will be closely scrutinised by commentators for what it might mean for various political parties and leaders.

However, something that should be receiving more attention is how our First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is letting down those who matter the most in this election – the people of Gorton and Denton, who will be choosing the person they want to represent them in the House of Commons.

The UK general election of 2024 was the most disproportional ever, with Labour securing almost two-thirds of MPs, from just over one-third of votes. Since then, it has become ever clearer that in our era of multi-party politics, First Past The Post is a broken system that cannot cope with how people are expressing their democratic preferences.

Where three or more parties are in contention, we are increasingly seeing candidates elected with the support of fewer than a third of voters in their area, meaning the votes of more than two-thirds of people are simply ignored. With Labour, the Green Party and Reform UK all fighting this by-election very strongly, it is highly plausible that the ballots of a majority of voters will be ignored in this way.

It’s a two-horse race! But who are the horses?

Another major drawback for voters is that when multi-party contests are forced through a FPTP system, the debate becomes dominated by tactical questions around which parties have a genuine chance of winning or which party is best placed to stop another party from winning. This is exactly what has happened in Gorton and Denton, with both Labour and the Green Party trying to persuade voters that they are the only option for people who want to ‘stop Reform’.

This kind of election campaign shortchanges voters. People deserve the chance to listen to the policies that parties are putting forward, listen to how candidates say they intend to represent their area and then make positive choices accordingly. They should not have to make tactical judgements about which parties might or might not be placed to beat another party that they might really dislike.

And although in this by-election the tactical voting argument is mainly playing out on one side of the political spectrum, at the next general election there will be many constituencies where the Conservatives and Reform UK will be trying to persuade voters that they are the ‘only’ choice for those who may want to ‘stop Labour’ or another party in their area.

Because First Past the Post is not designed with more than two candidates in mind, it encourages parties to engage in this type of campaigning to work around the flaws in the system. This does not reflect a democracy in good health.

Designing a better solution

Scottish local elections are conducted under the Single Transferable Vote (STV), a form of Proportional Representation where you number the candidates on the ballot paper. When local council by-elections arise in Scotland, voters can put the candidate they genuinely want to win as their number one, safe in the knowledge that their vote can be transferred to the candidate they put in number two, if their first-choice has no chance of being elected and no candidate has received a majority of votes (this continues until someone wins a majority).

Rather than having to work out who is best placed to defeat the party you hate, you just put down your preferences and the system does the hard work for you.  This ‘preferential voting’ removes the prospect of ‘splitting the vote’ and letting in a party the voter really dislikes.

With proportional representation you can make a positive choice

Proportional representation allows people to vote positively, safe in the knowledge that there is a much higher chance that their vote will translate into representation in parliament. Proportional representation also significantly reduces the need for voters to take into account tactical considerations and allows them to focus more on who they would genuinely prefer to see elected.

It is time we got rid of the outdated First Past the Post system, so that voters in all elections across the UK can focus fully on who they would like to win, without worrying about tactical considerations.

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The government is bringing in new laws to improve our elections – and this is our chance to make things better.

After years of broken promises and an electoral system that has consistently left millions of voices unheard, Parliament finally has the chance to fundamentally fix our democracy. The upcoming Elections Bill presents a rare opportunity that we cannot afford to let slip by.

Progress has made, but not enough

The government has already confirmed that the Elections Bill will be packed with changes we’ve long been fighting for.

In a statement to parliament, the democracy minister set out plans including extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds, a modernised and more automated registration system to get the missing millions on the register, scrapping photo ID requirements in favour of non-photographic ID like bank cards, and crucial measures to tackle dodgy money in politics by closing political finance loopholes.

This represents great progress and shows that sustained campaigning can move the dial on democratic reform. However, now we need to push them to go further.

The missing piece is fair votes

Because there’s still one fundamental change missing from this legislation: fair votes.

They’re calling it an ‘Elections’ Bill, but without proportional representation at its heart, it won’t fix the key problem with our elections.

Right now, we elect our MPs using First Past the Post – a winner-takes-all system where only the candidate with the most votes wins, and everyone else gets nothing. The 2024 General Election was the most disproportional in British history. Thanks to First Past the Post, 57.8% of people – that’s 16.6 million voters – ended up represented by an MP they didn’t vote for.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. One MP can never represent the full range of political opinions in an area. Under fairer, proportional voting systems like the Single Transferable Vote, multiple representatives are elected per area, ensuring that far more voices are heard and seats actually match votes cast.

This is why we need to see this Bill go further.

Now is the time to act

It’s time to ensure seats reflect votes and give power back to the voters – all voters, everywhere, regardless of where they happen to live.

We need to speak up now, while they’re still writing these laws. This is our moment. Let’s make sure they go all the way and deliver the fair democracy we deserve.

We live in a country where each constituency has a single MP. Yet for most people this means the MP who “represents” them in parliament doesn’t share their politics, didn’t win a majority of the vote in their local area, and was chosen by a tiny handful of party insiders long before election day.

In the 2024 General Election, the majority of people found themselves with an MP they didn’t vote for. That’s 57.8% or 16.6 million people represented by someone they didn’t want. In fact, Labour is the only party where a majority of their voters have an MP they voted for. It’s no surprise that people feel like politicians don’t listen.

While these MPs will, no doubt, try their best to help their constituents and stand up for their local areas. But when it comes to more political issues, these MPs will be marching into the voting lobbies along party lines. But it’s precisely to influence national political issues that we elect MPs in the first place.

MPs without majority support are the norm

In the 2024 general election, around 85% of MPs were elected on less than half the vote. That’s 554 constituencies where the majority of people wanted someone else to be the MP – this is compared to 229 in 2019. It gets worse though, 266 constituencies (41% of all seats) elected their representative on less than 40%. The record for lowest vote share was an incredible 26.7% – barely over a quarter of voters.

That 26.5% vote share was made possible in South West Norfolk as the right wing vote was split three ways, between Reform, the Conservatives and an Independent Conservative. Together, those three won 62% of the vote, compared to the Labour candidate’s 26.7%. It’s pretty clear voters wanted a right-wing MP, yet as the vote was split three ways, and Labour won the seat.

Candidates are chosen from the top down

But who chooses the candidates? Before voters even get a say, party HQs or small groups of local activists have already decided who stands. Sometimes candidates are parachuted in from outside the area, hand-picked for loyalty to the leadership or their faction.

While all the political parties contain a broad range of views, the rest of us get one candidate per major party, and one shot at choosing between them. You can’t say, “I like this party but prefer their other candidate.” You can’t choose between shades of opinion.

It doesn’t have to be like this

One MP can never represent the full range of political opinions in an area. Under fairer, proportional, voting systems like the Single Transferable Vote, things look very different.

Instead of one MP per area, you elect a small team of MPs to represent a larger region. On the ballot paper you number the candidates in order, across or within parties, so you can choose who best reflects your values.

If you like a party but not its chosen candidate, you can back someone else from the same party. And because several MPs represent each area, almost everyone ends up with at least one MP they actually voted for. Someone they can turn to and say, “You speak for me.”

When Scotland changed to the Single Transferable Vote for Scottish elections, the number of people who ended up with a councillor they voted for jumped to 75%.

The Single Transferable Vote is a tried and tested system that works

First Past the Post gives power to party HQs and factional insiders. It narrows choice and locks millions out of meaningful representation.

The Single Transferable Vote gives that power back to voters. It creates competition within parties, encourages cooperation across them, and ensures that every voice has a chance to be heard.

It’s time we stopped pretending that one MP for everyone is working for anyone.

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Poll after poll and headline after headline in the U.K may leave you with the impression of a country more divided than ever. This is never more obvious than in the seemingly daily polling notifications. In the latest round conducted by YouGov there are now five parties over ten percent and four hitting over 15%.

If politics feels more divided than ever, then our voting system deserves a share of the blame. All a party needs to do in an election run under First Past the Post is double down on their tribe because, in most seats, that’s all that’s required of them to win.

Politics is no longer about building bridges – if it ever really has bee – it is about holding down your patch. This means parties talking to themselves, getting tied up in internal wars, governments elected on a minority of votes, and a country pulled apart by itself.

The Politics of the Few

Though it may be obvious to some, under First Past the Post a lot of seats are considered ‘safe’, the outcome of their vote has already been decided before a vote has even been cast. If you’re realising you’ve never had people knock on the door and ask for your voting intention, or a single leaflet through the door the chances are you are in a safe seat. Parties and candidates don’t need to campaign there because they already know who is going to win.

On the other hand, if you live in a ‘marginal’ seat – the few that change hands from time to time at elections – the game for parties is simple: find your core voters and get them to vote for you on the day. The incentive to speak to Labour voters if you’re a Conservative or vice versa and persuade them to join your side is very minimal. There is just no need for you to reach across the divide and speak to people who might disagree with you, so why bother?

So, we live with the consequences. Politics narrows. Parties stop trying to represent the country and start trying to hold their base.

When Winning Means Excluding

First Past the Post teaches parties that broad appeal is a risk, not a strength. Parties that stretch themselves too thinly can risk losing everywhere. Talking to the whole country might lose you your base. Reaching out to others might look like “betrayal.”

So instead of understanding, we get confrontation. Parties retreat into echo chambers because that’s what the system pays them to do.  After all, as we saw in 2024 why bother with the effort of reaching out when you can win a majority on just 30% of the vote?

Increasingly, though, the old institution of First Past the Post is crumbling. As the polling shows, the old establishment of voting Labour or Conservative because your family or your area votes for that party is no longer the norm. There are many reasons why that is the case which belong in another blog. However, the principle stands that voters are rejecting a two-party choice and First Past the Post can’t keep up.

Rewarding reaching across the aisle

By using proportional representation, the incentives for parties to win votes change. To form a government, they have to at least acknowledge the fact that diverse political opinions exist in the country they are attempting to govern and find shared ground across the whole population. This isn’t a weakness; it’s actually just how you win.

Countries which use a PR system benefit from political campaigns running for everyone’s vote. Not just a certain tribe’s.

This could mean a country no longer run by the policies of just One Nation Conservatives, just Blue Labour, just the Tribune Group or just the Brexiteers, rather by majority support across the population. Not just a lucky cluster of constituencies.

Isn’t this what democracy should look like? A politics for the whole country, not just one corner of it?

Time to End the Tribal Game

First Past the Post has left our politics and country in a state of a one team-takes-all mentality, where the losers make up most of the country. In 2024, 57.8% voted for someone who didn’t get elected.

Community is pitted against community, leaving millions unheard. If we want a politics that reflects what is truly great about this country – a thoughtful and diverse nation – we need to change.

Proportional representation would give us a politics that rewards cooperation over conflict and infighting. Our country deserves better than tribal warfare, it deserves representation.

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