We are living through an uncertain political era. Many old certainties are shifting geopolitically and the UK has only just emerged from a chaotic Westminster parliament that saw three Prime Ministers in a year.
Yet even after the last general election, where Labour won an unassailable majority, politics doesn’t feel like it’s returning to stability. Part of that is to do with the deep electoral volatility that underpinned the last election and is still informing national politics.
The 2024 election was the most disproportional in the UK’s history, in terms of parties getting seats in line with their vote-share. Labour won just under two-thirds of Westminster seats (63%) on a mere third of the votes (34%). Meanwhile, the Greens and Reform received just over 1 per cent of seats for more than 20 per cent of combined vote-share. In short, this parliament least represents how the country voted of any in history.
Two-party dynamic may be over
The reason is that Westminster’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system – essentially designed for two parties – struggles with the multiparty way the country is now voting. The 2024 election was the first time in British history where four parties received over 10 per cent of the vote. Voters are shopping around at a rate not seen in the modern political era and our outdated voting system is buckling under the pressure.
The question now is what will happen at the next election? The early signs are that the old two-party dynamic is not resuming. Since the election, Reform has surged in the polls and is now often sitting at around 25 points alongside Labour and the Conservatives.
Reform has even topped several nationwide polls for the first time in recent months, meaning it is now getting into a position where it could disproportionally benefit from FPTP in the way Labour did at the last election. This points to more unpredictability in how the Westminster voting system may operate in future. Another highly unrepresentative parliament in London would not be good for trust in politics, already at record lows.
Existential implications for the union
But a future result may prove to be disproportional and far more out of keeping with how Scotland voted. This could leave us in a 1987-style situation, when the strong feeling was that the result in Westminster didn’t reflect the democratic wishes Scotland had expressed. This stoked the cause of independence and lit the touch paper for the Constitutional Convention that eventually culminated in devolution. The instability the Westminster system is showing could have existential implications for the Union.
The last election shows in stark terms why the Westminster system is beyond its sell-by date and needs replacing with a modern, proportional system, like the ones Scots have been using for Holyrood and council elections for years. We now urgently need to move to a system that ensures how the whole country voted is accurately represented in London. The only bias an electoral system should have is towards the voting public.
This article was originally posted on The Scotsman.
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