The Conservative conference this year was dominated by the leadership contest, with the four remaining candidates making their pitches to MPs and members this week in Birmingham. Meanwhile, at the fringe events there was a vigorous discussion and focus on the Conservative’s defeat at the July general election, which was the heaviest in the party’s history. This also meant there as a renewed focus on how the First Past the Post electoral system had impacted the party, with Reform splitting the vote on the right in an unprecedented way.
The ERS team was at the conference to meet with activists, answer questions and support our allies in the party.
Electoral Reform Society supports Conservative fringe event
This debate culminated at a crowded fringe event at the Hyatt Hotel held by Conservative Action for Electoral Reform (CAER) on Tuesday, which was supported by the ERS, and looked at how the party could rebuild a winning electoral coalition.
The event opened with CAER chair, Keith Best, arguing that if the party wants to revive its political fortunes it needs to seriously consider electoral reform, especially if Reform remain a feature of the electoral landscape. Keith described how he had been a supporter of PR for many decades, partly due to living in the safe Labour area of Lambeth, in London, where he lamented that he and other Conservatives had little incentive to go out and vote on a ‘wet and windy evening’ as the result was always a ‘foregone conclusion’.
Split vote under First Past the Post more likely to lock Conservatives out of power than PR
The fringe then heard from John Oxley, the Conservative writer and commentator, who warned that the party was currently relying on an increasingly ageing electoral coalition and had to consider how it would start appealing to younger voters and people of working age. He said that one startling fact was that the amount of people who cast their first vote for the Conservatives had declined between 2010 and 2024.
John also argued if the right’s vote remained split at future elections, that is more likely to lock the Conservatives out of government than any change to a proportional electoral system. He said that Europe, where most countries have a form of proportional representation, showed that the centre right often won and thrived under different voting systems.
The public is put off by the complexity of First Past the Post
Joe Twyman, co-founder and director of Deltapoll, broke down some of the company’s research on how people decided who to vote for under the current First Past the Post system. He said the company had found that fewer than half of voters know who had won in their seat at the last election and even fewer than that know how close the second-place party had been.
Joe said that in reality the public were not hugely aware of how to vote tactically, but that parties had become very adept at telling them which candidate to vote for tactically in election leaflets and social media videos. Joe also said that, when polled, the public said that what they want from a voting system is that it represents how people voted, gives parties seats in proportion with the number of votes they won, is easy to understand and provides strong government.
The ship will leave – Conservatives need to be on it
Lastly, the audience heard from Emma Best, a Conservative member of the Greater London Assembly, who made an impassioned case for the Conservative party to engage with the debate on electoral reform. She said that as a Conservative supporter in a Labour party of London, voting for her had largely been a ‘ceremonial event’, until she had been able to vote in the Mayor of London elections, which until this year had been held under the preferential Supplementary Vote system.
She said that she would not have been elected to the London Assembly without the proportional list part of the Additional Member System (AMS) that the authority uses. Emma also told the audience that without AMS, the Conservatives would have been reduced to three members on the Assembly at the May elections, rather than the eight they currently have.
Emma ended by telling the fringe that a move to proportional representation will happen at some point, and that the party needed to do it’s thinking on the issue now. She added: “The ship will leave, and we can either get on board or stand on the side and complain about the direction it’s going in”.
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