Who’s afraid of a truly representative democracy? It’s time to embrace proportional representation

A voting system more reflective of our society would be a good thing for Britain. Why does that scare the Tories so much, writes Femi Oluwole

Political parties almost never get a majority of the vote, yet they always get a majority of the seats in parliament (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

I’ve never felt a hope like this before. It’s been a hard 13 years for lefties and progressives in the UK, but the Tories have spent weeks screaming in panic that their reign is ending.

Remember when the Tories claimed to be champions of democracy? They were the great defenders of the “will of the people”. That is gone.

They are now openly declaring that they’re scared of voters. Several Conservative politicians and journalists have said that a fairer voting system would “keep the left in power forever”.

V from V for Vendetta would be proud: the government is finally afraid of its people.

It started with the rumours that Labour might be planning to lower the minimum voting age to 16 and change the voting system from the current winner takes all, “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) system to proportional representation.

Right-wing journalist Andrew Neil responded by writing a warning in the Daily Mail and tweeting that this would “keep the left in power for ever”. That might be the biggest self-own in politics I’ve seen in a long time.

Not only did he admit that right-wing politics depends on our rigged system to win, he literally made it headline news.

The Conservatives have been scared of truly representative democracy for a while.

Last year Dominic Raab said that proportional representation was a “threat” to the Conservative Party. But it gets better! At the recent Conservative Democratic Organisation, Tory lord Peter Cruddas said that a proportional voting system where the MPs in parliament matched the votes of the people would “make it almost impossible for the Conservatives to win an outright majority”.

That is not just an admission that Conservative-majority governments are never what the majority of people want. It also shows that the Conservative Democratic Organisation judges our democracy based on whether the Conservatives get to control everything. And this isn’t the first time they’ve admitted this so openly.

In 2019, parliament was voting on whether to let 16-year-olds vote in the election. Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood said they would vote against it because “we know it will probably favour one particular party”. Oh boy! Once you start deciding who gets to vote based on who they tend to vote for, you are in full fascism territory.

And Cruddas, Neil and Ellwood have firmly planted their flags on that field. But the top spot went to Jacob Rees-Mogg. He bluntly admitted that they changed the law, so you have to show photo ID when voting, because he was hoping it would help the Tories by discouraging young voters.

Conservative pundit Tom Harwood was more subtle. He said a proportional voting system would mean that our governments “would always be a result of grubby backroom cross-party political deal-making, rather than a coherent manifesto elected by the people”.

But political parties almost never get a majority of the vote, yet they always get a majority of the seats in parliament. If your argument against PR is that one party, with a minority of the vote, should be able to pass any laws they like, without even consulting the parties that the majority voted for… you don’t want democracy, you want the other thing.

The members of the Labour Party have voted in favour of changing our voting system to a proportional one. And now the Tories are publicly shrieking in fear of it. So, regardless of Keir Starmer’s opposition to it, that change is coming. In almost every election since World War Two, the majority of votes have gone to parties to the left of the Tories. When that change happens, we are going to see a new UK.

Femi Oluwole is a campaigner against Brexit and a co-founder of pro-European Union advocacy group Our Future Our Choice