Why is Labour allowing itself to be distracted by voting reform again? Now is not the time

Hundreds of Labour members have called for the party to support proportional representation in its policy review. There are more pressing questions to answer, says John Rentoul

Labour MP Sandy Martin believes our current first-past-the-post voting system favours Tory governments (PA)

Every time Labour loses, it turns to the displacement activity of agitating for electoral reform. Hundreds of Labour members have demanded that the party support proportional representation in its policy review. The party’s annual conference in Liverpool has been cancelled this year, so there will be no votes, but Labour’s national policy forum has asked for ideas – and 60 per cent of submissions to the “justice and home affairs” review have called for a proportional voting system.

That is justice and home affairs, at a time when there are pressing questions of how our police and courts work to gain people’s confidence – but no, the priority for socialists is to complain about the unfairness of the voting system.

Even if they were right, immediately after an election is not a good time to say so. Boris Johnson is not Lukashenko; the Conservatives won fair and square under the rules. It is fine to want to change the rules, but wanting to change the rules now makes Labour look like bad losers.

Sandy Martin, who was Labour MP for Ipswich from 2017 to 2019 and who is chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, says the first-past-the-post system “gives rise, more often than not, to right-wing governments”. I do not think that is right. There is nothing in the electoral system that makes it more likely that the Tories will win. Labour was quite capable of doing that all by itself. Indeed, Labour was capable of overcoming constituency boundaries biased in its favour to give Johnson an 80-seat majority.

What I suppose Martin might mean is that it would be easier to constrain a Tory-led government in a proportional system. It is true that the Liberal Democrats did modify Tory policies in the coalition government when the existing system threw up the kind of hung parliament in 2010 that would be the norm under proportional representation.

But equally, it would be more likely that a Labour government would have to water down its policies in a system of permanent hung parliaments. It is selfless of Labour advocates of electoral reform to argue that the Lib Dems and the Greens should have greater representation, but it is not necessarily more democratic.

My objection to proportional representation is that it tends to give too much power to smaller parties. The principle of proportionality sounds fair, but the purpose of an election is not just to represent all strands of opinion, it is to choose a government. Under a proportional system, the people can vote against a coalition government only to find that one or more coalition party has negotiated its way back into power in post-election trading.

I am no great enthusiast for the first-past-the-post system. For one thing, it gives the Scottish National Party huge overrepresentation in the House of Commons. I used to support the limited change of allowing people to rank candidates in order of preference – the alternative vote system that was crushed in the 2011 referendum. I learned something from that defeat, which is that most people don’t care about the voting system. And if they don’t see the point of changing it, they will assume that any attempt to change it is designed by the political class to strengthen the political class.

That is why it is a mistake for Labour to appear to be interested in this subject now. Not only does it make them look like bad losers, but it makes them appear obsessed with something that is of interest only to political insiders.

Above all, though, campaigning for electoral reform is a way of trying to avoid hard political choices. Instead of deciding what Labour’s policy should be on, say, unemployment, some members would rather focus on the details of voting systems. For some, proportional representation is explicitly a way to avoid making hard choices: some of its Labour supporters argue that it would allow them to pursue a “pure” socialist policy – because then people could vote for what they believe in and the government programme would be sorted out in post-election negotiations.

That, it seems to me, is the worst argument of all: that proportional representation would absolve a party of trying to present a programme for government that could appeal to as many people as possible.