Why Labour’s conference is set to give Keir Starmer a PR voting headache

Last year the Labour leader defeated demands for reform but this time the forces against him are stronger, writes Rob Merrick

The Labour leader is facing calls to back changing the first-past-the-post system (PA)

It’s not a priority for me,” Sir Keir Starmer says. Well, to the Labour conference opening in Liverpool on Sunday, it is a very pressing concern indeed.

I’m talking about getting rid of the UK’s outdated and hideously unfair voting system and replacing it with one suited to the modern age and less clearly favourable to the Conservatives.

The issue of replacing first-past-the-post at Westminster with some form of proportional representation (PR) has been buried in the political weeds for a decade but could be about to sprout again.

In Liverpool, more than 100 delegations have drawn up motions for the party to back the switch and – unlike in a similar vote last year – they look like succeeding.

Twelve months ago, the Starmer team saw off the demand for change made by more than 80 per cent of local party members thanks to the opposition of trade unions.

But this time the unions are ready to switch sides – Unison, Unite and the Communication Workers Union having all voted at their own conferences to bin first-past-the-post.

Votes at the Labour conference are not binding on the leadership – Tony Blair ignored them year after year – and no one is suggesting this is as important as the cost of living crisis and collapsing public services. But it will be far harder for Sir Keir to ignore demands for voting reform, as Labour’s 2019 manifesto did, if his party has voted to insist on change.

And it definitely is time for change. Labour has paid a heavy price for Mr Blair ditching the reform plan he commissioned in the 1990s, handing successive Tory governments free rein on a minority of the popular vote.

The UK’s electoral system is all but unique in Europe in having no element of proportional representation. In 2019, it took more than 50,000 votes, on average, to elect a Labour MP but only around 38,000 to elect a Tory.

Sir Keir, in 2020, recognised another weakness of first-past-the-post, that “millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count”.

If Labour wins, it can make other important improvements by allowing 16-year-olds to vote and through automatic registration to stop – conveniently for the Conservatives – millions of mostly poorer voters falling off the rolls.

But on Monday the party is poised to tell Sir Keir to go much further – and not run away from voting reform for fear of Tory protests, wrongly, that it is a Labour-Liberal Democrat stitch-up.