A new YouGov MRP poll, published on 26 September 2025, provides another snapshot of the chaotic democratic outcomes being caused by First Past The Post (FPTP) in our era of multi-party politics.
Although only a poll, it reflects what we are seeing in actual FPTP elections, whether that be the 2024 general election, the most disproportional on record; the English local elections of May 2025; or more recent local council by-elections.
The Random Government Generator
The YouGov poll includes a number of striking findings that highlight how the voting system used for UK general elections is being stretched beyond breaking point and how it is not a reliable tool for reflecting the political preferences of the public.
The first thing to note is that the largest party, Reform UK, are projected to be within a whisker of an overall UK parliamentary majority (48% of seats), despite a projected vote share of just 27%. This represents an underserved bonus, like that received by Labour at the 2024 general election, where Labour won 63% of seats from 34% of votes.
It cannot be right that parties are winning (or are even close to winning) untrammelled parliamentary majorities with the support of as little as three-in-ten of those who turn out to vote.
The poll also indicates that combined support for Labour and the Conservatives has slumped even further from the historic low of the 2024 general election (57% of votes), standing at just 38% (Labour: 21%; Conservatives: 17%) in this latest YouGov MRP poll.
An electoral system designed for two large parties, which hoover up virtually all of the votes, as was the case in Britain in the period immediately following World War II, is clearly no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was.
As YouGov point out in their write-up of the data, ‘high levels of uncertainty and volatility are now the norm in British electoral politics’ and this is reflected in the number of seats that the poll projects would be decided by very small margins. The projected average margin of victory is just 10 percentage points, whereas the equivalent figure at the 2019 general election was 26 percentage points.
A lottery election?
This means that small changes in levels of support for different parties can result in wildly different outcomes, which is not something that should be a feature of a healthy democratic system.
At a constituency level, the projected average vote share of a winning candidate is just 34% and some constituencies are projected to be won on astonishingly low levels of support of as little as 1-in-5 of voters. For example,
- Labour are projected to win Cardiff East with 22% of votes.
- Reform UK are projected to win Watford with 23% of votes.
The fact that the views of 80% of voters are set to be completely ignored in some constituencies is a damning indictment of First Past The Post.
We already use proportional voting systems for many elections throughout the UK, including Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland. And MPs have set out a route for how to get it in Westminster.
If we want to be able to choose our own governments, and the future direction of the country, we can’t have general elections that throw out random results. We need to make every vote count, in every election.
End the chaos of First Past the Post
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