The streets of Gorton and Denton will be much quieter this week after the flashmob of party activists has now departed. Last Thursday’s poll saw a historic win for the Greens and their first ever parliamentary by-election victory. This prompted widespread debate about the collapse of two-party politics and the suitability of Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system to cope with the new multi-party electoral reality.
The risk with by-elections is always overinterpretation. They are a snapshot of a single constituency, and voters can often behave differently in a one-off, mid-term by-election compared to a general election. However, the Gorton and Denton result reinforced a trend we have been seeing for over a year now: that voting intention is splitting between multiple parties in a way we’ve not seen before in British politics. This trend emerged in the 2024 General Election, where four parties received over 10 per cent of the vote for the first time ever. We now have five parties polling consistently at over 10 per cent.
This has profound implications for Westminster’s First Past the Post system, which is designed for a two-party system and cannot cope with multi-party politics. We saw this at the last general election, where it produced the most disproportional result in British history. The danger we now face is the risk of it behaving in an even more chaotic and distorting way at the next election. This is not just a concern held here at the ERS.
First Past the Post is ‘creaking at the seams’
After the Gorton and Denton result, the Institute for Government said the by-election showed the voting system is “creaking at the seams”, and it is time to “seriously consider whether our electoral system is fit for purpose”.
It warned: “If casting a vote starts to feel more like participating in a lottery than making a positive and principled decision, then voters are going to become ever more frustrated. This is dangerous. At the very least it will drive down turnout and engagement, at the worst it will undermine the legitimacy of the future governments it delivers.”
The visible wobbling of First Past the Post has prompted some supporters of the status quo to come to its defence in recent days, such as Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff. In a reasoned column, she laid out what she saw as the pros and cons of the system versus switching to a proportional one for Westminster, citing that she feels First Past the Post does a good job ‘keeping extremists out’ and that proportional representation would not remove some of the grubbier aspects of politics.
The ‘extremist’ point is an often cited one, but it skips over the fact that we have proportional systems in Scotland and Wales and no ‘extremist’ parties represented in either of those parliaments.
Opponents of PR will also often point to countries that have proportional systems but not particularly stable politics. It is not hard to find outliers, as pretty much every democratic country has some form of PR. They forget to mention the vast majority of relatively stable countries with PR, from Germany to New Zealand to the Republic of Ireland. Or that PR, far from being some exotic import, has been in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for decades. This is not something new to the UK, just SW1.
France is cited as a cautionary tale for electoral reform, although this is a red herring, as France doesn’t have a proportional system (i.e. one that aims to accurately represent how people voted) but effectively two rounds of First Past the Post. It may sound like a technical point, but it is important.
People clearly want a politics that better reflects their lives
The next question often asked is ‘what kind of governments would that produce?’ That should be up to the voters of this country. It should be simple: People vote, parliament represents that vote accurately, and politicians deal with the mandate they are given. The only bias the voting system should have is to the voter.
Meanwhile, public support for electoral reform is growing in this country, as the British Social Attitudes survey has recorded a consistent majority in support in recent years. There is a clear desire from the public for a politics that better reflects their lives. A good place to start is a parliament that properly reflects how they voted.
What is clear is that pressure will only continue to build on a Westminster voting system that simply cannot cope with the reality of multi-party politics. People are already voting as if we have PR, it’s time for a voting system that accurately represents that in Parliament.
Do you think parliament should represent how we vote?
Add your name to our call for proportional representation