What's wrong with FPTP?

SEATS IN PARLIAMENT DON'T MATCH VOTES CAST

The UK is usually governed by a party with an overall majority - and almost never governed by a party or parties that most people voted for.

Since 1970, the winning party in a UK general election has never gained more than 45% of the vote (the exception being the Con/Dem coalition of 2010). Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives won an overall majority of 80 seats in 2019, on only 43.6% of the vote. This majority allowed them to push through a disastrous no-deal Brexit; a corrupt and incompetent response to COVID; and rapacious attacks on the NHS.

In 2024, Labour won 65% of the seats on 34% of the vote.  As Labour members and supporters, we are delighted that we have a Labour government, but the lack of a clear popular mandate has dogged the Labour government so far, and stood in the way of more radical and decisive policies.

Under a system where seats matched votes, the UK would have had a Labour-led government for most of the past century, and much of the progress made by previous Labour-led governments, such as the provision of council housing, would not have been dismantled by incoming single-party Tory governments.

MILLIONS OF VOTES ARE WASTED

EVERYBODY GETS A VOTE - WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

If you are a Labour voter living in a safe Tory seat, your vote is wasted from the start - the Tory will always get in, no matter what you do. A large proportion of Labour votes in safe Labour seats are also wasted, because they are "surplus to requirements".

People who support a party that is not a serious contender in their constituency face a horrible choice on polling day: to vote for the party they support, in the belief that their vote will count for nothing, or to vote for a party they don't really support,  but that might have a chance of winning that seat.

Under FPTP, elections are decided by voters in a small number of marginal constituencies. This can't possibly be fair - after all, the outcome of the election affects everyone!

In the UK, estimates suggest that as many as 12-15% of people aren't registered to vote. Of those who are registered, about 30% don't turn out on polling day. The turnout at the 2024 General Election was the second lowest since the introduction of universal suffrage.  It's no surprise that levels of apathy are so high in a system where so many votes count for nothing. Research shows that turnout is higher under PR systems.
Of the people who do go out to vote, about 20% vote tactically for a party they don't support, and about 30% vote for a losing candidate in a safe seat (some of these are the same people).

Surely it's not too much to ask that people should be able to go to vote on polling day and vote for the party they prefer, knowing that their vote will make a difference. 

FPTP FAVOURS A RIGHT-WING AGENDA

For most of the time since 1945 FPTP has favoured the Conservative Party in elections, because so many Labour votes are wasted in safe Labour seats. When Labour has proposed redistributive policies, it is the less-well-off who are most concentrated in urban areas who will benefit, whereas better-off and more middle-class voters tend to be more evenly spread across more constituencies.

In addition, FPTP breeds apathy, which leads to lower levels of voter registration and turnout. People who aren't registered to vote, or who don't vote, tend to be young, to live in rented accommodation, and to be less affluent... and these are groups that historically favour the Labour party.

FPTP also favours a right-wing agenda in other, more subtle, ways. Research shows that PR systems tend to produce societies with lower levels of inequality, higher levels of public spending, and a fairer distribution of public goods.

It's not hard to see how this comes about. Although PR systems do produce right-of-centre governments, these governments tend to be broadly-based and to operate with a degree of consensus (for instance, in Germany). Because of this, they find it difficult to launch attacks on the welfare state such as we have seen from Conservative governments in the UK, and can expect to see from any Reform UK government in future.

Some people have supported FPTP because they look forward to the day when the Labour Party wins an overall majority in Parliament on a minority of the vote, and introduces a socialist programme.

There are two problems with that. Under FPTP a right-wing party is likely to win an overall majority again - and they can win an enormous majority on well under half the popular vote. Time after time in Britain, Tory governments have systematically dismantled the progressive policies that Labour governments put in place. They have sold off council houses built under Labour; they partially dismantled the NHS; and their attacks on the welfare state have reversed Labour's reductions in child poverty and seen thousands of families relying on food banks. The damage that would be done by a Reform UK government is likely to be even worse.

And the second problem is that the need to put together a winning single-party coalition under First Past the Post has led to Labour governments that do not introduce a radical socialist, or even social democratic, programme, even when they are elected. Surely it would be better to be principled about our policies and then build an effective coalition with other parties that share part of our agenda, rather than having to water down our approach to the voters in the first place.

A broad-based Labour-led government elected under proportional representation could introduce a programme of progressive reforms, which we know would be popular with the electorate, and could cooperate with other progressive parties to ensure that they had popular buy-in. And Tory-led governments, when they eventually came along, would find it difficult to dismantle them.

FPTP BREEDS A TOXIC POLITICAL CULTURE

FPTP is a winner-takes-all system. It breeds a politics where there is more to be gained from hurling jibes and insults at people of different political persuasions, than from genuine attempts to find common ground and build constructive solutions. This is reflected in the “yah-boo” culture of the House of Commons – behaviour which has nothing to do with meaningful political debate, which would not be tolerated in any other workplace, and which lowers respect for politicians among the public.

At election time, the winner-takes-all system gives politicians little incentive to run civilised campaigns by promoting their own policies, and far too much incentive to base campaigns on discrediting their opponents’ reputations.

Anyone who wants to see a constructive grown-up politics, anyone who agrees with the immortal words of Jo Cox, that there is more that unites us than divides us, should have no time for an electoral system which prioritises division rather than cooperation.

FPTP KEEPS OUT EXTREMISTS – UNTIL IT DOESN’T

By awarding seats to whichever party happens to get the most votes in each constituency, irrespective of how low the percentage of votes might be, but not awarding any seats to parties in respect of support that they have across the country, FPTP has so far grossly under-recognised smaller nationwide parties, and in particular the Green Party and Reform UK. So long as those parties gain less than 20% of the vote, they win very few seats.  This breeds resentment that their voters’ voices are not being heard.  Reform UK (and its previous incarnations) has successfully tapped into that resentment, helping to fuel the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, and now propelling them to be the highest-polling political party in England.

However, just as FPTP denies parties the modest representation they should win on a modest vote, it then propels them to a disproportionate number of seats if they manage to achieve a higher vote than any other party.  Labour managed to win nearly 2/3 of the seats in the House of Commons on just 33.7% of the vote. Farage (or whoever else heads a right-wing populist party) could become Prime Minister with an overall majority on as little as 29% of the vote.  Under a proportional system, no party could win a majority of seats on less than a third of the vote, and other parties could form a coalition to exclude an extreme right party even if that party gained more seats than any other single party.  The Alternative fur Deutschland won the second-highest number of votes in the recent German general election, and topped the polls in several provincial elections, but with PR the other parties have managed to marginalise and contain the racist party.