The replacement of Sir Keir Starmer would bring to five the number of UK Prime Ministers since 2022. Of those since 2010 only one of them remained in the post more than three years. None of them was able to convert winning a majority in the general election into completing their five-year mandate. Such political instability is usually associated with third world countries, not with a nation often described as a home of pragmatism.
What are the reasons for this? The most common ones given are the impact of the divisive Brexit, agreed by a narrow margin (52% to 48%) in a referendum in 2019 and which a majority of voters would now like to overturn, the UK’s economic decline and the impact of social media that has deepened polarisation.
But another factor is also increasingly being blamed for the topsy-turviness: the first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP), under which the candidate with the most votes –even when far short of a majority– wins. Not for nothing is FPTP known as ‘winner takes all’, leaving the other parties that fielded candidates with nothing. This would, prima facie, seem fair. After all, there is only one winner in most competitions, and elections are a competition. But deciding which party will govern a country under FPTP is not the same as winning a board game. There are no consolation prizes, which might often soften disappointment and reward effort; those leaving who voted for the losing parties are left feeling disenfranchised.
FPTP gave Britain stable single-party majority governments with both the Conservatives and Labour tending to last their full five-year term in office until 2017 when Teresa May called a snap election in the hope of winning a bigger majority (which did not happen). Boris Johnson then called another early election in 2019. FPTP is used in around one-third of countries, notably in the US and also in Canada and India. MPs serve the constituency they campaign in. As a result they remain in touch with local issues, tackle local problems and have face-to-face contact with their constituents.
A shift occurred in the 2024 election when a record one-third of voters supported none of the three main parties, Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrats. Close to 60% of voters got an MP they did not vote for. Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory, with 411 of the 650 MPs (63.2% of the total) on a mere 33.7% of the vote (see Figure 1). Labour, on that basis, was the most over-represented party, while the hard-right populist Reform UK was the most under-represented (0.8% of the seats on 14.3% of the vote). The Liberal Democrats won a smaller slice of the vote (12.2%) than Reform but because of the nature of FPTP captured 11.1% of the seats.
Figure 1. UK’s election results 2024, main parties, % of votes and number and % of seats
| Political party | % of votes | Number of seats | % of seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 33.7 | 411 | 63.2 |
| Conservatives | 23.7 | 131 | 18.6 |
| Reform UK | 14.3 | 5 | 0.8 |
| Liberal Democrats | 12.2 | 72 | 11.1 |
| Green Party | 6.4 | 4 | 0.6 |
| Scottish National Party | 2.5 | 9 | 1.4 |
| Sinn Féin | 0.7 | 7 | 1.1 |
| Plaid Cymru | 0.7 | 4 | 0.6 |
| Democratic Unionist Party | 0.6 | 5 | 0.8 |
The UK’s Electoral Reform Society says FPTP is ‘bad for voters, bad for government and bad for democracy’. It said the 2024 result was ‘not only the most disproportional election in British electoral history, but one of the most disproportional seen anywhere in the world’. David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister between 2010 and 2016, said the proportional representation (PR) system would allow people into parliament who did not finish first in their constituency in an election and would create a ‘parliament full of second-choices who no one really wanted but didn’t really object to either’. In return, however, for the support of the Liberal Democrats, which enabled him to be able to form a government, Cameron agreed to a referendum in 2011 on the so-called Alternative Vote system –often called Instant Runoff Voting in the US–. It is not a form of PR and is designed to deal with vote splitting. It was rejected by 67% of those who voted.
Spain uses the d’Hondt system of PR. It has produced stable governments, with the Socialists and Popular Party (PP) alternating in power and tending to last their full four-year term in office until 2015 when the political system fragmented with the entry into parliament of two new parties, the hard-left Podemos and the would-be centrist Ciudadanos, and then in 2019 the hard-right VOX. This system, widely used, divides total votes by a series of divisors (1,2,3…) to determine seat allocation and is generally considered to favour larger parties, which helps to form stable majorities.
The PR system is more representative of the electorate and delivers fairer treatment of minority parties and independent candidates. It encourages people to vote and reduces apathy: fewer votes are ‘wasted’ as more people’s preferences are taken into account. It rarely produces an absolute majority for one party and often leads to greater consensus in policy-making. Spain has had majority Socialist and Popular Party governments, partly because in the smaller of the 50 provinces (those with 2-6 seats in Congress) and the way d’Hondt works only the two main parties tend to get elected. Over- and under-representation in PR is much less prevalent than under FPTP. In the 2023 election, the PP, the dominant party, won 39.1% of the seats on 33.1% of the votes (see Figure 2). VOX and the hard-left Sumar won 33 and 31 seats, respectively, on 9.4% and 8.8% of the vote. The Catalan and Basque parties do quite well because they only field candidates in their regions and not nationally.
Figure 2. Spain’s election results 2023, main parties, % of votes and number and % of seats
| Political party or alliance | % of votes | Number of seats | % of seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Popular Party | 33.1 | 137 | 39.1 |
| Socialists | 31.7 | 121 | 34.6 |
| VOX | 12.4 | 33 | 9.4 |
| Sumar | 12.3 | 31 | 8.8 |
| Republican Left of Catalonia | 1.9 | 7 | 2.0 |
| Together for Catalonia | 1.6 | 7 | 2.0 |
| EH Bildu | 1.4 | 6 | 1.7 |
| Basque Nationalist Party | 1.1 | 5 | 1.4 |
The disadvantages of PR are that it makes it easier for extreme parties to gain representation (that system applied in the UK’s 2024 election would have given Reform UK around 100 MPs), it can create political gridlock (Spain had four elections between 2015 and 2019 ) and it favours compromise and coalitions that are not always the wisest course when a strong majority government is required to push through much-needed reforms (which some would argue is what Spain needs). It is no surprise that Reform UK is leading the call for PR –it needed 823,522 votes to elect an MP compared with 23,622 for Labour–. It used to be the Liberal Democrats who complained most about FPTP until they did very well in 2024.
Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics, says PR would make polarisation and fragmentation worse, and voters would no longer have a local MP directly accountable to them. The voting system that would best suit the UK, he argues, is Majority Rule (MR), as it would retain Britain’s traditional and much-loved single-member constituencies, a feature that many would like to keep and which is one of the main reasons why voters are reluctant to move to PR.
Under MR voters would rank the candidates in their constituency (or as many of them as they wish) in order of preference. The winner is then the candidate who would defeat each rival in a head-to-head contest according to the rankings. Maskin compares MR to 10 friends choosing a restaurant for dinner. ‘The four carnivores all prefer Steakhouse to Salad Bar to Tofu Table. Three of the vegetarians have the ranking Salad Bar > Tofu Table > Steakhouse, and the remaining three, Tofu Table > Salad Bar > Steakhouse. Under first-past-the-post, the meat-eaters win; Steakhouse comes first with 40%. But Salad Bar –the winner under MR– is a more democratic choice: 60% prefer it to Steakhouse, and 70% rank it above Tofu Table’.
A fairer voting system than FPTP would not in itself resolve the profound malaise in British politics, but it would make the electorate feel better represented and produce more collaborative governments that, in turn, might put an end to the quick turnover in Prime Ministers.
