British Prime Minister Keir Starmer walks outside Number 10 Downing Street to greet Scottish Labour MPs in London, on July 9.Chris J Ratcliffe/Reuters
The headlines were pretty much unanimous after last week’s election in Britain. “Keir Starmer is new UK Prime Minister after landslide election win.” “Starmer Becomes U.K. Prime Minister after Labour Party landslide.” “U.K.’s Starmer vows ‘government of service’ as he takes power after Labour landslide.”
And why not? Labour won 411 out of 650 seats, one of the largest majorities in British political history. It won in every part of the country. It won more than three times as many seats as its nearest rival, the Conservatives.
But look a little closer and it becomes clear Labour’s “landslide” is not all that it seems. That thumping great majority – nearly two-thirds of the seats! – was won with barely a third of the vote: 33.7 per cent, the smallest winning share in the country’s history. Indeed, it’s only a shade more than the 32 per cent the party won in losing the previous election, under Jeremy Corbyn.
First past the post strikes again. Labour didn’t win the election: the Conservatives lost it. It was the split in the vote on the right, between the Conservatives and the upstart Reform UK, that told the story. In scores of constituencies that Labour won, the combined Conservative and Reform vote comfortably exceeded that of the Labour candidate. Yet those robustly right-wing electorates ended up being represented by a left-wing party.
As with most FPTP elections, that only begins to describe the anomalies. It took fewer than 10 million votes to elect those 411 Labour MPs, or about 24,000 votes per seat. By contrast, the Conservatives, with nearly seven million votes, won 121 seats, while Reform, with more than four million votes, won just five seats: a staggering 821,000 votes per seat.
Well, okay, a bit of rough justice, but in the broad strokes the result was all right, wasn’t it? After all, if there was one thing most Brits were agreed on, it was that they wanted the Conservatives removed from power. Say what you will about FPTP, its defenders claim, but when it’s time to throw the bums out, no system does it better. As one constitutional scholar put it, it may not do so well at representation, but it’s great at accountability. It’s a trade-off.
Is it? Look again at those election results. Between them, the main left-of-centre parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, won 52 per cent of the vote, to just 38 per cent for the Conservatives and Reform. In a more proportional system, it’s clear the Conservatives would still be out, and Labour would be in – but at the helm of a broader coalition. An actual majority government, that is, rather than a pretend one.
Or maybe the case for FPTP lies in how few seats Reform won. Britain saved from extremism, once again! But the knife that cuts one way can as easily cut another. A third of the vote was enough to hand Labour a majority this election. It might give Reform a majority the next. And if you think that’s an unlikely scenario, have a look at what just happened in France.
Like Britain, France elects its legislature in single-member districts based on plurality voting. Unlike Britain, it does so in two rounds, the second being restricted to those candidates who received the support of at least 12.5 per cent of eligible voters in the first.
In the second round, the parties of the left and centre agreed to run a single candidate in many districts so as to avoid splitting the vote and prevent the crypto-fascist National Rally (RN) from getting in. The tactic succeeded brilliantly: the RN ended up in third, with fewer than a quarter of the seats.
But had there only been only one round of voting, as in Britain, it’s conceivable the RN could have won a majority – it led in 297 of 577 districts after the first round – again, with a third of the vote.
France’s two-round system may seem exotic. But its basic dynamics are similar to proportional representation. In France’s system, parties combine their forces before the final vote; in PR, it happens after. Either way, it makes a takeover by extremists less likely than under simple FPTP, not more.
Under any system, that is, a majority of the electorate is unlikely to vote for an anti-democratic party. In PR, the best a fascist party can hope for is to be one party among several in a multiparty coalition (usually they do not even get that far). They cannot win a majority on their own, or at least not with a minority of the vote.
Whereas in a winner-take-all system like first past the post, you never know. Ask the Americans.