Labour now holds 63% of the seats in Parliament, but this landslide majority was won on just 34% of the vote, making the 2024 general election the most disproportionate in the UK’s history.  

There’s a very simple explanation: first past the post (FPTP), the voting system that no European countries other than the UK and Belarus use. Everybody gets one vote, and the candidate with the most votes in each constituency takes the seat. It sounds sensible but leads to problems.  

In worst-case scenarios, it leads to situations like the 1951 “wrong winner” general election, which gave Labour more votes than the Tories but produced more Tory MPs than Labour MPs. FPTP is the reason that main parties often campaign on nothing more than “we’re not the other ones”; all they need to do is not be the worse option (voters often vote against, rather than for, under FPTP). It leads to the “spoiler effect”, where voters who broadly agree with each other split their votes between several candidates and a generally unprefferable candidate takes the win; this is why David Cameron warned of a “vote UKIP, get Labour” situation.  

One of the clearest examples from this election is Leicester East, where the left-wing vote was split between Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, two now-independent previous Labour MPs, and a handful of pro-Palestine independents (totalling over two thirds of the vote) — resulting in a Conservative win on less than a third of the vote.  

This happened because FPTP gives seats to the most liked candidates, while other systems give seats to the least disliked ones. Candidates with dedicated but small followings, who are unpopular with those they’re not the first choice for, are more unlikely to win seats under proportional systems.  

Proportional representation (PR) by single transferrable vote (STV) is used for all elections in the Republic of Ireland, elections below Westminster level in Northern Ireland, and local elections in Scotland. Voters rank candidates in order of preference. After this, the ballots are sorted by first preference, and then candidates are eliminated one by one from the bottom of the ranking, with their ballots then re-distributed by next preference. This is repeated until a candidate at the top of the ranking has hit the quota to be elected, at which point their extra votes are re-distributed too, and it keeps going until enough people have been elected. It’s a system that allows voters to put their real thoughts as first choice, with backup options afterwards.  

Common criticisms of PR include: “It’s difficult for voters to understand”? (Just rank the candidates. Easy.) “People need ‘strong and stable’ governments, not messy coalitions”? (Strong and stable is all well and good, but it ignores voters’ real opinions; would a messy coalition that accurately represents the nation really be so bad?) “It will let in dangerous extremists”? (Maybe Reform voters wouldn’t be rioting right now if they’d been given the MPs they voted for. And we wouldn’t have Tory and Labour parties who are trying to also be Reform to appeal to Reform voters. Reform could be Reform instead.)  

STV comes with multiple-seat constituencies. This writer’s home constituency in Dublin has four TDs (MPs). This is really helpful for anybody who’s ever felt like their MP ignores them because they’ll never vote for a certain party. In multiple-seat constituencies, there’s a much higher chance of any given person having at least one representative who’ll listen to them. (Norwich City Council does have three-seat wards, but it’s not quite the same, because these are elected one seat at a time using FPTP, and so essentially function as groups of three single-seat wards.)  

STV means voting for the person, not the party — parties will often run multiple candidates in the same constituency, because they know that if one is unpopular then the votes can just transfer to the others.  

Labour and the Tories both benefit from FPTP, because they get support from people who really don’t like them at all, just because they dislike the others even more. The only thing, seemingly, that could make them bring STV in is a smaller party making it a red line on a coalition (as the Lib Dems did in Holyrood in 2006, bringing it to Scottish local elections).  

Norwich South MP Clive Lewis is one of the very few Labour MPs to be in favour of PR, having pointed out the unfairness of FPTP in his speech at the 2024 election count. Ironically, he also has the second-safest seat in the East of England. Safe seats are a feature of FPTP, not of PR, and for better or for worse they allow MPs to prioritise things other than actually talking to their constituents, whether they use that time to loudly have opinions on the internet or to have second, third, and fourth jobs. Safe seats certainly have less accountability.  

Many of the common complaints about modern British politics can be traced back to FPTP, and even the mainstream media are starting to pay attention to the inconsistencies between the MPs the country wanted to vote for, the MPs the country voted for, and the MPs the country got.