First Past The Post Has Hollowed Out Our Politics
By turning politics into a strategic game, the FPTP system is destructive of real democratic politics & stands in the way of change
Leaving aside the formation of a national government in 1931, it has been 120 years since a single party in the United Kingdom was able to command the support of a majority of the voting public.
Even in his great landslide election victory of 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour Party only won the support of 47.7% of the voting public and support for Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party never rose above 43.9%. Whilst Blair’s Labour Party managed to win an election in 2005 with only 35.2% of the vote — the smallest percentage of the vote for a single party to ever produce a working majority in the Commons.
In truth, winning a general election in the United Kingdom is not about gaining popular support from a majority of the people. In fact, it might be that a majority of the public are opposed you. What is required to win is that you can keep together a fragile coalition of voters that is sufficient to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons (typically something slightly in excess of 40% will do).
The 2019 election is an excellent example of this feature of the UK political system. Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party secured 43.6% of the vote, which is the party’s best result on this measure since 1979. But, even in this landslide election, a majority of the public supported parties that would have offered the public a second referendum on our membership of the European Union.
What is plain from the above is that the First Past The Post (FPTP) system used in the UK for General Elections sacrifices fair representation in order to provide single-party government. Supporters of the system argue that this is justified on the basis that majority governments are strong and stable, providing governments that have the ability to use their majority in Parliament to enact the policies contained in their manifestos. But this justification rings hollow when one considers that governments elected without majority support often push through policies that the majority (or a significant minority) oppose. This was certainly the case with…
