Dear John,
Just as a broken clock is right once a day, our warped political system successfully produced a favourable result for the country yesterday. The Conservative government that oversaw the pollution of our waterways, the poisoning of our politics, and the dismantling of our civil liberties has been utterly rejected by the British public.
But for dedicated democracy campaigners like us, the fight is far from over. The results, while reflective of the country’s righteous animosity for the Conservatives, still laid bare an electoral system that is fundamentally disproportionate, exclusive, and unfair. It might have produced benign results this time – but that’s no guarantee in future.
The numbers don’t lie. Labour secured nearly 2/3 of Parliamentary seats (63%) with just over 1/3 of the vote (34%). The party’s Parliamentary power is nearly double that of their national vote share. That’s going to ignite a serious discussion, from both good faith and bad faith actors.
The smaller parties, conversely, were cheated by First-Past-The-Post’s disproportionality. The Greens and Reform both won four seats (just 1%) with 7% and 14% of the vote respectively. While the Greens are celebrating three new seats in Parliament, Reform is all but guaranteed to weaponise these results, using it to foment even more fear and mistrust in the establishment.
It’s already started. “Four million” (referring to the number of people who turned out for Reform at this election) was trending on X this morning, with pro-Reform bots and supporters parroting lines about censorship and exclusion.
In summary, the results last night give us two major causes for concern:
The fact that a party can win unilateral control of the country with just a third of the vote may have been beneficial in getting the Conservatives out – but what happens in 2029? It’s not unfathomable to imagine Farage himself – or something worse yet to emerge – securing 34% of the vote and sweeping Parliament. On a deeper level, results like these just don’t reflect the true will of the people.
These disproportionate results create a fertile breeding ground for bad-faith actors to foment distrust. Whatever words you may have for the far-right, they are politically expedient. They will, without a doubt, look to take advantage of these broken results.
On a more positive note, this General Election will – and has already begun to – generate a national conversation about vote share and electoral systems. It’s long overdue. We know from the 40,000 + signatures on our PR petition that people sense the unfairness of the current electoral system.
But last night it went mainstream. It’s no longer just political nerds talking about proportionality in our elections. In the first few days of this new premiership, this conversation will present us with major opportunities which we plan to take full advantage of.
In the meantime, you can help out by adding your name to our PR petition and sharing it widely, just one leverage point of many we plan to use on the new PM, Keir Starmer, to push him to do what’s fundamentally right and necessary.
