‘First past the post’ not fit for purpose

At the end of each general election, the United Kingdom is governed by arithmetic. If one party has more Members of Parliament than all the others added together, it forms the next Government. If not, permutations and combinations have to be calculated to see who can command the confidence of the House of Commons. But there is another piece of arithmetic that has even more substantial long-term implications. All the evidence suggests that analysis of the 2015 election result will reveal a serious mismatch between total votes cast for each party, and the number of seats obtained in the House of Commons.

This discrepancy is particularly worrying when the trend is towards political diversity instead of the traditional two-party system. There were seven parties campaigning for votes on the British mainland this time, and five more in Northern Ireland. The existing voting system is not well designed to extract a truly democratic outcome from such a multi-party contest – a government which represents as wide a spread of interests as possible, with the number of votes and seats as well aligned as can be devised.

There is a growing list of other issues where the British constitution has fallen behind the turn of events. For example, on the day after the Scottish nation rejected independence from the United Kingdom in last year’s referendum, the Prime Minister endorsed cross-party proposals to transfer more powers from Westminster to Edinburgh but added that this raised the question of “English votes for English laws”. If Edinburgh became responsible for setting income tax rates in Scotland, for instance, why should Scottish MPs continue to be allowed to vote to set income tax rates in England and Wales? But the answer is not as simple as the question.

In response to these ineluctable pressures, the United Kingdom seems to be drifting towards a fully federal system, as in Germany, the United States, Australia and elsewhere, but without looking where it is going. There is an overwhelming case for a grand Constitutional Convention to try to bring all these different pressures and tendencies into a harmonious balance. The goal would be a new constitutional settlement that is fair to the interests of the four nations and which can be seen to enhance their common good. Such a settlement could save the United Kingdom from disintegration. House of Lords reform ought also to be in play in such a joint rethink of the UK’s basic structure.

It is clear the winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post method of electing a government – which may have produced clear outcomes and favoured stability when there were two large parties representing 90 per cent of the electorate – no longer serves the public interest. The more it delivers results which please nobody, the less public confidence it can command.

A Constitutional Convention would require all interested parties to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis of democracy that is undermining the present system, to work out what they really want, and then negotiate a compromise, to be endorsed by referendum, that gives each of them as much power as possible. It has to happen, and the sooner the better.