If you were to travel back in time to the mid-1990s, during the twilight years of the Thatcher-Major run of Conservative governments, and told a cabinet minister that a 2026 by-election in a Manchester suburb would be won by a party on the left defeating a party on the right, they would likely accept that result without sparing it another moment’s thought. What would, however, come as a complete shock to our cabinet minister, well acclimatised to the Conservative/Labour two-partyism that had so long dominated British politics, would be the two parties in question. In the case of the recent Gorton and Denton example, we have the Greens on the left and Reform UK on the right.
It’s all too easy for us to get caught up with the potential political ramifications of such a result—which include but aren’t limited to an indication of the end of the Labour Party as the dominant party of the British left—to the extent that one tends to forget just how much the British party system itself has evolved over the past thirty years. But even just ten years ago, a result like this would have seemed remote.
We ought to warmly welcome the introduction of new parties to Westminster. However, a multi-party system trying to play itself out in a decidedly two-party voting system yields wildly disproportionate results, which often harbour wider political ramifications—and the UK is on a collision course with what could turn out to be one of the most unfair elections ever seen in its history.
How did we get here?
British elections are celebrated using a system called ‘first-past-the-post’ (FPTP). Under this system, the UK is divided into 650 equally(ish)-populated constituencies, each of which elects one MP to parliament to represent them. With just two parties, seat counts in parliament after elections that use the system tend to reflect, relatively loyally, the parties’ actual share of the popular vote.
Between the 1935 general election and the 1980s, Great Britain did in fact have a reliably two-party system of governance. Mutually reinforced by FPTP, the two parties, pragmatic in their approach and broad in their appeal, rarely allowed challenger minor parties to gain any notable share of the popular vote, and therefore, of the parliamentary seats.
Since the 1980s, however, the UK has seen a steady rise in the number of parties gaining representation in the UK parliament. At the 1983 election, three parties won more than 2% of the popular vote in England, Scotland, and Wales combined. At the most recent election, this has doubled to 6 parties, with the additions of Reform UK, the Greens, and the Scottish National Party.
This observed rise in the number of small parties clearly reflects that people don’t believe successive Tory and Labour governments are working for them, and this is often attributed to the ‘ideological convergence’ between the two main parties, or in other words, the perception that the two main parties are too close on policy, and that voting for one or the other makes no discernible difference.
Others ascribe this growing sentiment as due to three major economic crises experienced by Britain since the turn of the millennium; the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic, all of which have contributed to the economic malaise that shrouds the nation. In reality, it’s likely a combination of the two factors among many others that contribute to people wanting to support a party other than the two historical big beasts.
Nevertheless, what is for sure is that, whilst FPTP used to be relatively reliable at reflecting the results of general elections contested by just two parties gunning for Number 10, it is bombastically unpredictable when blended with multi-party elections. In a hypothetical constituency with six equally popular candidates going for office, it isn’t hard to envision an eventual winner in that constituency to finish with only 17% of the votes—just a little over one in six—provided this is more than any other single candidate.
In all fairness, constituencies are seldom competitions between more than three candidates, but it helps to highlight a major shortcoming of the system. And a comparison of the two most recent UK general elections shows this disproportionality in action: in 2024, the Liberal Democrats received, it must be said, a relatively well-proportioned 11.1% of seats, translated from 12.2% of votes nationwide. However, in 2019, they won over 11.5% of the vote share, yet only 1.7% of the seats. So, despite a similar level of support across both elections, their 2019 seat count was nearly an entire order of magnitude smaller than 2024.
This impressive discrepancy can be accredited to the fact that Lib Dem support in 2019 was very geographically dispersed, but, in 2024, an election with a record low voter turnout of just 59.7%, the party purposely switched up their strategy to maximise their seat count under the system. They ferociously targeted regions such as South West England and the Home Counties commuter belt, largely in former Conservative constituencies with populations that were disillusioned by the Johnson-Truss turmoil and ensuing instability.
The fact that the system forces parties to change their tactics, fixating on certain constituencies whilst practically abandoning others, often results in a citizen’s ability to vote for the party that they would like becoming a ‘postcode lottery’, essentially a form of regional discrimination.
Digging even deeper, we can see that this specific mode of ballot counting gives rise to another negative ramification: tactical voting, which is where one votes for the candidate that is not necessarily their favourite, but is their most favourite out of those with the possibility of winning that seat, even if they are only average or even sub-par in the voter’s eyes. Put like that, it’s easy to see why so many people stayed home at the previous election.
And this is without even mentioning the headline result of that election, in which the Labour Party won the general election with a commanding parliamentary majority, despite only receiving 33.7% of the vote share. There are, however, plenty of alternatives used all around the world that partially or entirely avoid the need for tactical voting at general elections and that mitigate the levels of vote-to-seat distortion.
In France, for example, the president is simply the person who gets more than 50% of votes, regardless of seats in parliament; if this requires a second ‘runoff’ election to whittle down the field (which it almost always does), then so be it. Over the border in Germany, coalition governments of more than one party are the norm, since their version of proportional representation (PR) is much better at reflecting the will of the people and avoids dishing out parliamentary majorities to parties that don’t receive more than half of all votes. Higher voter turnout has been recorded as a result, with France also recently pulling away in light of Britain’s dwindling enthusiasm. Both countries also report higher democratic satisfaction, and, crucially, where you live matters a lot less towards how you vote.
Looking forwards
A far cry from elections of previous eras, which realistically featured just two parties that largely agreed on many issues surrounding the institutions and regulations that govern our nation, the next UK general election will feature insurgent populist movements on the left and the right, both of which want to fundamentally change the current legal framework. One of Reform’s pre-eminent policy positions is leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is the underpinning of a vast amount of British human rights jurisprudence; for the Greens’ part, their indifference towards a strong NATO in the face of increased Russian aggression and heightened international tensions has faced criticism.
Mix that in with a result that hangs entirely in the balance (the five largest parties, as of recently, are all polling nationwide within the same 10% range of 14%-24%), and you have the perfect recipe for electoral disproportion on calamitous levels, and with potentially titanic consequences: a series of post-2024 MRP opinion polls consistently shows Reform UK taking either a plurality or a majority of the seats, sometimes in a landslide, with barely 30% of the popular vote nationwide. Pollsters More In Common warn that any such result has a good chance of displacing the 2024 election as the most disproportionate in British history.
Such a volatile electoral system also raises the stakes for MPs, meaning that many on the Labour side find themselves unwilling to back their own government’s votes in parliament. This has led to an embarrassing series of u-turns, as backbench rebellions have forced government climbdowns on policies such as benefit payments and farmers’ tax. Despite a vast majority, this government still all too often finds itself hopelessly impotent thanks to the very system that handed is such an augmented seat share in the first place.
Soon after last month’s by-election, the Institute for Government (IfG), a highly respected independent think tank founded in 2008 to foster the improvement of government effectiveness, released an explicitly-worded article warning of Westminster’s total deficit in preparation for such a scenario, giving light to institutional practices that promote two-partyism and shun any potential outsider movement.
They also condemned a general mindset around Parliament that holds that any more than two parties is an “unwelcome aberration” and detailed how the time allocated in debates and the spaces granted on committees operate as if we continue to live with a two-party system. Putting the hypothetical aftermath of a highly skewed election as envisioned above more succinctly, they say “the ability of such a parliament to fulfil its constitutional role of scrutinising the executive could be dangerously compromised in precisely the circumstances when this might be most important”.
Public support for a change to the electoral system before the next election seems to be high, and the next UK general election could be the most consequential in generations. Such a meaningful vote is crying out for a voting system to match; the UK’s current version of first-past-the-post is anything but that. Labour passed a motion at their 2022 conference which officially committed the party to embrace PR, and many of the new intake of MPs have publicly backed a change to the way in which representatives are elected to Westminster. Now it is clear more than ever that they need to get on with it.
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