I quite enjoy games of chance. Every few weeks, I play low-stakes poker with a group of people who have become firm friends. I also like playing Dungeons and Dragons whenever I can organise enough people to do it. Throwing an eight-sided dice is a great way to kill a troll.
However, I’m less convinced it’s a great way to elect a government. Yet that’s exactly what our First Past the Post electoral system is offering to do for us at the next election.
With five or more parties around 10% to 25% in the polls, our current First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system breaks down, and it becomes increasingly difficult to predict outcomes. Feed the national polling into any of the general election prediction websites, and they will give you massively different answers from week to week or even day to day.
Our antiquated system wasn’t built for the era of multi-party politics. Everyone knows this, but Labour and the Tories are clinging on to the past in the form of FPTP, in the desperate hope that somehow, something will change between now and the next election. An election now certain to be less than four years away. Maybe it will, but if you are thinking that way, you probably think Mr Micawber was a far-sighted visionary.
One factor is certainly going to change though, in the shape of Corbyn’s new political party. Whatever it ends up being called, it is likely to further fracture the political landscape and add to the uncertainty under FPTP.
Labour is worried and they should be. Speaking to LabourList recently, Lord Kinnock said recently that a split progressive vote was Labour’s biggest challenge and jokingly called Corbyn’s new party the “Farage Assistance Faction”.
Very droll.
His solution? Everyone should just vote Labour, obviously.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that’s unlikely to work out and neither is it reasonable to expect ex-Labour supporters to just suck it up, hold their noses, and vote Labour.
The people leaving for other parties aren’t doing so for fun. They are doing so because they some have made the judgement that there is no place for them in a party that no longer represents their values, whilst others feel that the level of democracy once afforded them, in return for the graft of grassroots activism, has been eroded to an unrecognisable extent.
These are deep and painful reasons and cannot be papered over with pleas to give the Party one more chance in order to stop the far right or because it’s the only other option for the left. That’s no longer the case and it’s too big an ask. The Labour Party urgently needs to consider how it can make both the kind of policy and democratic changes needed to win back activists, members and voters.
Otherwise, these combined issues mean that FPTP has become a gift for Reform. If they can keep their vote share at 25% or higher, as seems plausible, they could be on course to form the next government. But it’s a roll of the dice. Nobody knows how it’s going to turn out.
Choosing our government should not be a game of chance especially one where the far-right has such good odds. The only solution is to change the voting system to a system that actually represents the country’s choices and doesn’t try to force voters to vote for parties they cannot in good conscience support. The only solution is Proportional Representation.