The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections launched with the backing of 100 cross-party MPs, including many on the Labour benches. You can see the full list of supporters here.
In marketing terms these are the innovators and the disruptors, challenging the status quo, building and refining the arguments to make the case for a better democracy.
The APPG hasn’t confined themselves purely to securing a fairer voting system for the UK Parliament, they are also after those who lurk in the shadows, exercising a pervasive influence on our politics with dark money and disinformation.
Now, more than ever, the defenders of our democracy need to be active and vocal. Cleaning up our politics is no longer a side hustle for the geek squad who understand why proportional representation is fairer than First Past The Post.
We need all MPs to engage and properly understand why all this matters. For Labour to only hug their massive majority – for as long as they can make it last – would be short-term thinking and an unacceptable response to the debate around democracy.
Labour secured 412 seats (63% of all seats) based on just 34% of the vote – that’s a win based on only one in three votes cast. According to BBC Verify, this is the largest gap on record. The Electoral Reform Society said it was “the most disproportional in British electoral history.”
No party that talks about democracy can be taken seriously if it accepts a mandate to govern on this basis, without recognising the negative impact on voters at all.
Trust in politics is at an all-time low and it’s been in a slow but profound decline for a long time. That trust is not going to return if voters keep getting parliaments that don’t look like the ones they voted for. We need to learn the lessons from Brexit that people want their voices heard. As Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester said;
‘In 2016, leading up to the Brexit vote, people were saying, ‘we’re gonna get heard this time – you’re gonna hear us’ and I just really remember that and all of that has kind of built my understanding or my feeling around the need for reform.’
The Government urgently needs to respond to the impact of a perverse general election result. The distortion caused by the First Past the Post system is disenfranchising voters. As over 58% didn’t get the MP they voted for, they won’t hear their views reflected in Parliament and politicians won’t be getting a realistic picture of national opinion – one feeds the other in a negative circle of decline.
This in turn, has the potential to lower voter turnout or push people to get their voices heard in an alternative way.
It’s time for action and the APPG has solutions. The ‘Free But Not Fair’ report, makes three key recommendations for government:
- Establish a National Commission on Electoral Reform: the Commission would allow experts, alongside citizens, to recommend a fair and democratic voting system in which every vote counts. It should start work in 2025.
- Close the donation loopholes and strengthen the Electoral Commission: these simple changes would prevent individuals or groups from bypassing our electoral finance and transparency rules.
- Require transparency in handling of ‘legal but harmful’ content: require new and social media platforms to publish risk assessments for ‘legal but harmful’ content.
You can find out more in the APPG’s new report, Free But Not Fair: British elections and how to restore trust in politics which accompanied the launch.
If you want to take action, please get in touch with your MP and ask them to do three things:
- Read the report
- Join the APPG
- Attend and speak up in parliamentary debates on democracy
You can follow the APPG for Fair Elections on social media. @FairElectionsUK on X (formerly Twitter) and @appgfairelections on Bluesky.