Bill Smith -
Electoral reform activists plan to turn hundreds of litter bins into mock ballot boxes next month to highlight their claim that most votes are wasted in British elections. Makes Votes Matter will hold a nationwide Demand Democracy Day on July 6, calling for “mass action to show and build support for proportional representation in general elections.”
In the last general election in 2017, about 68 per cent of voters “didn’t play an active role in the decision of the outcome because they either were for losing candidates or they were for winning candidates who didn’t need that many votes,” said Darren Hughes, head of Britain’s Electoral Reform Society.
In 2015, in what the society called “the most disproportionate election in British history,” the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority with just 37 per cent of votes under the first-past-the-post, constituency based system, which has been used in its current form since 1950. Most voters appear to acquiesce in the system, which has allowed the Conservatives and Labour to dominate British politics.
Britain will get a new prime minister in late July without another general election, just as it did three years ago when the Conservatives chose Theresa May after David Cameron failed to persuade voters to remain in the European Union in the Brexit referendum. May agreed to step down over her failure to withdraw the country from the EU.
But the Brexit debate, which started years before the 2016 referendum, has catalysed a shift in attitudes to the two main parties and perhaps to the electoral system. “We have a system where seats don’t match votes so we’ve regularly seen single-party governments formed on a small percentage of the vote, sometimes as low as the high 30s,” Hughes, a former Labour lawmaker in New Zealand, said.
“So there is a structural problem... (and) a political-cultural problem at the moment, which is the volatility among voters,” he said. Recent elections for local councils and the European Parliament suggest a dramatic shift that bodes ill for the Conservatives and Labour. Polls suggest the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, for most of their recent history a distant third in elections, are now as popular as the Conservatives and Labour.
Veteran anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, formed in April, has made an even more spectacular vote grab from the traditional “big two.” A YouGov poll of general election voting intentions put the Brexit Party and the Conservatives level
on 22 per cent, with Labour on 20 per cent and Liberal Democrats on 19 per cent. — dpa
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