Following the 2024 UK General Election, the Liberal Democrats are up to 72 members in the House of Commons, the party’s best result since 1923 (as the Liberal Party) and one of the most proportional results in their history. However, with this newly restored parliamentary might, what is the future for the Lib Dems’ long-held commitment to electoral reform?
In the party’s 2024 manifesto, as has been the case for many years, the party called for a change from the current First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system to a form of proportional representation (PR):
‘Liberal Democrats will introduce proportional representation for electing MPs, and local councillors in England, and cap donations to political parties’.
However, ever since the party’s decline from its place as one of the two main parties in British politics, being displaced by Labour a century ago, the party has struggled to get the other major parties – the Labour and Conservative parties – to commit to a system that is likely to see the Conservatives and Labour do less well…
The first real effort to achieve a change in the electoral system came towards the end of the First World War, in an early version of the Representation of the People Bill. The bill contained provisions aimed at changing the Westminster voting system to a mixture of the Alternative Vote (AV) and a form of proportional representation but these reforms were ultimately defeated. Since then, the Liberals (as well as the Liberal-SDP Alliance/Lib Dems) have always had a lower percentage of seats in Parliament compared to the percentage of votes they received. As the table below shows, 2024 was the first time the party’s representation in seats came within 5% of their percentage of votes since 1959…
Since 1918, it is only really when times have got tough for Labour or the Conservatives that electoral reform rose to the agenda at all. This is for one obvious reason: both Labour and the Conservatives benefit from a system (FPTP) that returns them (mostly) absolute majorities of seats despite not achieving an absolute majority of the vote since the Second World War (although the Conservatives got very close in 1955). One need only take Labour’s current majority as a fantastic example of this – the party got 33.7% of the votes and won 63.2% of the seats in Parliament.
Probably the closest Labour came to enabling electoral reform was not long after the first decline of the Liberal Party, during the second (minority) Labour government of 1929-1931. Labour and the Liberals both seemed likely to benefit from not splitting the “progressive” vote against Conservative opponents.
With Labour receptive, the Representation of the People (No. 2) Bill was put forward offering not proportional representation, but a compromise of AV. Labour were hoping this move would firm up Liberal support for other measures they sought to achieve at the time as well as potentially keeping the Conservatives from outright majorities in the future (due to a split Lib/Lab vote). The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Home Secretary JR Clynes, described the need for reform thus:
‘The necessity for the Alternative Vote is clearly due to the defects of the existing system of Parliamentary election. With three main political parties in the field, the present system is likely to result… in a minority of votes returning a majority of Members to Parliament.’
And he felt that AV was the clear answer:
‘The system of the Alternative Vote has worked very well in organisations and societies covering collectively a few million people interested in the Government of great bodies and organisations… I submit that the growth of parties in our present-day electoral system justifies this change in the direction of a wider choice, in order that no longer shall the Government of this country be conducted on a minority basis.’
Conversely, Conservatives, including the ex-Liberal MP Winston Churchill, opposed a change to the system for reasons that sound very familiar to the ears of those who remember the debate over the retention of FPTP in 2010-2011:
‘To-day we have listened to the Home Secretary making a more-dead-than-alive speech upon the Third Reading of a Bill into whose conception and composition no thought of the public interest has at any stage entered. At this time, when of all others there is need for a more stable and earnest political foundation, for more structure and substance and gravity in our electoral system, we have a Bill which by all accounts, from the testimony of all sides, merely accentuates the existing formlessness of our political institutions, which aggravates the fluidity of the electorate, and which adds new features of caprice and uncertainty to the conduct of each individual election.’
However, the bill was not to be as, despite progressing largely along party lines in the Commons (with a combined Labour/Liberal vote able to carry it against primarily Conservative opposition), it was delayed in the Lords, and Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government collapsed before the bill could become law.
Perhaps the next closest the UK came to reform rested on a somewhat different dynamic, but again with the Liberals (now the Liberal Democrats) supporting a move to AV. One difference was that it was the Conservatives dangling the carrot of electoral reform for the Liberals rather than Labour, the other was that the prospect rested on a referendum.
In 2010, as part of the agreement to bring the Liberal Democrats into a coalition with the Conservatives, who had fallen short of an overall majority, the issue of electoral reform was once again back on the table:
‘We will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum… We will whip both Parliamentary parties in both Houses to support a simple majority referendum on the Alternative Vote, without prejudice to the positions parties will take during such a referendum.’
Unlike in 1931, the potential for legislation to change the voting system to AV was not what was on offer – merely the promise of a national referendum on the issue, which the Conservatives fully intended to campaign against. The campaign to change the voting system was roundly lost in the subsequent 2011 referendum, with roughly two thirds of votes cast against changing to AV – in addition, the turnout was disappointingly low.
Proponents of FPTP have, inevitably, taken the AV Referendum result to be a sign that there is no appetite for electoral reform and that the question has been settled for a generation. However, with AV being neither a proportional electoral system, nor the favoured system of any of the smaller parties in Parliament (including the Lib Dems in the 2010-2015 coalition), does the 2024 election result herald a new opportunity to discuss a change to real PR? With the Conservatives and Labour combined only attracting 57.4% of the national vote, yet holding 82% of the seats in Westminster, the question is certainly being asked. The issue, of course, is that the power to bring about the change still lies with the two parties that have the most to lose from changing the system…
Well, at the very least Labour are more likely to consider electoral reform than the Conservatives and it is they who are in the driving seat at the moment. Groups like the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform are leading the calls for PR, and the party membership more widely called for PR at their 2022 conference. If not now, perhaps 2028/9 is the time when Labour might well accept the call of the smaller parties to move on electoral reform (perhaps as part of another coalition or similar agreement) – that is, unless they manage to maintain their staggeringly disproportionate parliamentary majority next time around…
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