The
classical First Past the Post (FPTP), single-member district, electoral system
that is so strongly associated with Great Britain did not in fact come into
widespread use for Westminster elections until 1884-1885 - a full 50 years
after the First Reform Act of 1832, which marked the beginnings of
representative democracy in the UK. Up until 1867 most members of the British
House of Commons were elected from two-member districts by the Block Vote who
served to compound the seat bonuses given to the larger parties. The Second
Reform Act of 1867 introduced the Limited Vote (in which electors had one fewer
vote than the number of seats to be filled) for the election of 43 members of
the Commons, chosen from 13 three-member districts and one four-member seat.
The Third
Reform Act of 1884-1885 abolished these Limited Vote seats and FPTP became
established as the dominant system. Even today, and despite Westminster's
reputation as the birthplace of FPTP, the system is not used throughout the United Kingdom.
The Single Transferable Vote form of PR was re-introduced in Northern Ireland,
after a 50 year absence, for local government elections in 1973 in an attempt
to craft incentives for accommodatory behaviour between the political
representatives of the Nationalist and Unionist communities, advantage the
moderate and non-sectarian middle, and ensure adequate representation of the
minority Catholic community.In the same year STV was used to elect the
ill-fated Stormont Assembly - which had been created to give the people of
Ulster a degree of self-governing power. Nearly a quarter of a century later,
in May 1996, a new body charged with finding solutions to the province's
troubles, the Northern Irish Peace Forum, was elected by PR in order to give
rise to the most representative body possible. Ninety Forum members were
elected from 18 list PR districts of five members in size, while the top 10
parties in terms of votes won across Ulster were awarded two additional
seats in the assembly. Since 1979 Northern Ireland's three members of the
European parliament have been elected by STV while, at the same time, Britain's
84 English, Scottish, and Welsh MEPs have been elected by FPTP.
The
proliferation of different electoral systems in use in the UK has meant that electoral reform,
for all tiers of British government, has become an increasingly debated issue.
In July 1997 the new Labour government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair,
announced that they would present legislation to change the electoral system
for British members of the European parliament to a form of regional list PR in
England, Scotland, and Wales,
while leaving unaltered the PR STV system in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the
proposed Scottish and Welsh assemblies, which will have a degree of autonomous
law-making power devolved from the Westminster parliament, are to be elected by
PR methods if they are approved by the Scottish and Welsh peoples in September
1997 referenda. Both assemblies are to have Mixed Member Proportional systems
which retain FPTP seats based on the current Westminster single-member districts, but
include district-based PR lists which will compensate, to some extent, for any
overall disproportionality. The proposed Welsh Assembly will have 40 FPTP
single-member seats and 20 list PR seats, while the proposed Scottish Assembly
will have 73 FPTP seats and 56 list PR seats. No set threshold for
representation has been agreed upon but the Welsh Assembly will have an
effective threshold of just under five per cent for a party to win a list seat
while in Scotland
parties will need far fewer votes to gain representation - probably closer to
1.5 per cent of the total vote. Lastly, STV has been proposed by the Fabians
(an influential Labour-affiliated policy institute) for local government
elections. But it is unlikely that electoral system reform will be seriously
considered for local government in this parliament's lifetime - not least
because the government's agenda for constitutional reform is already so
over-loaded.
However,
the overwhelming focus of electoral reform remains the House of Commons and at
the time of writing Britain
appears closer to changing her FPTP system than at any time since 1917. In that
year a proposal to introduce the Alternative Vote (AV) for two-thirds of the
parliamentary seats, and the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for the remaining
one-third of seats, was narrowly defeated after a stalemate between the House
of Lords and House of Commons. A second attempt to move to AV was rejected by
parliament in 1931, and it was not until the 1970s that electoral reform
muscled its way back on to the British political agenda. In 1976 the Hansard
Commission on Electoral Reform, chaired by the former Conservative cabinet
minister Lord Blake, recommended that a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system
be used for parliamentary elections, with three-quarters of the members being
elected by FPTP and one-quarter from regional PR lists. The calculation for
list seat allocations would take place at the national level and these seats
would compensate for any disproportionality in the overall results of the
single member district seats.
After four
consecutive defeats for the Labour party (1979, 1983, 1987, and 1992) the
previously solid Labour support for FPTP began to fracture and in 1990 the
leadership set up a commission, chaired by Professor Raymond Plant, to
investigate electoral system reform options. The Plant Report (1993)
recommended a switch to a sibling of the Alternative Vote which they called the
Supplementary Vote - the same system used to elect the Sri Lankan president.
While this proposal was never officially adopted by the Labour party in
opposition they did nonetheless adopt a policy that, when returned to office,
they would hold a national referendum on electoral system change. This policy
was given teeth in a joint agreement on constitutional reform between Labour
and the Liberal Democrats (who had consistently advocated a switch to a PR)
announced on the eve of the 1997 British general election.
The debate
over reforming the way members of the House of Commons are elected reflects the
First Past the Post versus Proportional Representation debate which has
underlain much of the discussion of British constitutional practice throughout
this century. The criticisms of the current FPTP electoral system have been
restated many times. First, FPTP in the UK has led to some highly
disproportional results where minority parties received far fewer seats than
their percentage vote might have indicated and has led to situations where the
"losing" party, in terms of votes won, became the winning party in
term of seats won and thus formed the government.
The Liberal
Party, then Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance, then Liberal Democrats, have
been the most victimized on the first count - although over the last four
elections the disparity between the third party's vote and seat share has been
decreasing. In 1983 the Liberal-SDP Alliance won 25.4 percent of the vote but
only 3.5 percent of the seats. In 1987 the Alliance won 22.6 percent and 3.4 percent of
the seats. In 1992 the newly formed Liberal Democrats won 17.8 percent of the
votes and 3.1 percent of the seats, but in 1997, utilising more sophisticated
targeting techniques and benefiting from the tide of anti-Conservative feeling,
the Lib Dems were able to win 6.5 percent of the seats with 16.7 percent of the
popular vote. The uphill struggle that new parties face under FPTP was
dramatically illustrated in the 1989 UK European elections when the UK Green
Party won 15 percent of the vote but not a single seat. The second anomaly, of
one party winning most votes but forming the opposition, has happened twice in
the post-war period. In 1951 the Labour Party won more votes but the
Conservatives won most seats and formed the government, while in February 1974
the indignity was reversed with Labour forming the government after the
Conservatives had polled most votes.
A second
powerful criticism leveled at the British FPTP system has been its inability to
adequately represent the nation along lines of gender and ethnicity. Up until
1997 fewer than ten percent of British MPs were women, although Labour's
vigorous promotion of women parliamentary candidates and their subsequent landslide
victory did nearly double the number of women MPs to 18.1 percent in the 1997
parliament. Ethnic minorities in Britain have been similarly
under-represented. Most parliaments preceding the 1987 election were all white,
and the four Black and Indian-English MPs elected in that year represented less
than 0.5 percent of the total. While Black and Asian representation has
increased over the last three elections their numbers in parliament remain
substantially below their proportion of the UK population as a whole.
Opponents
of FPTP have also cited destabilizing swings in economic policy which arose
from the alternation of Conservative and Labour governments between 1945-1979,
but the Conservatives 18 unbroken years in office (1979-1997) and Labour's drift
toward the fiscally moderate centre has tended to weaken this argument.
Finally, some PR advocates have disputed the fact that FPTP creates a strong
geographical link between elector and representative in the UK, arguing that
many safe Conservative and Labour seats are effectively "rotten
boroughs" where MPs have little incentive to make themselves accessible,
and that the urban centres of the UK are now so totally dominated by Labour MPs
that all other party supporters are effectively disenfranchised.
In contrast
FPTP in Britain
is defended particular because of its single-member districts and encouragement
of a "dominant two-party system". Supporters of the status quo find
the single constituency member sacrosanct and argue that this relationship of
accountability between a voter and their MP is the bedrock of British
democracy. Opponents of PR also point to the fact that all, bar one, UK
governments in the post-war period have been single party governments and
predict that the coalition governments, which would most likely result from a
PR system, would be destabilizing to the country as a whole. Related to the
previous point is the argument that FPTP provides a barrier against the
fragmentation of the party system, which might involve the break up of the
major parties (for example, a split in the Conservative Party between
"pro-" and "anti-" European wings). Finally, FPTP is
praised for denying a platform to extremist parties such as the National Front
and British National Party.
Reform of Britain’s FPTP
system for parliamentary elections has become increasingly likely with the
formation of a Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government in May 2010.
A referendum will be put to the British electorate on May 5, 2011, asking
voters to decide between FPTP and a new alternative vote system (AV, also known
as instant runoff voting).
