Proportional Representation (PR) is an electoral system that has been gaining more support in recent years. It’s long been advocated by smaller parties, the Liberal Democrats especially, but also the Green Party and now Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. There are also a few campaigns pushing for its adoption, one is called Get PR Done and another is Make Votes Matter.
The arguments made for PR are always based in the language of fairness. “PR is far fairer because it makes every vote count” we’re told by the video on Get PR Done’s website, and “How does it feel not to be heard?” we’re asked by the video on Make Votes Matter’s website.
I agree, it can be frustrating feeling like one’s vote doesn’t count. It’s equally frustrating feeling unheard, like my wishes are ignored in Parliament. But the problem with PR is that although it may feel nice being able to vote for whichever party you like, to feel there’s a party in Parliament that represents what you believe in, it will do nothing to solve any of the myriad problems the UK faces, and nor, I suspect, would any of the things which I care about ever get addressed in a meaningful way even if there were a party in Parliament that shared my views.
You’ll notice it’s a rare person who argues for PR because they think it will improve the standard of government.
PR is an electoral system that seems designed to either introduce gridlock to politics or to ensure that fringe parties get the whip hand over larger parties as they become kingmakers. For an example of both of these features of PR one need only look at Germany.
In 1998 the Green Party, in coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), came to what is now known as the “nuclear consensus” which limited the lifespan of nuclear power stations to 32 years and allocated plants an amount of power each one could produce before it had to be shut down. The building of new nuclear power stations was banned entirely. As an example of bad policy being pushed through thanks to PR empowering radical ideologues, this is a particularly egregious one.
Unfortunately for our German friends, it’s a policy which has been maintained with Germany’s post-Merkel net-zero policy, Energiewende, continuing to drive up energy prices much to the detriment of Germany’s famous and once thriving industrial base.
Meanwhile, Germany’s current traffic light coalition government has been in a state of dysfunction more or less since it came to power with indecision over how it should respond to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, or the Free Democratic Party’s discomfort with its coalition partners’ tax-and-spend instincts (the party from which Christian Lindner, the German finance minister, comes), to the recent battering each of the coalition parties got in the European elections (which saw their far right rival, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), gaining 5 points on their 2019 election results and finishing with 16 per cent of the vote).
One could point to the last few years of the Tory government and argue that it’s hardly been an exemplar of strong and stable government. That is a fair criticism. But that’s an example of dire Tory incompetence rather than a feature structurally incentivised by our electoral system. There’s no reason it had to be that way; especially after Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in 2019. But if one thinks that the incompetence of politicians will vanish under a PR electoral system then I admire your optimism! I suspect incompetence would worsen as more chancers and oddballs got larger shares of the vote.
There’s also the danger that it wouldn’t just be chancers and oddballs increasingly populating our parliament and asserting even more force on the direction in which our politics travels. In an age where the populace is fragmenting and new identity groups are becoming increasingly entrenched in Britain, how long do you think it would be before their own political parties were adorning the seats of Westminster? Alongside Britain First you might soon have The Islamic Party of Great Britain or The Hindu Party of Great Britain (examples are emerging, albeit still in their nascency, on the continent, like Germany’s Democratic Alliance for Diversity and Awakening which has been accused of being a mouthpiece for the Turkish President Erdogan, or the Islamist Nuance Party in Sweden). They may have to moderate themselves when pushed into coalitions, but what would the trade-offs be in any negotiation? And would they have greater or lesser influence in formal coalition forming than they have now in our informal electoral coalitions?
Already we have these groups making demands of political parties. I suspect formality would add substance to their bargaining positions — although never to the extent their base hope for creating an odd juxtaposition in which minority groups are simultaneously empowered, heightening expectations, and disempowered, perhaps leading to evermore hard-line replacements. We’re seeing the rise of sectarian politics in Britain, and it seems to be entrenching itself across our diverse communities with various groups now publishing their own ethnic manifestos. Formalising that in our politics, giving each group separate representation, and systemically encouraging ethnic groups to think of themselves as part of a coalition inevitably against other ethnic groups in an opposition coalition, seems to me to be a very dangerous game to play. The equivalent of piling dry wood on a smouldering social phenomenon.
But even where populist right-wing parties are winning on the continent, their voters are unlikely to get what they want. Eventually, they’ll be booted from office unsuccessful, leaving an electorate behind them as disillusioned as the British electorate is now. Even the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders has had to soften his image and is pulling back on some of his more, ermm, hard-hitting policies to try and form a coalition. Not exactly what his voters thought they were voting for…
This leads to another problem inherent to PR. In the words of one X/Twitter user, “PR is a racket by which politicians make deals with each other [once they’re elected] to enable them to ignore the public”. Cynical perhaps, but functionally true. In a system where manifestos get whittled down in negotiations after the fact, how can the electorate know what it’s voting for? At least the Tories have no one to blame but themselves for their monumental failures, and we know exactly who to blame! There was no dealmaking necessary for the Tories to exercise power, it was just sheer incompetence or betrayal. You decide which.
No voting system is perfect, but ultimately politics is about the use of power, and any system which structurally imposes legislative lethargy on a parliament, or neuters a government’s ability to solve problems, isn’t a good system. It may be fine in an uneventful era when the world is relatively stable — like the brief period between the collapse of the Soviet Union until the invasion of Ukraine — but that time is over now.
History has started again, and in this time of uncertainty, we’ll need responsive government that can respond to the many unknowns, thanks to geopolitics and technology, which are coming our way. That means the Right — if it wants to remain relevant — has to finally start taking power and government seriously, and it’s thanks to the Rights’ own philosophical short-sightedness as a political ‘side’ that it hasn’t. But you can bet Labour is. To quote Sam Bidwell, “For every one of Britain’s major structural problems, Starmer has prescribed a new independent commissioner, a new knee-jerk regulatory intervention, or a new arm’s length body”. These are all mechanisms for utilising power, albeit technocratic power away from the gaze of the electorate. Blair did the same thing before him. So for the Right, there has to be no more Reaganite nine scariest words and it has to ask, what does a right-wing theory of power look like in 2024 or 2029? And what should be done with it?
No party that is serious about changing the country or fixing the problems we face would be talking about PR. Only parties which expect to either never have any significant power, or suspect they're incapable of maintaining a hold of what little power they can get, advocate for PR. Ultimately it’s a whinge, born of political weakness.