While this year’s Conservative conference was dominated by the leadership contest, questions around rebuilding the party were being asked in fringe meetings across the event.
This also meant there as a renewed focus on how the First Past the Post electoral system had impacted the party, with Reform splitting the vote on the right in an unprecedented way.
This debate culminated at our crowded fringe event at the Hyatt Hotel looking at how the party could rebuild a winning electoral coalition. The event was vibrant, lively, and stimulated some good questions and comments from the members present.
As CAER chair, I opened the event arguing that if the party wants to revive its political fortunes it needs to seriously consider electoral reform, especially if Reform remain a feature of the electoral landscape. I have been a supporter of PR for many decades, partly due to living in the safe Labour area of Lambeth, in London, where my fellow Conservatives and I have little incentive to go out and vote on a ‘wet and windy evening’ as the result was always a ‘foregone conclusion’.
As I told the fringe, this conference is about rebuilding trust with the electorate on the basis of fairness and justice for all the people and we must listen to them, not just to Party members, so it is appropriate that electoral reform should feature in that. The 2024 election was the most disproportional in history: Sir Keir Starmer had been elected with an enormous majority of 172 seats with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn secured in 2019 when the Conservatives won with an 80 seat majority; what is the fairness in that?
Only one third of voters and one fifth of the total electorate had voted Labour in the 2024 election which meant that it was not a vote for Labour but a vote against the Conservatives – perhaps why the present Conference is so upbeat as we recognise that we have to put our own house in order which is easier than confronting a popular new government as we did with Tony Blair in 1997.
This election for the first time saw four parties gain more than 10% of the total vote – almost as though people were voting thinking we have a proportional system. Every new legislature in my long lifetime has been elected on a proportional system – Northern Ireland Assembly, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and now, of course Scottish local government having changed to it and a facility for Welsh local government to adopt it if, after public consultation, it is wanted. So why do we want fairness for all these bodies affecting our lives but not for Westminster? Why for Parliament should we disenfranchise so many people?
Putting power in the hands of voters, not parties
We are firmly against party lists which removes choice from the elector so I condemned what the Labour Party in Wales has planned for the Senedd elections and we should fight it. In any list system the voter should be able to prioritise and not have to rely on where the party places the candidates. We accept that in the UK we may need to have a mixed system (not unique – in former times university seats returned three members against others with only one). Single Transferable Vote works well in a conurbation such as Sheffield which would be one identifiable multi-member constituency but in the West Country or rural Wales it means covering hundreds of miles and another system might be more appropriate. We already have two types of representative in the Additional Member systems in Scotland and Wales and it does not create two classes of representative.
Representation for all Conservatives
One of the great benefits of multi-member constituencies is that it encourages parties to put forward several candidates of mixed gender, ethnicity and political opinion – giving voters the choice. Conservatives were making progress on electing more women (we gave women under 30 the vote in 1928) but in this election went backwards. Proportional representation is the obvious answer to ensuring more women are elected.
How would we go about this in the UK? Our preferred option is to mirror the New Zealand answer: to first ask the question “Do you want electoral change?” and, if the answer is affirmative, to then ask what system is most appropriate. In determining what system or mix of systems – but all proportional – we might need a Royal or other Commission to look at the country in detail.
The view of the speakers, however, was that it is unlikely that we shall see another referendum on the issue but more likely that it will be in a party manifesto in a subsequent election. Conservatives must be ready with their thoughts well-considered in advance.
A great selection of speakers
The following is reproduced with permission from the Electoral Reform Society’s report from the event, available on their website.
Split vote under First Past the Post more likely to lock Conservatives out of power than PR
The fringe then heard from John Oxley, the Conservative writer and commentator, who warned that the party was currently relying on an increasingly ageing electoral coalition and had to consider how it would start appealing to younger voters and people of working age. He said that one startling fact was that the amount of people who cast their first vote for the Conservatives had declined between 2010 and 2024.
John also argued if the right’s vote remained split at future elections, that is more likely to lock the Conservatives out of government than any change to a proportional electoral system. He said that Europe, where most countries have a form of proportional representation, showed that the centre right often won and thrived under different voting systems.
The public is put off by the complexity of First Past the Post
Joe Twyman, co-founder and director of Deltapoll, broke down some of the company’s research on how people decided who to vote for under the current First Past the Post system. He said the company had found that fewer than half of voters know who had won in their seat at the last election and even fewer than that know how close the second-place party had been.
Joe said that in reality the public were not hugely aware of how to vote tactically, but that parties had become very adept at telling them which candidate to vote for tactically in election leaflets and social media videos. Joe also said that, when polled, the public said that what they want from a voting system is that it represents how people voted, gives parties seats in proportion with the number of votes they won, is easy to understand and provides strong government.
The ship will leave – Conservatives need to be on it
Lastly, the audience heard from Emma Best, a Conservative member of the Greater London Assembly, who made an impassioned case for the Conservative party to engage with the debate on electoral reform. She said that as a Conservative supporter in a Labour party of London, voting for her had largely been a ‘ceremonial event’, until she had been able to vote in the Mayor of London elections, which until this year had been held under the preferential Supplementary Vote system.
She said that she would not have been elected to the London Assembly without the proportional list part of the Additional Member System (AMS) that the authority uses. Emma also told the audience that without AMS, the Conservatives would have been reduced to three members on the Assembly at the May elections, rather than the eight they currently have.
Emma ended by telling the fringe that a move to proportional representation will happen at some point, and that the party needed to do it’s thinking on the issue now. She added: “The ship will leave, and we can either get on board or stand on the side and complain about the direction it’s going in”.