Almost totally unnoticed, one party has surged to prominence over the past year. Its name? ‘OTHER’.
Backing for parties other the Big Two – Labour and the Conservatives – now sits at around 40%, according to the latest YouGov polling. (That’s for General Elections – before we even talk about the European Parliament vote.)
In such a scenario, you’d think voters were blessed with choice. But millions of voters are being denied a real say in Thursday’s local elections, with hundreds of seats being contested by just two parties.
In 816 council seats across England, voters will be forced to choose between just two parties – despite 156 parties contesting this May’s elections, as Electoral Reform Society research revealed on HuffPost shows.
The problem affects 2.65million voters – a scandalous denial of choice. (This time, the East Midlands performs worst in offering voters ‘real choice’, with 150 seats contested by just two parties, followed by the West Midlands and North West. However, the West Midlands performs worst in terms of the numbers of potential voters affected, with over 475,000 electors in two-party wards.)
The majority – 56% – of the two-party contests will see the Conservatives and Labour battle it out without any challenge beyond themselves. The rest are largely Conservative-Lib Dem battles around the South West.
That means millions of voters will be unable to vote for their preferred party. This isn’t the only problem with how local elections are run in England: last week the ERS revealed that 300 seats have been guaranteed by parties long before election day, in wards that are totally uncontested. Rotten boroughs are back.
What ties these two problems together is that large areas of the country are written off as unwinnable under England’s outdated ‘first past the post’ system. But it doesn’t have to be this way – Scotland has used a different voting system for local elections since 2007 and the problems vanished. You have a team of local councillors, and if your first choice doesn’t have the backing to win, your second preference is used instead – rather than your vote going to waste. Uncontested and undercontested seats have become virtually a thing of the past.
Northern Ireland and the Republic too use proportional voting systems to elect their local councillors, with the public consistently offered a wide choice of parties – and the Welsh government is currently consulting on allowing councils to switch to a more proportional voting system.
The findings come ahead of European elections – conducted using a form of proportional representation – which are likely to see voters choose from a wide range of parties across the spectrum in every region.
The campaign for change in England is growing. Last Tuesday MPs discussed switching to a proportional voting system for the Commons, in a Westminster Hall debate that saw several Conservatives back electoral reform.
There’s a growing sense that at a time when people want to ‘shop around’ more than ever, millions of voters are stuck in two-party seats with just a couple of candidates to choose from. A competition of ideas is vital for a healthy democracy, but in the one-person-takes-all-politics of first past the post, even well-supported parties often don’t stand a chance.
No areas should be viewed as an ‘electoral wasteland’ or ‘unwinnable’ by parties – but that is the sad reality under England’s broken voting system.
Whoever you support, the now is the time for real political reform: the party system is fragmenting but the structures of England’s politics remain locked in the 19th Century. That’s bad for all of us who believe in democracy.
Let’s demand a truly representative, participatory politics, where every vote counts, and where people know their voice will be heard – wherever they are.
Josiah Mortimer is writer and spokesperson for the Electoral Reform Society