Britain’s skewed election reinforces the case for voting reform. After 2029

Among the questions prompted by Labour’s huge victory on July 4th is whether Britain’s electoral system needs overhauling. The party won 63% of the seats on only a third of the vote, prompting complaints from some smaller parties, and a few smarting Conservatives, that the result was unfair. The case for reforming the country’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency takes that seat, is becoming ever stronger. But it should not be a priority.

Measured by the difference between share of the votes and share of the seats in Parliament, this election was the most skewed result in British history, and second in Western democracies only to a French parliamentary election in 1993. Because its voters were efficiently distributed around the country, Labour needed fewer than 24,000 votes for each of its seats. Reform UK, in contrast, needed well over 800,000. Under the Scottish system of proportional representation (PR), Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411; Reform UK would have had 94 MPs instead of five.