Reform Or It’s Reform - Starmer Must Swallow His Pride On Proportional Representation

The writing is on the wall. It is not an understatement to say that Sir Keir Starmer’s lofty vision for change has now all but dissipated into dust. During the course of the last Labour leadership race, I saw Keir Starmer as a more benevolent heir to Blair and as a fundamental changemaker, however, the continued belligerence against proportional representation is harming Labour’s opportunities in the long-run. Two party politics is dead, and with the election of Zack Polanski as leader of the Green Party, the problem only deepens for the two major parties that have governed us over the past 100 years. The electorate has realised that there needs to be a change for quite some time, and this has come in the form of a shift to more radical views. 

Ian Simpson, Senior Research Officer at the Electoral Reform Society, an admittedly biased source, extrapolates from YouGov polling, “the continued strong support for proportional representation among people who voted for Labour at the 2024 general election. Despite the party they voted for winning a landslide victory under First Past the Post, Labour voters back a move to proportional representation over retaining First Past the Post by two to one, with 48% in favour of electoral reform and just 24% in favour of the status quo.” It has long been an argument from supporters of First Past the Post, that the system keeps out the extremists. 

However, this fades if we consider more accurate MRP polling. A June 2025 poll conducted by PLMR, on behalf of Electoral Calculus, suggests that Reform would gain an overall majority if an election was held at that time. This should have been shocking to Labour at the time, however, perhaps Labour viewed this as an, in my mind, misguided attempt to justify that the Overton Window has shifted rightwards. However, if we look at the PLMR MRP poll, we can see that a progressive alliance of Labour, Green and Liberal Democrats, would win 55% of the vote overall. First Past the Post has worked for some time for the two major political parties, but not so here, as the progressive alliance of MPs would only gain 221 seats to Reform’s 377, with the Conservative Party only receiving 29 seats. 

This is why there needs to be action on electoral reform, to give these views the valid amount of exposure they require. Even if Reform would still be the largest bloc, a progressive alliance could and should make a real difference in a parliament and with the seats and how they tally up under a first past the post system, this isn’t the case. Ideologies at the extremities are having a profound impact on our politics and the major political parties will face an awakening sooner rather than later. From the right flank we have the spectre of Reform and from the left we have the unimaginatively named Your Party. 

The good thing for Labour is that, barring some major party rebellion, Starmer is safe for the next four years, but the mood from Labour MPs has been one of disquiet for quite some time and this shouldn’t be brushed aside. Electoral reform has been mooted by various parties before and the Alternative Vote farce that was previously offered was too complicated to be of any value to our electorate. As a political class we shudder that there will be a lack of constituency contact for individuals, but this could be easily established. The farce is that Proportional Representation can and does work in numerous countries globally including our European friends Austria, Belgium, Poland and Czechia. Petr Pavel, the President of Czechia knows that the right are on the rise electorally in the global political system, even if actual percentages don’t back this up. He states “We cannot ignore the rise in support for extremists in Europe We need to perceive these voices and think about why this is happening”. The way we frame our politics really matters, and Petr Pavel is right when he says this. Although Czechia is in a far less electorally precarious position than ourselves, as they have proportional representation, they are not ignoring the emergence of a new politics that looks all too horribly familiar; a politics of division that only emerges when people don’t feel they are being listened to - something that first past the post only exacerbates. And this is the salient lesson that was not learnt before the Brexit vote and continues, now nearly ten years after Brexit, to be unheeded by the political class. Will they wake up? It seems doubtful.

Image: Eliot Lord.

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