Proportional Representation: General Elections

Clive Jones Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

I thank the Members who secured this debate. They have brought to the House a very important issue that I and many of my constituents care deeply about.

The UK’s history of electoral reform is one of slow, gradual change. There is much frustration now with our politics, and I am sure that soon it will lead to greater demand for electoral reform. British history is full of us taking the right and necessary steps, only for people on the wrong side of history to decry them as the end of the world as we know it. Examples of that are giving Catholics the vote in 1829, making the ballot private in 1872, and granting women suffrage in 1928. When we look upon the past, we laugh at how silly the country used to be. Who is to say that the way we view the past is not the way future generations will view us?

As a young teenager in the February 1974 general election, I was—and continue to be—filled with frustration and a sense of unfairness by our electoral system. The Liberal party won 19.3% of the vote—more than half the votes the Conservatives got—but it won only 14 seats, versus the Tories’ 297. Under proportional representation, the Liberals would have won 123 seats, the Labour party 236 and the Conservatives only 240. This obvious unfairness in our system still drives my personal politics today.

We need to fundamentally change our electoral system. It is undemocratic that under the UK’s electoral system, not all votes count in the same way. First past the post feeds public disillusionment in politics because it leaves millions of people feeling that their votes are irrelevant, just like those in our past. Although the injustice may not seem as obvious as the injustice of withholding the right to vote on the basis of faith, wealth or gender, the system essentially withholds the right to vote based on geographic location. With so many voters now so disillusioned with the first-past-the-post system, will the Minister commit to being on the right side of history, and deliver the change in our electoral system that the nation really needs?