One Man, One Vote – Just Not In One Of The World’s Oldest Democracies

If one thing can be illustrated from the current parliamentary impasse over Brexit it is that the UK has a fundamentally broken political system, in which going to the polling station no longer carries anywhere near as much value as it once did. Our parliament is not representative of our country. It operates on a mindset that the nation exists as two guiding political thoughts manifested in two political parties, the Conservatives or Labour, when in fact the reality is much more diverse. This diversity is evident on a macro level in the Brexit vote with a significant minority of Labour voters voting to leave the EU and likewise a significant minority of Conservative voters voting to remain in the EU – neither of which fulfils the stereotypes.

However, a lack of true representation becomes even clearer the more it is broken down. Did you know for example that in the last general election, of the 650 seats in the House of Commons only 35 seats were won by MPs with more than 50% of the vote? Statistically this means that 615 MPs had more people vote against them than vote for them! It is time now that our voting system recognises the diversity of opinion that exists in constituencies, and gives a voice to the politically voiceless.

It is a simple, hard-cold fact that the vote of someone who lives in rural Scotland is quite literally thousands of times more valuable than the vote of someone who lives in Hackney. If we look at the last general election, 42,265 people (75% of voters) voted for the Labour Party in the constituency of ‘Hackney North and Stoke Newington’ (35,000+ votes ahead of the nearest rival), whilst in the constituency of ‘North East Fife’ 13,743 people (33% of voters) voted for the SNP (only 2 votes ahead of the nearest rival!). Yet despite such wild differences, both constituencies have only 1 MP each and to top it off, 67% of people in North East Fife did not vote for the MP they ended up with! The case highlighted here is repeated in hundreds of constituencies across our country where the majority does not back the winning candidate. This is profoundly unfair and undemocratic; leaving people unrepresented, disillusioned, angry and often voting with the mindset of trying to pick the least-worse-option. Our democracy should not function in this way and I would argue that it is this lack of true representation that has been one of the crucial factors in the breeding of the problems we now have coming home to roost before us.

Through the introduction of a proportional system of voting (as advocated by the good people over at MakeVotesMatter) we would create a democracy that truly takes into account the majority of people’s views and forms a broad consensus. It would mean a system in which a party that gets 20% of the vote would also get about 20% of the seats. It would mean that as the single mother of two gets up to go and cast her vote in Hackney her vote would carry exactly the same value as the married farmer in Fife. No longer would we talk about ‘safe seats’ or ‘X party always gets in here!’. Instead we could turn up at the ballot box knowing that we can vote for who we truly believe in with a voice that has value; and the mantra of ‘one man, one vote’ can become a genuine political reality in modern Britain.