Yahoo News Labour leadership: Contenders urged to overhaul UK's ‘decaying’ electoral system and adopt proportional representation
Labour leadership contenders have been urged to overhaul Britain’s “decaying” electoral system and commit to introducing proportional representation at national elections.
In a letter to those vying to replace Jeremy Corbyn, the Liberal Democrats claim electoral reform has been “dangerously absent” from the party’s leadership contest – now around halfway through.
So far, the three remaining candidates – Lisa Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Sir Keir Starmer – have not spoken in favour of ditching the current first-past-the-post voting system.
In the wake of Labour’s worst electoral defeat since 1935, however, a poll of Labour members found that three-quarters (76 per cent) supported adopting proportional representation as a policy, with just 12 per cent opposed.
Clive Lewis, who dropped out of the leadership race, said last month the party must embrace a new voting system, as he claimed a commitment to electoral reform was now the “litmus test of Labour’s survival”.
In a letter to Ms Nandy, Ms Long-Bailey, and Sir Keir, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for constitutional affairs Wendy Chamberlain, claimed the last three years demonstrated “politics isn’t working for people”.
“It is broken,” the MP added. "Now is the time to hit the reset button.”
Citing the results of December’s general election, she added: “The Conservatives, despite only getting 44 per cent of the votes, entered the House of Commons with 56 per cent of the seats.
“14.5m people have an MP they didn’t vote for while 71 per cent of votes were ‘wasted’. In Scotland, the situation was even worse, with the SNP securing 80 per cent of the seats from 45 per cent of the popular vote.”
“It is no wonder that people feel they have little or no influence on decision-making today. Our democracy doesn’t need piecemeal change. It needs an urgent and radical overhaul at all levels.
“There are many issues we disagree on. But progressives right across the UK, aside from Labour, agree that we have a decaying electoral system that shuts out too many from our democracy.”
Claiming Boris Johnson cannot be trusted to reform “our broken politics”, she continued: “It therefore isn’t good enough for the next Labour leader to sit on their hands and do nothing. It is past time Labour joined the progressive alliance in favour of electoral reform.
“So far in the Labour leadership contest, electoral reform has been dangerously absent.”
At the 2019 election, Labour said it would hold a constitutional convention in power that would look at the voting system in the UK – but it stopped short of explicitly mentioning proportional representation.
The party did, however, advocate extending the franchise at national elections to 16 and 17-year-olds and pledged to introduce an automatic voter registration system.
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