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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Will Hayward & Joshua Taylor

How the House of Commons would look if Britain used proportional representation

Every election in Britain sparks arguments about our first-past-the-post voting system.

Critics of the current method say it's vastly unfair and overwhelmingly favours the two big, established parties - Labour and the Conservatives.

Smaller parties tend to come second in a lot of constituencies but fail to win a single seat because they don't come first anywhere.

This means a party can potentially rack up millions of votes without ever gaining a single seat.

Yesterday the Green Party got 864,743 but this only led to one MP.

And in 2015 UKIP got 3,881,129 votes without winning a single seat - compared to the SNP's 56 seats from 1,454,436 votes.

The headlines this morning would be very different if we had proportional representation, according to analysis from Wales Online .

Use our interactive graphic here to see how a proportional representation House of Commons compares to today's reality...

If we had proportional representation, today's House of Commons would have...

  • No overall majority for any party;
  • The Conservatives with 75 seats fewer;
  • The Greens would go from one seat to 17;
  • The amount of SNP seats would half;
  • A government could only be formed if parties worked together;
  • The Brexit Party would win 13 seats.
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