There’s an increasing disconnect between those who want to run the country and the rest of us who merely live in it – and it seems to be making us more likely to call for a change to the way we choose them in the first place.
Back in 1986, when the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) first asked people whether they trusted governments “to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their party”, only 12 per cent of people said “almost never”, compared to 40 per cent who replied “just about always” or “most of the time”.
Yet, its latest report, published this morning, turns all that on its head.
Now it’s those saying “just about always” or “most of the time” who account for 12 per cent, while those who say “almost never” make up an eye-watering 46 per cent of respondents.
But as our trust in government has declined, our support for changing the electoral system so as “to allow smaller political parties to get a fairer share of MPs” has risen.
Back in 1986, for instance, just 32 per cent of us favoured change, with 60 per cent of us saying we wanted to keep the system as it is. Fast forward to today, and we see another near-complete reversal, with only 36 per cent happy with the status quo, while 60 per cent want change.
Cynics, of course, will point to what we might call the “You only sing when you’re losing” effect: as the BSA’s report shows, our views partly depend on whether the party we favour did well or badly out of the system last time around.
Given that they got just four seats in the Commons – instead of the 41 that their share of the vote might have earned them in a perfectly proportional (PR) system – it will come as no surprise that 90 per cent of Green Party voters want to see a change.
Contrast that with Lib Dem voters. Their party’s tally of 72 seats wasn’t off the 79 seats it would have been entitled to under pure PR. Cue the proportion of Lib Dems wanting change falling from 71 per cent in 2023 to just 56 per cent now.
Likewise, before last year’s landslide, some 60 per cent of Labour supporters favoured change – and that’s now fallen to 55 per cent.
Predictably enough, Conservative supporters have travelled in the opposite direction. In 2023, only 24 per cent wanted to change the voting system to make it fairer. But, after a general election that saw the Tories bag only 121 seats instead of the 154 that pure PR would have given them, that proportion has now more than doubled to 52 per cent.
Still, that pales in comparison to Reform supporters – some 78 per cent of whom say they want a change (hardly surprising, given Farage and co ended up with just 5 seats at Westminster rather than the 93 they might have expected from pure PR).
All of which means that, for the first time ever, a clear majority of the country’s right-wing voters seem open to change. Meanwhile, a majority of voters as a whole seem more relaxed about the obvious corollary of such a shift: just over half of us now say we’d prefer a coalition to a single-party government.
Put that together with the possibility that Labour, if it’s as unpopular in four years’ time as it is now, could reach for PR as a last-gasp way of “saving the furniture”, and the end of first-past-the-post (FPTP) might – just might – come sooner than we all think.
Whether that would help restore our trust in government, who knows? But it’s got to be worth a try.
Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London and the co-author of ‘The British General Election of 2024’ to be published this autumn
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