Our winner-takes-all system too often makes voting for what you believe in a waste of time (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)

As we stand on the precipice of a no deal Brexit – the biggest disaster this country has faced in a generation – you might think the last thing we need is more political infighting, drama and splits.

But whatever your views on the wisdom of this week’s Independent Group launch, it might just be the wake-up call the biggest parties need – the shock that forces them to recognise that our politics is broken.

Our first-past-the-post electoral system pushes MPs into two huge and dysfunctional umbrella parties, each containing an impossibly wide spectrum of views. Voting Conservative in one area might get you Dominic Grieve – while in another you’ll get Jacob Rees-Mogg.



The public has long understood this. The Brexit vote that helped exacerbate Labour and Tory divisions was a cry for representation, democracy and control.


As part of a project called Dear Leavers, I’ve been travelling to Leave-voting areas to listen to people’s concerns. Everywhere I’ve been so far – completely unprompted – people talk about our rigged electoral system.

They say they don’t have control over what happens in their area – and they’re right. At the last general election, 68 per cent of votes didn’t get translated into seats.

Our winner-takes-all system too often makes voting for what you believe in a waste of time – and it forces many politicians to give up on their principles in order to get elected.

First past the post isn’t working for anyone – not even the major parties it’s designed to benefit. Once it was lauded for delivering huge parliamentary majorities that allowed governing parties to do as they pleased – but two of the last three general elections have resulted in hung parliaments, with the Conservatives brokering deals with smaller parties to stay in power.

If we’re going to heal our society’s divisions and overcome unprecedented challenges like Brexit and climate change, we need a new way of doing politics that gives everyone a voice.

Proportional representation – an electoral system where every vote counts – could transform our politics. In 2015, more than a million people voted for the Green Party, but I was the only Green MP elected. Under a proportional system, I’d have had 24 Green colleagues by my side, challenging Tory austerity and pushing for urgent action on climate change.

There would no longer be safe seats, which allow huge swathes of the country to be ignored and neglected. If politicians were fighting for every vote in every area of the UK, they might take more notice of the entrenched inequalities between North and South, cities and towns, coast and countryside.

New parties and groupings – from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party to the Independent Group – would have less of a mountain to climb to gain a foothold in politics. And with that plurality would come collaboration and compromise. No single party has a monopoly on wisdom, and a proportional system would force politicians to achieve broad support for their policies and work together to implement them.

So it’s baffling that the Independent Group failed to mention the need for proportional representation in its ‘statement of independence’. If they truly want to ‘change our broken politics’, electoral reform must be a top priority as part of a full programme of democratic renewal.



In 2019, when we have the technology to allow unprecedented public engagement, a vote every five years and the occasional ‘once in a lifetime’ referendum doesn’t sound like much of a democracy.

If we’re going to heal our society’s divisions and overcome unprecedented challenges like Brexit and climate change, we need a new way of doing politics that gives everyone a voice.

Citizens’ assemblies could also have an important role to play – where representative groups of people come together to hear objective evidence and carefully consider how to move forward on contentious issues. They could be held on Brexit, climate change, democratic reform and more. In Ireland, they’ve been used to find agreement on contentious issues like same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

Power must be devolved to the regions too – to give people more of a say over what happens in their area.

And it’s about time we swapped our unelected House of Lords for a democratic upper chamber that is accountable to the public.

As we stumble towards the Brexit cliff-edge, these long-needed changes might not seem particularly pressing. But Labour’s splintering, Parliament’s paralysis and the 2016 referendum result are symptoms of a political system that is cracking under the pressure of modern crises.

If we’re to stand any chance of overcoming our divisions and solving our problems, politicians of all parties and none must come together to rebuild our democracy.

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