Vote Reform Fight: Labour MPs Push Back on Burnham Plan

The way Britain counts its votes shapes every law that reaches ordinary households, from hospitals and schools to wages and safety standards, and that is why the debate now unfolding inside the Labour Party over electoral reform matters well beyond Westminster’s corridors. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has put the question at the centre of his agenda, but his own MPs are far from agreed on whether the system that elected them should change.

Burnham announced the plan in his first conference speech as Prime Minister in Liverpool last month, telling Labour activists that a new national commission on electoral reform would be established. “In past years, you have voted twice to support electoral reform. I hear you, I agree with you, and today I am announcing a new national commission on electoral reform,” he said. He added that Labour would “contest the next election with a manifesto commitment to change the electoral system so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.”

The case for change rests partly on fairness to voters. Supporters argue proportional representation would make Westminster elections fairer, and a majority of Labour members back replacing first-past-the-post with PR. Around 100 Labour MPs supported a campaign for a national commission before Burnham made his commitment. Earlier this year, more than 50 academics wrote to the government warning that the current system risked producing distorted results on an unprecedented scale, with growing numbers of candidates elected on low vote shares. “The collision of a multi-party electorate with a voting system designed for just two parties is creating new risks for Britain,” they wrote in a letter reported by PoliticsHome.

Since the Prime Minister’s announcement, however, resistance has surfaced within his own ranks, including among ministers. According to PoliticsHome, Louise Haigh, the Deputy Prime Minister and a close Burnham ally, has concerns about shifting to PR. Other Cabinet figures have previously voiced reservations.

Angela Rayner, now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said in 2022 that she was a “first-past-the-post girl” who was “yet to be convinced by PR”, telling The News Agents podcast that the system could allow extremist parties such as the British National Party to win House of Commons seats. John Healey, now Chancellor, campaigned against electoral reform in the 2011 referendum on the alternative vote, describing it as “perverse”. In a piece for The Independent, he warned: “Immediately after an election the parties would be scrambling to do coalition deals. They would feel free to jettison policies that had been firm pledges only a week earlier. This isn’t the new type of politics people have been calling for. They want politics that treats them with respect, not as fools.” Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, took the opposite position in that referendum. Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh and Communities Minister Florence Eshalomi were both signatories to this year’s MP campaign for a commission.

The reference coverage of the internal split can be found at https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/burnham-faces-labour-mp-resistence-electoral-reform, which has reported on the divisions since Burnham’s speech.

Critics within the party argue that PR would weaken Labour’s electoral position, and the arithmetic of possible coalitions adds to their unease. Burnham has refused to work with the Green Party for as long as its conference motion describing zionism as racism remains in place, complicating any hung Parliament scenario. One Labour MP who supports scrapping first-past-the-post admitted that “the prospect of having to rely on Ed Davey, or even worse the Greens, to get stuff through almost makes me physically sick”.

Charlie Buckley, senior research associate at More In Common, told PoliticsHome that forming a workable majority “looks even more complicated” under PR. “The Greens would go from a handful of MPs to a sizable bloc, while Restore Britain would arrive in Parliament in numbers, potentially giving these smaller parties a kingmaker role in the formation of coalitions,” he said.

Henry Tufnell, the Labour MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, pointed to his experience of PR in Wales. “I saw on the doorstep ahead of the Welsh elections how democratic accountability can be lost under proportional representation and the broken link between the electorate and the representative. We should think very carefully about introducing any legislation nationally on electoral reform,” he told PoliticsHome.

Reform advocates, by contrast, insist the balance of opinion has shifted. Neal Lawson, director of the pressure group Compass and co-founder of the new Labour group Mainstream, believes some senior ministers will try to block change. “Some people in the Cabinet who are very opposed to it, who are old-school tribal, adversarial Labour, and they will try and do whatever they can to try and kick PR into the long grass,” he said. But he stressed that the Prime Minister is “instinctively and intrinsically pro-proportional representation”, backed by the membership, the trade unions and a big chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party. “The overwhelming mood in the Labour Party is for PR,” Lawson said.

For voters, the outcome of this internal fight will determine whether their ballots carry equal weight at the next general election.