Proportional representation could save the Tories from annihilation

The electoral system that for so long paved the Conservatives' path to power is now stacked against them.

via Alamy/ 2R24WRE

The Conservative party faces the risk of near annihilation at the next election. For months, polls have been showing that support for what was long seen as the natural party of government has fallen below 20%. On that level of support, the Tories are heading for an even more disastrous defeat than in 2024. Current forecasts indicate that the Conservative party could lose most of the 121 seats it currently holds in Parliament at the next election. YouGov's latest seat projections has Reform UK on 271 (+266), Labour on 178 (-233), the Liberal Democrats on 81 (+9), the Conservatives on 46 (-51), the SNP on 38 (+29), the Greens on 7 (+3), Plaid Cymru on 7 (+3) and other parties on 3 (-2).

Predictably, media attention has focused on how long Kemi Badenoch can survive as leader, though candidates who have the capacity and will to take on that unenviable task are not conspicuously obvious. With the electoral system that has so long paved their road to power now clearly stacked against them, it is not surprising that some Tory thoughts are starting to turn to Proportional Representation (PR).

This might not be such a shift from party tradition as first appears. In 1918, the Tory-dominated House of Lords repeatedly inserted PR provisions into the Representation of the People Act that brought universal manhood suffrage. Their object was to safeguard against the elective dictatorship of governments elected on a minority of votes. With Labour having won a majority of 179 on a vote share of only 33.7% in 2024, that argument is clearly worth revisiting.

In 1918, it was their colleagues in the Commons who thwarted the intentions of the Tory peers. Instead of PR, the interwar years proved a period wherein the Conservative and Labour parties consolidated their positions as broad electoral coalitions, squeezing out the declining Liberals. By the 1950s, the two major parties took over 90% of the vote between them.

Yet, during the crisis years of the 1960s and 1970s, as the Tories lost four elections out of five in an era of hung parliaments and weak government, Conservative opinion changed. Conservative Action for Electoral Reform (CAER) was founded just after the defeat in February 1974. Faced with a minority Labour government that Tories believed was behaving like the elective dictatorship Lord Hailsham warned of in 1976, Conservative MPs flocked to join CAER. Even after Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979, some 123 Tory MPs favoured electoral reform. It was only as Thatcher consolidated her grip on power that Tory interest in PR collapsed.

This brief history shows that Conservative interest in PR has always been mixed with a healthy dose of self-interest. With the party now facing the risk of near annihilation, the potential benefits of PR are even more apparent than in the 1970s.

It is not just that the Tories have a weaker leader and start from a weaker position. It is also that they have, for the first time in their history, a major rival on the Right. That party, Reform, is riding high in the polls and is currently on course to be the largest party after the next election on a vote share of 31%.

The prospect of what is in most respects a protest party winning an election on such a small vote share clearly risks bringing the electoral system into disrepute. Moreover, such a Reform victory would also pose an existential threat to the Conservatives.

After all, the recent local elections suggest that Reform have reached a tipping point and that the First Past the Post system now gives them an electoral bonus. In such circumstances, Nigel Farage may well drop his earlier support for PR as he seeks to consolidate a position as the main party of the Right, usurping the Tories’ place.

There are some who think that eventually there will be a merger between the two right-wing parties. Given Farage’s determination to retain control of his political destiny - it’s surely no coincidence that Reform is a business with no shareholders in which he is one of the two directors - this seems only likely on his own terms.

Meanwhile, in a political landscape which is more complex and fissured than in the 1950s, there remains a space for a Conservative party that is economically and fiscally conservative, which Reform most definitely is not. Simply hoping that Reform will therefore effectively crash is, however, not a strategy.

Instead, Tory thinking surely should be informed by the possibility that Reform will succeed where the SDP failed in the 1980s and actually break the mould of British politics. To avoid being left out in the cold in that eventuality and retain representation in Parliament commensurate with their support, surely the Tories should – like their predecessors in the 1970s – reconsider PR.

In that fraught decade, the PR system of choice across the political spectrum was the Additional Member System. This involves both MPs elected in single-district constituencies and top-up representatives elected from regional party lists. At the time, the use of this system was felt to have contributed to the post-war success of West Germany. Variants of it were later adopted in Scotland and Wales. Whether it looks so appealing now is a moot point.

Perhaps the Tories might be better advised to revisit the system favoured by the House of Lords in 1918. This is the Single Transferable Vote (STV). STV has become tainted in British eyes as the system used in Northern Ireland. Yet there it has enabled the Tories’ erstwhile sister party, the Ulster Unionists, to survive being outflanked on the Right, a fate which now also threatens them. It retains a local element as it is based on multi-member constituencies elected by preferential voting. And that preferential voting offers the Tories a chance of picking up second and third choices from their rivals.

If the Conservatives remain second choice in large swathes of the country, including in seats which they currently seem to have little prospect of regaining from the Liberal Democrats, such a preferential system offers them a chance to win far more seats than might otherwise be the case, certainly under First Past the Post. In such circumstances, the Tories might well find the idea of PR worth revisiting if current trends in the polls continue.

Pippa Catterall is Professor of History and Policy at the University of Westminster