Liberal-left coalitions are the only way to overturn the right’s unfair electoral advantage
Bravo for the Labour party and a new cadre of trade union leaders who this week showed unequivocal support for overhauling our archaic voting system. Labour conference delegates overwhelmingly backed a motion calling on the party to embrace proportional representation. How could it be otherwise when a fanatical cult of free-marketeers has seized power and crashed the economy?
Progressives almost always outvote the right, according to the Electoral Reform Society. But the right nearly always wins under the current first-past-the-post system because the centre and centre-left vote has been fatally split ever since the rising Labour party failed to kill off the remnant of the old Liberals. At the last local elections, in 85% of seats just one rightist – a single Tory – confronted an anti-Tory vote split between two or three Labour, Lib Dem and Green candidates. Readers of these pages know the well-rehearsed reasons why the Guardian backs electoral reform. The political scientist Sir John Curtice says the system is now more biased towards the Conservatives than at any time since the 1950s, when Labour on its own outpolled them but lost.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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