“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker

(This is an extended version of an article that previously appeared in The National. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

Given the audience likely to read this column, the statement “UK democracy is broken” isn’t going to feel uncontroversial or even particularly objectionable, but it is one that is being forced into sharp relief by the ongoing UK General Election campaign. We’re are all, regardless of our political leanings, being ill served by it.

This column started with a thought around the claims that the UK Labour Party are eyeing the potential of winning a “supermajority” after next Thursday with the loudest complainants of such a result being those in conservative circles. Understandably so as it would mean Labour winning a majority so large that they can’t possibly be challenged by the Opposition and so large that they don’t even need to worry about a rebellion on the back benches or the inevitable trickle of by-elections triggered by scandal, illness and the march of time threatening to flip the balance of power.

But this is the level of power enjoyed by all majority Governments in the UK Parliament. Having just a single vote above 50% of the House of Commons grants 100% of the power and nothing, not even opposition in the House of Lords, can stop you doing what you want. Unlike countries with written constitutions that require a higher level of scrutiny to change, there aren’t very many laws in the UK that require more than a 50% vote in favour.

One notable one was the Fixed Term Parliament Act which, as the name suggests, removed the Prime Minister’s power to call an election whenever they wanted unless 75% of Parliament agreed. The UK never saw a full five year Parliament under the auspices of that Act (though Theresa May did manage to get the 75% majority she needed to call the 2017 election). The Act died when Boris Johnson wanted to call an election to hammer down his own backbench rebellion and force his Brexit deal through and he did so by relying on the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty and the idea in UK law that Acts passed more recently supersede older Acts (rather than new legislation being compelled to fit within older legislation which could result in Governments being bound by their predecessors). This allowed Johnson to pass a new Bill – the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019 – which only required a simple 50% majority to pass. In 2022, Johnson passed a repeal bill to scrap the FTPA. This is how any Government that has a majority but not a “supermajority” can always act within the UK context. Internal rebellion aside, a majority of one seat is as good as one hundred.

But if the Conservatives in particular are concerned that absolute power might be held by someone who isn’t them, they’ll be campaigning to change it won’t they?

Not a chance. In fact, their manifesto contains a commitment to upholding the First Past The Post voting system that creates this inequality. No, they don’t want Labour to have absolute power, but the only thing worse is the idea that a future Conservative government will NOT have absolute power. Not that many of the other parties are much better here. Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour themselves are silent on the matter of voting reform (beyond a few tweaks around the rules on who can vote in these broken elections). Absolute power would suit them just fine too.

To their credit, the SNP do support change but they support a shift to Single Transferable Vote as we currently use in council elections. This, too, is a play for power in its own way. STV is better than FPTP (which is a low bar since FPTP is the least fair of all electoral methods that retain the concept of being able to freely vote between multiple electable candidates) but it still tends to result in concentration of power between the largest parties – if FPTP tends to create a system of two “main” parties plus a few exceptions, STV tends to create a number of parties equal to the number of candidates in each “ward” (usually three to five) and since the SNP can be reasonably expected to place at least third in most wards in Scotland, yes I can see why this suits them fine too.

The UK should take inspiration from Germany and how their voting system works in the Bundestag – the two countries are similarly sized and have similar regional disparities (albeit Germany concentrates far less wealth in its capital compared to the UK) so it’s hard to argue that the German system can’t work here.

Voters in Scotland will already be relatively familiar with the German system as it is very similar to the Scottish Additional Member System. The differences lie in the technical details but it’s notable that at almost every point of difference, the German system made a choice that favoured more and smaller parties while Scotland chose to favour fewer and larger parties. Are there the same number constituency seats compared to list seats, or more? Can the Parliament expand to maintain proportionality, or are the number of seats fixed? In the case of a close result, will the final list seat tend to go to the smallest party in the running, or the largest?

People who object to proportional representation tend to point at a small party they don’t like (left or right wing, could be either) and say that we need to lock them out of power forever but in addition to being the very antithesis of democracy, this simply doesn’t work. What happens instead of a Parliament of multiple small parties working in coalition or parleying election results into power within a broad voting bloc is that we see factions within the parties hiding in plain sight, doing the same jockeying and sometimes purging the other factions when they can. The insidious difference is that you, as a voter, will be claimed by all of those factions if you vote for the broad party. If your local candidate is of the Left faction and you vote for them but the Right faction of the party holds the power, they will claim your vote as a mandate for their vision of what the party “should” do.

So where should you place your vote in this broken democratic system next week? Well, this isn’t the column for that I’m afraid, other than to say that I have little personal affection for “tactical voting”. One of the consequences of FPTP is that so many voters feel powerless that they don’t vote at all. If “didn’t vote” was a political party, it would have won 226 seats in 2019. Rather than voting for someone you don’t believe in, vote for someone you do believe in and try to bring a non-voter with you to the polls to do the same – even if that means a mass spoiling of ballots to send the clear message that you’re actually dissatisfied with all of your “options”, rather than just being lazy and accepting the winner via your apathy. Change will only come when we make the status quo impossible, no matter how hard those who benefit from it try to keep it.