First Past the Post is the political system that is currently used in the UK. In
this system, the country is divided up into 650 constituencies, which elect an
MP (Member of Parliament). These MPs represent a certain political party,
and if a party wins more than 226 seats, they have won the election. In
contemporary political society, there is ongoing debate about whether this is
the optimal electoral system, with compelling arguments to be made on both
sides. Some of these arguments are presented in the source, which is
adapted from a Hansard report of a debate that happened in the house of
commons after over 100,000 people signed a petition calling for the
introduction of Proportional Representation, a term which is used to describe
a number of systems that aim to be more representative of the overall
political landscape of the nation in which it is in use. In this debate, MPs
Steven Double and Caroline Lucas (of the Conservative and Green parties,
respectively), gave their contrasting views on proportional representation.
In the source, Steve Double argues that "Proportional representation will
damage democracy by putting more power into the hands of parties." This
argument would pertain to the closed list system, in which members of large
constituencies vote for a party, as opposed to a candidate, with the number
of seats given to a party decided by the proportion of the vote they receive.
As the list of candidates who are then given seats is decided by the party as
opposed to the people, it would mean that parties have more power in some
sense. However, there are other proportionally representative systems that
do not give parties this additonal power, such as the single transferrable vote
system, in which people rank the running candidates from their most to least
favourite, with the winner being decided by a droop quota. Therefore, this
argument is not entirely valid in its suggestion that proportional
representation would damage elections to the House of Commons.
Additionally, Double's claim that proportional representation would "damage
democracy" can be countered with Lucas' statement that "FPTP is damaging
the legitimacy of our system." This argument is backed up by the
unrepresentative nature of FPTP. The FPTP system means that the party in
charge usually has not received over 50% of the overall vote. For example, in
the 2024 Election, Keir Starmer's Labour party received just 34% of the
overall vote, but gained around 66% of the seats in parliament. This
essentially creates an elective dictatorship for Starmer as such a strong
majority allows the Labour party to pass any motions they see fit through the
House of Commons with little chance for effective backlash. Therefore,
despite only receiving 34% of the vote, Labour effectively holds 100% of the
