Labour, not the Tories, benefit from first-past-the-post voting system | Letter

Dismissing Tory success as a rigged game betrays a head-in-the-sand refusal to engage constructively with other reasons for defeat, says Robert Frazer

Edward Milford says the Tories have been kept in power by first-past-the-post elections (Letters, 31 December). If anything it’s the opposite – FPTP in the UK is visibly biased in favour of Labour, and the Conservatives often have to poll much harder for an equivalent output in the Commons.

The Tories may have won in 2019, but actually by a much narrower margin than is strictly equitable – in terms of vote share, more people actually voted for Boris Johnson (43.6%) than Tony Blair in 1997 (43.2%), but the Conservatives ended up with over 50 fewer seats than Labour did in its famous landslide (365 compared with 418). In 1983, the year of the “longest suicide note in history” (since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat, now the second-longest), Michael Foot’s Labour polled worse than the Conservatives did in their calamitous 1997 wipeout (27.6% against 30.7%) yet still ended up with substantially more seats (209 to John Major’s 165).

When Tony Blair polled 40.7% of the vote in 2001 he crushed the Conservatives with a second landslide of 413 seats, but even though Theresa May easily beat him with 42.7% of the vote in 2017 she only scraped 317 seats and lost her parliamentary majority.

First-past-the-post results appear inequitable not because of an establishment conspiracy – as we can see, the system works against the Tories more often than not – but because the local picture is a variegated one. Dismissing Tory success as a rigged game is not only untrue but betrays a head-in-the-sand refusal to engage constructively with other reasons for defeat and will only lead the Greens, Labour, and all progressive parties to another failure next time.
Robert Frazer
Stockport, Cheshire

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