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8 hours ago
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Look at the coverage of any general election opinion polling recently and what you are likely to see is a map of Britain divided into its constituencies and covered in Reform’s light blue. They are utterly dominant when it comes to the projected seats. Take the latest YouGov MRP poll, published with great fanfare this week. MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) is a particularly detailed kind of poll that creates projections for each constituency – and this one predicted that Nigel Farage’s party would win a whopping 42% of the seats inside the House of Commons if a general election were held now. Even this was fairly low compared with some other recent data that actually projected a majority of 30 seats.
But while Farage and some parts of the media really want you to focus on the number of seats Reform might win, what you should be looking at is what the data is actually telling us. Stay with me on this. Because, while the latest YouGov poll may show Reform achieving 42% of UK seats, the proportion of people in the UK who actually support them, according to that same poll, is only 26%. What we really should be taking from the latest data is the headline “three-quarters of UK voters don’t want Nigel Farage and Reform”. Only one in four people want them in government.
When you think about it like this, the ridiculousness of the current system is laid bare. This party is unpopular with most of the voters, yet the question on Westminster watchers’ lips is: “Can they win a majority?” This warps the discourse around our entire political system and creates the impression that most of the public want something that they self-evidently don’t.
If you need more convincing as to how the UK’s first-past-the-post system is spinning politics to the extremes, take a look at the part of the UK where Reform are polling even better – Wales. Recent polls in Wales have shown Reform and Plaid Cymru vying for first place ahead of the Senedd (Welsh parliament) elections next year. The latest poll puts Reform in first place with 29%.
But in Wales there is no genuine conversation (outside the Reform party itself) about Reform really being able to form a government next year. And why is this? It is because in Cymru we have a system that is far more proportional. There is simply no way that any party can come close to a majority with less than a third of the vote. Call me crazy, but in a democracy, doesn’t that make sense?
Let me give you an example. In a poll at the start of May looking at voting intentions in Wales, Plaid Cymru got 30% and Reform UK 25%. When it came to seat projections inside the Senedd (which has 96 seats), Plaid was projected about 35 and Reform 30. This is broadly reflective of the numbers of people who would have voted for them. So Reform could easily be the largest party in Wales next year. I think it will be. But there is still very little chance of it forming a government for the plain and simple reason that its politics are miles away from the views of most people in Wales.
Inside the Senedd there are six parties who can realistically win seats: Plaid, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Conservatives and Reform. All those first four parties have categorically ruled out working with Farage. The only party that would do so is the Tories, but all the evidence suggests that most of Reform’s gains are coming at their expense. So the better Reform does, the smaller is its only prospective coalition partner likely to be. This is the benefit of proportional democracy in action: it stops extremes guiding the agenda.
Imagine you and 12 mates are going out. Three of you want to go have a cappuccino, three want lattes and three want flat whites. You all want coffee but can’t quite agree on which specific one, but broadly you are in agreement on what you want to do. But imagine that the remaining four want to go out to get out and get battered on Special Brew and smash up a bar. Under first-past-the-post, because there are more people wanting Special Brew than cappuccino, lattes or flat whites respectively, you are all condemned to go out on the piss.
Under the Welsh setup, and frankly those of most healthy democratic systems (like those in New Zealand, Finland and Norway), the direction of the nation is as close as possible to the view of most of its people, not simply the largest minority. Whereas the UK as a whole is going to be forced to go out on the lash by Reform even though they really want a nice cup of coffee.
If Keir Starmer really wants to counter Reform, he needs to change an electoral process that punishes parties for having broad appeal. It’s the single biggest change he can make as prime minister that will stop the hard right seizing power. Will he have the courage to do away with a system that gave his own party 63% of the seats on just 34% of the vote? I doubt it. But if he is serious about putting country over party, he must.
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Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
