FPTP is here to stay because turkeys and MPs don't vote for Christmas

The National

01-06-2025

It gets worse. The LibDems found ­themselves the third largest party (­replacing a badly wounded SNP) having won more than 70 seats on just over 12% of the total vote. Even the unlovely Reform UK got a handful of seats.
Reform UK (previously UKIP and the ­Brexit Party) took five seats, all from the Tories, though they've already fallen out with one who committed lese majeste by ­criticising the sainted Nigel Farage. ­However, they came second in no fewer than 98 ­constituencies, 89 of them in Labour-held seats. Cue a very public panic attack from the PM last week.
This is the latest legacy of a deeply flawed electoral system. You might wonder why attempts to ditch First Past The Post (FPTP) have always failed. Wonder no more. The sitting MPs in the Commons have figured out that a fairer voting system might well result in many of them getting their jotters.
READ MORE: Labour have 'given up' on by-election amid SNP-Reform contest, says John Swinney
Turkeys and MPs rarely queue to vote for Christmas.
The UK General Election is unique in sticking with FPTP. Scotland wound up with a messy compromise when the ­Constitutional Commission tried to please all the parties involved in the ­previous ­Convention.
The result was the Additional ­Member System (AMS) which has constituency MSPs ­elected under FPTP then list MSPs given seats in proportion to their vote share. ­Neither fully proportional flesh nor ­equitable fowl.
For years thereafter, list MSPs laboured under the label of being somehow second-class citizens. Not least the Tories who had fought against devolution and all its works yet, thanks to AMS, found themselves with a healthy clutch of seats in Holyrood.
The Single Transferable Vote (STV) has ­several merits compared with FPTP. Most ­importantly it reflects what most ­voters ­actually want, it tends to stop tactical ­voting, and, not at all incidentally, it stops parties from deciding themselves how they want to rank their own candidates on a list.
Plus it lets voters assert their personal preference even when these cross party lines. So, even if your favoured ­candidate doesn't win, his or her votes will be ­redistributed. Waste not, want not.
This might help to reduce the ­widespread scunneration factor about politics and politicians generally, from which Scotland is certainly not immune. The upcoming by-election will be ­fiercely fought on all sides but is unlikely to ­produce much in the way of voter enthusiasm. If half the electors sit on their hands it's not much of an advert for democracy.
Remember the heady days of the 2014 referendum, when an astonishing 85% of folk trotted off to the polling stations?
All parties, including the SNP, have misused the party list system by putting candidates they've taken agin well down the list in the certain knowledge that will ensure electoral death. Not so much ­power to the people as too much power to the parties.
The Welsh Senedd has decided that AMS too is flawed and will move to ­another system next year while STV is the preference in our Scottish local ­elections as it is elsewhere in the UK. Only the Commons sticks with a system which most often results in a successful candidate the majority of voters don't want. And certainly didn't vote for. Again, hardly an advert or an argument for democracy.
It's likely that a lot of Westminster -centric MPs are not even aware that they are the only chamber left where FPTP manages to survive despite public ­opinion being only too well aware that their vote, in too many constituencies, is of no ­consequence. Why bother voting when you know your voice will never be heard or acknowledged?
And let's not even think about the House of Lords which has been about to be abolished since God was a girl. It's a salutary fact that only the Chinese ­assembly has more members than the 800-plus HOL, where a few doughty ­members do the lion's share of any work going while the rest are – sometimes literally – sleeping partners.
It's also instructive to note that ­almost all new peers say they favour ­abolition themselves, before undergoing a ­Damascene conversion shortly after their posteriors make contact with the red benches.
The self-proclaimed conceit that they are a house of all the talents has been somewhat diluted by successive Prime ­Ministers giving out gongs with an ­enthusiasm at which even David Lloyd George might summon a blush. (In six years from 1916 the Welsh ­Liberal PM managed to create 120 hereditary ­peerages, not even to mention more than 1500 knighthoods. He noted that a fully equipped duke cost as much to keep up as a couple of Dreadnoughts and were just as scary and lasted longer!)
The modern equivalent, certainly for the Conservatives, is to hand over ­peerages to major party donors which is little more than a kick in the pants ­distant from selling them off. Buying peerages is notionally illegal, but tell that to the raft of party appointees who march with ­unseemly haste to the Lords should their seat be required for a more '­deserving' candidate.
I admire the way in which the SNP have set their face against nominating anyone to the so-called upper house, even though there have been a number of SNP ­'grandees' who might have fancied a daud of ermine as a kind of long service medal.
The latest was former ­Westminster SNP leader Ian Blackford who suggested SNP peers would help give Scotland greater ­influence. Wonder who he could have had in mind!
IT may be too much to hope that there will be any significant change to how Scotland votes in an election which is now less than a year distant.
Yet we did manage to effect change in the teeth of opposition when we extended the franchise to teenagers who could get married while being deemed 'too young' to have a vote. How frustrated these young voters must be to find that they are still banned from other electoral processes.
Yet the one constituency to which every elected politician lends an ear is the ­voting public. If enough of us say 'up with this nonsense we will not put' it just might light a fire under the party top brass.
And a nonsense it truly is when voters, who are not daft, realise that their own vote in too many areas is totally wasted. In truth, there are only a few ­constituencies where voting actually ­matters any more.
One of them is Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, previous fiefdom of the late and much lamented Christina ­McKelvie.
If the opinion polls are to be believed it's now largely a two-horse race between the SNP in which she was a popular ­minister, and Reform UK which have the ­distinction of having no track record in Scotland, no costed policies, and is ­predicating its pitch on 'Change'.
Seem to remember that was also the war cry of the incoming Starmer ­government. That's gone well. So anyone prepared to be seduced by a one-word slogan from a party now in its third incarnation and led by Donald Trump superfan Nigel Farage will soon find out just how hollow his promises ­always are.
Apparently, he's about to grace us with his presence. Let's hope he requires ­rescuing by Police Scotland again. The party leader Nigel unceremoniously dumped, Richard Tice, says a Scottish breakthrough is very much on the cards. Seemingly he has his own pack.