Maggie would not have been PM, but Gordon Brown would have gone on and on. No wonder the Left want to scrap first past the post elections!

Fans of proportional representation — at least in this country — tend to be on the Left. But extremists of the Right are, as often as not, the beneficiaries (and would be here if we introduced it).

as we have just seen in Israel’s general election. a relatively new party called Religious Zionism polled almost 11 per cent of the vote. Under Israel’s system of pure proportional representation, that translated into a similar proportion of seats in the Knesset, and they will become the main partner in a complex coalition to be led by the Likud Party’s great survivor, Benjamin netanyahu.

That means a prominent role in government for the leader of Religious Zionism. This is Itamar Ben- Gvir, a devotee of an extremist Rabbi whose own party had been banned by Israel as a terrorist organisation in the 1990s.

Until recently Ben-Gvir had kept in his sitting room a photo of Baruch Goldstein, the man who gunned down 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994.

But netanyahu can’t muster a parliamentary majority without Ben-Gvir. While this may be an extreme case, a function of political life in a country whose very right to exist is under constant challenge, it is also typical of what happens in countries with proportional representation (PR).

Unpopular

Unlike our own system, known as firstpast-the-post, PR produces a mass of parties, and rarely yields a majority of parliamentary seats to the ‘winning’ one. so it invariably requires a coalition, often of the most unlikely bedfellows.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed in 2010 was an aberration in our system, though it had trade- offs familiar from similar settlements in countries with PR.

nick Clegg extracted from David Cameron a promise to stuff the House of Lords with scores of Lib Dems who had never been able to get elected to the Commons, and none of whom could remotely be described as distinguished.

Cameron also agreed to hold a referendum on replacing first-past-thepost; but to the fury of the Lib Dems, over two-thirds of those who voted in it cast their ballot in favour of retaining our existing, ancient system.

Meanwhile, Clegg went along with the Conservative plan to triple university fees, even though the Lib Dems’ principal pledge in the 2010 General Election had been to abolish those fees altogether.

shabby deals on all sides, in other words: and ones which would have infuriated both Conservative and Lib Dem voters, never consulted while these transactions took place in secret.

at least the Conservatives, having gained 96 seats in the 2010 election, were able to compose a government, while Labour, which lost 91 seats, was unable to manufacture a majority with the Lib Dems (who actually lost five seats in that election).

However, those two ‘losing’ parties polled between them 52 per cent of the vote. Under PR, they could have formed a ‘ majority’ government — and the then deeply unpopular Gordon Brown would have remained in 10 Downing street.

If you think that would have been perverse, consider the election of 1979, which propelled Margaret Thatcher into office, and rescued this country from apparently inevitable economic decline, with radical reforms that could never have been carried out if she had been forced to share power with multiple parties.

In fact, Labour and the Liberals polled over two million more votes than the Conservatives in the 1979 election. PR would have enabled a Labour-Liberal coalition, blocking Margaret Thatcher from becoming Prime Minister.

For Polly Toynbee, the veteran Guardian columnist, this is the basis for her longstanding campaign to get Labour to adopt PR: to keep the Conservatives out, preferably permanently.

she argues that under the current system the ‘ centre and centre-Left vote has been fatally split ever since the rising Labour Party failed to kill off the remnant of the old Liberals’. and she condemned as ‘disgraceful’ that ‘ a minority in the Labour Party, comprising tribal dinosaurs’ reject PR because it ‘means Labour too would never win alone again, losing seats to the Greens and any new socialist party that may emerge’.

Perverse

actually the old Labour ‘dinosaurs’ have a point. as Dr Richard Johnson of London’s Queen Mary University observes: ‘In every post war election, with the exception of the 1950s and 2019, Labour has received a greater share of House of Commons seats than its share of the popular vote. This boost has sometimes been very substantial, giving Labour majorities it would not otherwise have.’

He concluded that PR would just mean ‘the Lib Dems would effectively get to choose the Prime Minister after each election. You can understand why they are so keen, but why are Labour members?’

But keen they are. at Labour’s recent party conference, the delegates overwhelmingly backed a motion in favour of introducing proportional representation in UK General Elections. It isn’t binding on the leadership, however, and sir Keir starmer has not committed himself on the matter (to Toynbee’s intense disapproval).

as it happens, that Labour conference coincided with the implosion in support for the Conservatives, measured by the opinion polls. It will have become clear to starmer, and, indeed, the whole of his Parliamentary party, that unless Rishi sunak performs a miracle in restoring public confidence in the Conservatives, after the debacle of Liz Truss, the first-past-the-post system will most likely deliver a solid working majority for Labour at the next election.

If it does, it is hardly likely that a Prime Minister starmer would seek to implement a change in the electoral system from which only the Lib Dems, the Greens and possibly an as-yet-unformed party of the far Right could derive benefit.

Fragile

If our existing electoral system were unhealthy, that would be demonstrated by a decline in the proportion of people who bother to vote. But this is not the case.

In the five General Elections from 2001 to 2017, turnout increased steadily each time, rising from 59.4 per cent to 68.8 per cent. On the other hand, the most recent elections for the French national assembly, saw a pathetic turn out: 46.2 per cent. Yet these were conducted under the PR system, in which, say its fans, ‘every vote counts’.

and then there are the other benefits of our system. There is the direct accountability of MPs to their constituents. It is straightforward to form a government. We do not experience what happened in Germany last year, where it took two months to form a coalition and a document of 178 pages to explain; still less what took place in Belgium where no government could be formed between June 2010 and December 2011.

and in Israel, one reason governments come and go with extraordinary frequency (there were four General Elections in two years) is that the inevitable coalitions are so fragile.

Critics may point out that we have our third Prime Minister since the 2019 election, which certainly looks like chaos. But the fact is that we have a parliamentary system: as long as one party can demonstrate a majority within that chamber, its leader can form the King’s government — and rapidly, at that.

Moreover, Rishi sunak and the Conservatives are transparently and alone accountable for everything that happens under their watch.

If the voters, when the next election is called, are highly dissatisfied with the overall performance, they have the power to ‘ kick the blighters out’, and the Conservatives will no longer be the tenants of Downing street. sunak could not hang on with some cobbled-together backroom deal, just as Gordon Brown couldn’t in 2010.

and it is during the times of greatest economic strain that it is most necessary to have a government which does not need to worry every day about its imminent dissolution. no electoral system is perfect, but rather ours than Israel’s.