Keir Starmer has been urged to throw his support behind some form of proportional representation (PR) in order to embed Britain’s “progressive majority”.
Paul Sweeney, member of the Scottish parliament (MSP) for the Glasgow region, warned that without electoral reform, the country could face a “horrendous scenario” leading to the “extinction of the United Kingdom”.
Speaking at Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool on Sunday evening, he pointed to the “existential question” that would be posed by a Reform UK majority at Westminster.
Sweeney said: “I’ve been watching the tensions build in this country over the last decade or so, whether it’s the [2014] Scottish independence referendum, whether it was the [2016] Brexit referendum or the rise of populist nationalism.”
Sweeney said Labour should not be “blinded” by the seismic nature of the party’s victory at the 2024 general election.
Labour won almost two-thirds of seats in the House of Commons (411) in the 2024 general election with just over one-third of the popular vote (33.7%).
The MSP told a Labour For A New Democracy and Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform (LCER) fringe event that, accounting for the 2024 result, “the last century has been the Tory century punctuated by occasional Labour governments”.
He said: “That’s what we need to be aware of – the long term prospects for our nation and [the need] to build a system of politics in this country that reflects the structural, progressive majority that truly exists in this country.”
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Referring implicitly to the prospect of a Reform majority government, Sweeney added: “There’s a potential scenario where if don’t reform the electoral system, we visit that horrendous scenario upon our country.
“And if that does happen at the next general election, then we can face the extinction of the United Kingdom. We can see the border poll in Northern Ireland happening; we can see a sustained majority for independence in Scotland as a result of that.
“So I think we need to be aware of the risks.”
In a later contribution, Labour MP Luke Akehurst argued that the case for reform should be made on “social democratic values” and not in terms of the Labour Party’s own self-interest.
Akehurst, the Labour MP for North Durham, said: “The reality is [under] a proportional electoral system we will probably help the Labour Party when we’re not doing that well, and probably take the edge off the number of seats that we would get in years when we’re doing fantastically well.”
He insisted it was impossible to predict how the public would vote under a different system, as people would “behave in a totally different way if they had a genuine choice”.
He added: “My message is we have to go out and win this on our social democratic values. There’s the word ‘democracy’ in there, because we should fight for the best forms of democracy that we can get.
“And the ‘social’ aspect of social democracy is about equality and justice, and that means justice for people in terms of their economic outcomes, justice for people in terms of their social outcomes and the lives that they have, but justice [meaning] a vote in any part of the country should be worth exactly the same.
“As much as I loved the ‘hero voters’ who switched from Tory to Labour in the last general election, actually, it’s an appalling indictment of our electoral system [that] there are some people whose votes counted effectively double because they took one off the Tory majority and one off of Labour.
“Everyone’s vote should have an equal value and that’s what we’re fighting for.”
The comments came as Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, issued his first major intervention of Labour conference.
In wide-ranging comments, Burnham looked ahead to the next general election and warned that Reform UK could win it with a historically limited share of the vote.
Reflecting on his experience campaigning for the Greater Manchester mayoralty, which is elected under the supplementary vote system, Burnham spoke positively of the impact of ranked voting.
He said that “point scoring gave way to trying to find points of agreement”.
Burnham added: “It creates a situation where the process of politics starts to align with the way the public see politics, because they look at us, and they look at what goes on in Westminster and on the television screens, and they think, why don’t they just try and find solutions and sort of work together? Why don’t they do that?…
“I think if we were to move to a PR system for Westminster, we would get the same effect replacing point scoring with the search for points of agreement”.
Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.
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