First past the post is not fit for purpose.

I want to ensure that your voice is heard – and transfer power back to the people. There is a reason I mentioned electoral reform in my first ever speech in parliament, which you can find here.

The previous shambolic Conservative Government created a democratic crisis, through their cronyism, rule-breaking and constant sleaze scandals. Successive Conservative Prime Ministers acted without integrity and treated Parliament and the people with disdain.

This coupled with the 2024 General Election which was the most disproportionate we have seen since the second world war, possibly ever. It was the first election in which four parties gained over ten percent of votes and five parties over five percent of votes. Labour and the Conservatives recorded their lowest combined vote share (57.4%).

This is combined with 73.7% of votes not directly affect the outcome in 2024 – This is 21.2 million people left voiceless out of 28.9 million voters.

Our party system looks like it is changing from a 2-party system to a multi-party one. This is constrained by an electoral system which favours two parties meaning the disproportionality is only going to continue.

I believe in governing through consensus, consensus is not 20.9% of the electorate, giving Labour 34% of the vote, which gives them 63% of the seats, and 100% of the power, as we have seen in 2024. If only 1 in 5 votes matter democracy is clearly not working as intended.

This is all a symptom of a broken political system, which enabled the Government to take families up and down the country for granted. It is clear that we need a political system with fair representation, so that politics is made to work for you again.

To ensure no politician can take you for granted, I believe in introducing proportional representation by the Single Transferable Vote for all elections. This is a system that is used in both parliaments on the island of Ireland where votes rank candidates in order of preference making this a very proportional system, and it encourages consensus as parties are encouraged to try and be ranked highly by other parties’ voters.

Rest assured this is something I believe passionately about so I will continue to raise this in parliament and pressure the government into changing the way we do democracy.