CROYDON COMMENTARY: One month on from Croydon’s local elections, PETER UNDERWOOD, pictured right, takes another look at our electoral system
There is a growing consensus that FPTP, the first-past-the-post system we use for Westminster and local council elections, needs to be replaced.
No one with any credibility would claim it makes sense to carry on using it in our multi-party system.
The FPTP system produces distorted and undemocratic results, and last month’s elections have given us plenty of examples. In Milton Keynes, the Liberal Democrats came fourth in vote share but became the biggest party. In Birmingham, Greens got the most votes, but Reform got the most councillors.
Here in Croydon, the Conservatives got more votes than Labour but ended up with fewer councillors, and both parties got far more council seats than their vote share deserved.
I’ve written before on why Croydon needs more and better democracy and the latest results make that even clearer.
The new map of Croydon: but does it reflect how people voted?n
Giving all the power to a Mayor who is supported only by 30% of the people who bothered to vote is clear stupidity, and I hope we can all come together to get rid of the mayoral system when the time comes.
At councillor level, the current system has also produced a result that is completely undemocratic and doesn’t represent what the people of Croydon want. A system based on Proportional Representation, where the number of councillors elected matches the votes each party receives would look very different.
While a “pure” PR system would be the fairest and most democratic way of deciding who gets elected, some people still like having a representative for their local area. Some have also pointed out that adding up all of the votes across a whole council or country would also disadvantage independent candidates, who may only have a particular link to just one area.
These are valid points, but they aren’t good arguments for sticking with the current system. Especially as we already use a type of PR election system that allows for local connections and makes space for independents to stand.
In elections for the Welsh Senedd, the Scottish Assembly and the London Assembly, we used what’s known as a “closed proportional list system”. In Wales the country is divided into a number of regions and each of them elects members of the Senedd. Each voter in that region votes for the party (or independent) that that they want elected.
The allocation of seats in the Senedd, Scottish government, and the list members of the London Assembly is made using the D’Hondt system which is also used in many other countries across the world.
So, what might this look like in Croydon?
As an experiment, I added together pairs of wards in Croydon to create 14 “regions” that elect four, or five, or six councillors. These regions match quite well with the local areas in Croydon: so you would have one region for New Addington, one for Coulsdon, one for Shirley, and so on.
I then added up the votes for each party in that region from the recent councillor elections and divided it by the number of candidates the party stood in that region to give the equivalent of a party vote. This gives a fairer estimate for parties that did not stand a full 70 candidates across the entire borough, and the independents.
The results are very interesting:
The first point is that while using this regional system doesn’t produce exactly the same result as a purely proportional system, it is far closer than the distorted FPTP result we currently have.
The old pattern of Labour coming first in the north of Croydon and the Conservatives coming first in the south of the borough is still evident, but the regional result shows that in reality, there is a much greater diversity amongst voters. Whichever region you live in, you would have a choice of councillors to go to, rather than being faced with just one party as happens in most wards currently.
When you look at the calculations below these results, it also becomes clear how close some of these races were. For example, if the Greens had got only 20 more votes in Sanderstead and Kenley, then they would have got the fifth Councillor there instead of the Conservatives. When election races get this close, it means that parties work far harder for your vote and so the people of Croydon would probably get a much better service from their councillors, wherever they lived.
The case is clear that we need to ditch the FPTP system and this experiment shows that a regional type PR system for local councils would produce not only a fairer system but also one that works far better for residents. I believe the same would apply if we used a similar region system for electing our MPs as well.
And this isn’t all just wild speculation. Reform Ltd, the LibDems, the Green Party, SNP, and Plaid Cymru have all argued for more proportional voting systems. Recently, more than 60 Labour MPs signed up to call for a national commission on electoral reform, and the biggest unions also now support a change.
There are also growing calls with the Conservative Party to get rid of the awful FPTP system.
If you want to join that call, then you should write to your MP and ask them why we haven’t changed to a fairer system – feel free to include a link to this article.
You can also find out more information and join the campaigns through either the Electoral Reform Society or Make Votes Matter.
- Peter Underwood was the Green Party’s candidate for Mayor of Croydon, who polled almost 20,000 votes and finished third, while also missing out on being elected as a councillor in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale, where he again finished third. According to Underwood’s sums above, he would have become a councillor under his regional PR system
- Anyone can write a Croydon Commentary, a platform for our readers to offer their personal views and experiences about what matters to them in and around our corner of south London. To submit an article for consideration for publication, email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention
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Difficult to argue with this. Who wouldn’t want elections that better reflect what people vote for? We no longer live in a two-party system. The old loyalties have broken down. If we stick to FPTP we risk an extremist government taking power with twenty-something percent of the vote.
How much of the vote did the Labour party get in the last election, and are they extremist?
Is an extremist someone who raises Council Tax by 33%, closes libraries, sacks lollipop patrols and hikes their own wages?
Interesting, but the implication throughout is that the electoral system is designed to represent the will of the people. Well, up to a point it is, but only generally: we vote for the direction we want to country to go in, as flagshipped by a political party.
The first-past-the-post system is not intended to be entirely representative of everyone’s views, its main function is to provide stable government. The thing we need most from an election is not a representation of all our views in a council or parliament, but a clear majority.
On a related, but separate matter: the party list system, whether in a ‘pure’ form like the elections to the European parliament in which we used to participate, or the d’Honte system, gives far too much power to the political parties. Basically it is a licence for the parties to put compliant yes-people on a list, with loyalty to the party as the highest qualification, regardless of their actual abilities or integrity. At least with the constituency (or ward) system the public get a chance to vote for an individual who (particularly in the case of local councillors) they have every opportunity to get to know.
The idea that it is only a clear majority that can produce stability is illusory. Scotland and many other European countries have had reasonably successful coalition governments. Even our last coalition government, although it did many things I disagreed with, probably ensured a few less mistakes were made. Indeed it was only when the Tories had the overall majority that so many more catastrophic errors occurred.
Party lists seem to be just about the worst form of PR. They share a lot of the same bad outcomes as FPTP, by allowing parties to select the list order and effectively decide who a large number of the successful candidates will be before the polls even open.
By contrast, the single transferable vote would allow voters to decide who would represent them best and give them the ability to vote out people who weren’t doing the job well. It could be applied to the existing wards, or better still to the slightly larger regions that Peter suggests. Wouldn’t solve the problem of Peter’s name being a long way down the ballot paper, but you can’t fix everything.
The DUTCH system for their parliamentary treats the entire country as one constituency and every candidate is listed on the ballot paper.
The elector has one vote and can either just tick the box for the party leader (who has #1 position on the party list) or can preference another candidate. Those individual candidate votes are still counted and if they reach a specific threshold of votes they can be elected above a fellow party candidate being elected on the seat allocation for the party based on the national results.
In AUSTRALIA for their Senate elections you can vote above the line where you are basically agreeing to the party list order. Or you can vote below the line where you can vote for individual candidates within the party lists. As you have to preference a certain number of candidates you can vote how you like across all candidates.
Most voters vote above the line because at the end of the day it’s quicker to complete the ballot paper.
So it’s possible to have PR elections with party lists that the parties don’t have complete control over. But remember all the candidates for each party will be vetted by the party.
The whole point of a representative democracy is that the elected members represent the views of the voters – if they aren’t doing that, who are they representing and what right do they have to govern? Giving all the power to a minority group isn’t stability, it’s dictatorship.
Plenty of countries all over the world manage to have stable governments while using a proportional election system. They have just learned that mature politics is about dealing with people you might not agree with and looking for areas of consensus rather than just focusing on trying to ‘win’ in the areas where you disagree.
On the party list system, it depends how democratic your party is. When I have stood for the London Assembly list and the European Parliament list in the Green Party it was members who voted to decide who was on that list, not the national Party. If you don’t like a party just appointing candidates nationally then you need to change that party or join one that is more democratic.
Stability? We’ve had 6 Prime Ministers in 20 years and two governments that were either coalitions or dependent on supply and demand agreements. As in the 30s and 70s financial instabilities have led to political instabilities that no voting system can glue back together. When we have had majority governments they’ve frequently been unable to get along with themselves and imploded when implementing their extreme visions that then unfortunately collided with the more pertinent and concrete aspects of life. There have been so many Conservative defrenestrations that Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee became a minor celebrity. People aren’t happy and they can’t be brainwashed any longer into voting for one of the two main parties with asinine slogans like “it’s a two horse race” or “only we can win here”. Whether or not we ever move to PR … the political landscape continues to fracture… The days of the two party system are long gone. People vote for who or what they believe in these days which is as it should be. And as for knowing your MP … It took till 2023 for Geraint “Someone had to do the most work. I’m proud it was me” Davies to be suspended by the Labour Party. Personally I was shocked to my core to discover that he many not have been the perfect gentleman.
We haven’t changed to a fairer system because the idea was defeated by 68% of the electorate in the 2011 national referendum on a turnout of 42%. It worries me that I cannot remember which way I voted.
Labour straddled the fence on that one, with the Tories and DUP firmly against. They hate democracy and only want power
I voted no. Not because I didn’t support PR but because I didn’t support AV as the method as it’s not a proportional system. You can still end up with parties earning a % of seats that still exceeds their % of the vote.
Completely agree of the need for permanent change for all elections. My understanding is that the 2030 council/Mayoral election will go back to a STV system, the same as 2022.
Labour has been in government since 2024. They had an opportunity to revert to STV in time for the 2026 local elections. They did not. Under STV, the likelihood is that the outcome of the 2026 Croydon mayoral election will have been different.
It required an Act of Parliament to put it back in place for Mayoral Elections in order to repeal the Tory legislation that turned Mayoral elections in to FPTP that repealed earlier legislation that required the SV method.
The Act that enabled it wasn’t passed until weeks before the election.
Yes they made a decision not to do it earlier but a lot of people would say that issues such as employment rights and renters rights and planning reform were more important.
The 2022 Mayoral election allowed for first and second preference voting. This method was subsequently abolished
I completely agree with Peter that we need more representative local councils and national government. At least with such a system people would fell that their vote had more value and it might begin to stem the huge disillusion that many of the public feel about our current politicians and political system. In order to promote the idea more locally I have started a petition, asking Mr Perry to share some of his cabinet posts with other parties. I am not naive enough to believe that he will accede to this request, but sometimes if one feels that something is very unjust, it helps to start a conversation. If I can summon up a thousand signatures, Mr Perry might at least have to try and justify in the Council Chamber why he and his party should have so much control and power over our borough when a large majority would prefer him to exit the political arena altogether. If interested in signing, here’s the link – https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/make-croydon-a-more-democratic-borough
Looking at the failures and lies of Labour’s Starmer and Khan….i don’t see Croydon turning red anytime soon. There are no term limits for the Mayor of Croydon, meaning Perry can run for and serve an unlimited number of terms. Meaning, he can keep continuing his bullshit and get away with it as all the other parties are just as useless
Says the guy who lost…
Nobody likes a sore loser.