Strengthen UK democracy by restoring Londoners’ second preference votes

As the UK's populist Right cheers on Donald Trump's abuses of power, Labour should repair the damage the Tories did to electors' choice

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In their essay The Path to American Authoritarianism, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way predict that “US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration”, not because the current President will turn the country into a dictatorship, but because he will continue to abuse his power so freely that opposing him will become more difficult and even dangerous.

Building on this, William Cullerne Brown observes that in the US “more and more elections have been tilted through tactics such as making it harder for some people to vote and altering the boundaries of voting districts”.

Note that the very term “gerrymandering” was coined in the US. Note also that Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, leaders of rival right-wing populist parties in the UK, are big admirers of Donald Trump. And further note how Badenoch’s party used its ability when it was last in government to try to make it easier for Conservative candidates to win elections.

As well is giving itself greater control over the officially independent Electoral Commission, a move which even the House of Lords expressed regret about, the Tories’ Elections Act (2022) introduced compulsory Voter ID, widely condemned as a solution to a non-existent problem with the covert purpose of making it more difficult for some groups of Labour-leaning voters to cast ballots.

And the Act also changed the voting system for elections for Police and Crime Commissioners and for directly-elected Mayors, including London’s. This, too, was criticised as a ploy to make it easier for Conservatives to win.

The late Lord Bob Kerslake, a former head of the civil service and ex-permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, said it was “hard to see any other reason for them doing this than perceived electoral advantage”.

The change was from the supplementary vote electoral system (SV), which allowed voters to express both a first and a second preference for Mayor, to the first past the post system (FPTP), which took the second preference away.

The strength of SV was that it gave Londoners the option of voting with both their hearts (giving their first preference to their favourite candidate, even if he or she had little chance of winning)) and their heads (giving their second preference to whichever candidate with a realistic chance of winning they liked better or disliked least).

In London, Labour candidates had routinely received more second preference votes than their Conservative opponents, with fringe Left, Green and Tory-averse Liberal Democrat supporters making the Labour rather than Conservative candidates their second preference. No wonder the Tories, flailing in London, thought a switch to FPTP a bright idea.

But SV also meant that winning candidates – including the only Tory mayoral victor so far, Boris Johnson – had stronger mandates than would have been the case under FPTP, having been backed by a larger and broader percentage of the electorate. The Institute for Government concluded that scrapping SV risked reducing voter choice and damaging the mayoralty.

Despite such objections, though, the Tory government mysteriously claimed that FPTP would strengthen the accountability of Mayors, with the minister responsible adding that it would allow voters to kick out politicians they didn’t want – as if somehow SV didn’t.

Furthermore, the Tories’ own accountability for this change in the law was almost non-existent. It was slotted in to the Bill at the last minute and Kerslake would remark that there was “no consultation whatsoever” about throwing out a voting system that had been used for mayoral elections since the mayoralty began in 2000.

It has been argued that the interference with the Electoral Commission was quite minor, and the now-former Tory MP William Rees-Mogg famously opined that Voter ID had backfired on his party, because it was older and therefore more likely Tory-voting people, rather than the young, who have turned out not to have the documents they needed. Moreover, there were signs in last year’s mayoral election in London that anti-Tory tactical voting compensated for the loss of the SV second preference to some degree.

For all of that, though, the principle at stake remains. Three years ago, the Conservatives weakened UK democracy for their own electoral ends. Their meddling included using underhand means to seek to tilt the outcome of last year’s contest for Mayor of London – and mayoral and PCC elections elsewhere – in their favour.

As Trump persecutes and threatens and Vladimir Putin rubs his hands, there is no better time to repair the Tory damage than now.

PS: Key themes of my London novel Frightgeist, written under my pen name John Vane, seem to be getting more topical by the day. Buy it here or here.