Our voting system for parliamentary and local council elections: First Past the Post - where the winner takes all – is outdated. Designed in an era of Whigs v Tories, and more recently, the Reds v the Blues, it takes no account that in our modern democracy the choice on a ballot paper is rarely binary.

Yet under our archaic voting system anyone who does not support the winning party gets no political representation at all. It pays lip service to democracy and leads to literally millions of voters, at every nationwide election, being completely unrepresented.

More often than not, the winning party in a General Election achieves little over 40% of the vote, and sometimes (such as 2015 and 2005) wins with a little over 35% of the vote. Under First Past the Post, we are therefore nearly always governed by minorities, yet smaller parties with pretty significant votes win little and sometimes no representation, or voice to reflect their voters.

Increasingly numbers of people are not even bothering to vote in General Elections – and who can blame them bothering in this rigged, broken system, where most voters cannot make a significant outcome in the election result?

In the six General Elections since the year 2000, voter turnout has NEVER reached 70%, and the average was a turnout of just 64.7%. As a comparison, in the 16 General Elections 1950-1999, voter turnout NEVER reached as low as 70% with an average turnout of 76.3%.

Based on the electorate at the last General Election, voter turnout in the 21st century, is 5.5 million voters less than it was in the last half of the 20th century – a significant number, as at that last General Election 15.56 million voters didn’t vote. This figure is now more than the 13.97 million who voted for the winning party. The joke “None of the Above” now actually forms the biggest block of voters.

It is time to replace this broken system with Proportional Representation (or PR), so seats match votes and all votes count equally.

UKIP aims to give the electorate this choice in a referendum – so, to either keep the existing system or to replace it with a system of PR. If the electorate opt for change, we will then hold a supplementary referendum to choose which of the types of PR is best suited to be implemented here in the UK.

A fair voting system will ensure that votes count equally, will therefore encourage more to participate in elections and that will mean that those elected in the future have a legitimate mandate that people can respect.



Steve Unwin

Spokesman on Home Affairs, Political Reform and Local Government