FPTP has led to a narrow, and unrepresentative politics, poorly conducted elections with low voter participation, and increasingly poor decision making.

Currently hundreds of constituencies, and even vast regions of the country are dominated by one party, despite their opponents recording substantial numbers of votes. FPTP is a major factor in making people remote from politics and less and less participating in our broken electoral system.

Despite a decline in the combined vote-share of Labour and the Conservatives, the results of our General Elections have become even more unrepresentative. In 2015 the UK Independence Party national vote-share was up by 10 percentage points to a total of 3.9 million votes but resulted in just holding one seat. The greens won more than a million votes but also held one seat.

The SNP, on the other hand, won less than 1.5 million votes winning 56 seats – so their impressive 50% of the votes won them an unjustifiable 90% of the seats in Scotland. In Southwest England the result was even more unrepresentative. The Conservatives, with 46.5% vote-share won almost 93% of the seats. In Northeast England Labour, with a 46.9% vote-share won 90% of the seats.

Our system of elections to the House of Commons is so broken it cares little about proportions and even less about representation.

The time has come for real, genuine, radical reform for elections to the House of Commons. The UK Independence Party agrees with the cross-party campaigns for Proportional Representation (PR) in the House of Commons – including by Makes Votes Matter and the Electoral Reform Society. Only if votes are made to count will people to be incentivised to take elections seriously and actually bother to vote.

Steve Unwin

UK Independence Party Spokesman for Home Affairs, Political Reform and Local Government