UK

Could electoral reform rein in the right?

SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

A new report from Compass says that proportional representation helps tame the populist right, while first past the post leads to their ideas being adopted wholesale. Mike Phipps considers the arguments.

One of the most potent arguments often used against electoral reform – proportional representation in particular – is that it would allow far right parties like Reform UK, which currently win only a handful of seats under first past the post, to win scores, perhaps hundreds, of seats and wield real influence over the governmental process. A new report from Compass, The Temper Trap: How Proportional Representation Tames the Populist-Right, aims to tackle that argument head-on.

Compromise versus explosion

Across Europe, in countries that use PR, populist right movements have not only surged in support but have entered government. Britain under first past the post has been spared this fate. But for the report’s author Stuart Donald, the picture is not so clearcut. He believes that proportionality, with its insistence on  political compromise, moderates populist right party participation in coalition governments – and subverts their ability to posture as anti-establishment outsiders.

“PR tempers populist voices, forcing compromise and limiting damage,” he argues. “By repressing their representation, FPTP acts like a pressure cooker, generating resentment that then erupts in massive political ruptures away from the two-party duopoly.”

Worse, we now face the prospect, if polls are accurate, of a Reform UK majority in Parliament based on just a third of the votes cast. But even if that does not happen, considerable damage has already been done.

The UK, suggests Donald, “has delivered some of the most extreme policy outcomes in Europe on immigration, asylum, EU relations, social justice and climate – not through fringe parties, but via its ‘centre-right’, the Conservative Party. Despite never having a parliamentary majority, Reform UK and its spiritual predecessor UKIP have transformed the political landscape under FPTP. They never needed seats to have power. Instead, the last 15 years have shown how they have forced the Conservatives, and now Labour, to continually bank to the right for fear they lose vote share.”

He adds: “The electoral dynamics of FPTP appear to compel Labour in the same direction, offering a tepid, triangulated version of Tory and Reform policies not out of conviction but out of political paranoia.”

The Netherlands provides the core case study in Donald’s report. In 2023, Geert Wilders’ PVV (Party for Freedom) won the most votes but had to surrender its most extreme policies to enter government. Eventually the coalition collapsed when it refused further compromise. Finland, Austria, and Sweden tell a similar story.  

“Even in Italy, where Populist-Right voices are in the majority in cabinet, PR has slowed and softened their agenda,” Donald contends. “But in the UK, supposedly protected from extreme politics by their lack of representation, FPTP has delivered a hard Brexit, Europe’s most brutal deportation policy, rampant austerity, reckless deregulation, and some of the most aggressive net zero rollbacks enacted in Europe to date – all at the hands of a party that is still labelled both by itself and the UK political establishment as a ‘centre-right’, mainstream voice. Arguably too much of this agenda has continued under a centre-left Labour government.”

Is this really so?

As a supporter of proportional representation, I wanted to be persuaded by these arguments. But they are not flawless. PR in the countries Donald cites may have tempered the extremism of populist right parties but it has also given them legitimacy. It could further be argued that it was PR elections to the European Parliament that gave legitimacy to UKIP – Farage’s original incarnation – and more importantly, financial resources too.

Equally, while Donald is right to say that first past the post discourages moderation and produces more extreme choices, that also makes it harder for the populist right to claim that the entire political establishment is identical – a key feature of their campaign against consensus politics across Europe.

Donald’s argument that FPTP has forced the Conservatives – and now Labour – to adopt the agenda of the populist right is also problematic. While it is indisputable that this drift has happened, it is by no means clear that this is a consequence of FPTP. New Labour’s lurch to the right in the 1990s was a political choice. It was not the case that a more left wing programme would have risked political defeat, as Donald suggests. In reality, public opinion was consistently to the left of what Tony Blair was offering in 1997.

As I have previously pointed out: “Over 70% of voters in May 1997 wanted an income tax increase to fund better education and public services. 74% wanted no further privatisations. 58% wanted wealth redistribution. Blair would disappoint on all these fronts.”

Similarly, the Tory lurch rightwards this century was a political choice, starting with the Cameron government’s lazy miscalculation that it could win a referendum on continued EU membership, and continuing through the May-Johnson years. The Tories’ need to move rightwards because of the rise of UKIP on their right can be overstated: Farage’s party picked up only one seat in the 2015 general election.

Equally, the continued rightward trajectory of the Conservative Party was not guaranteed  in advance.  The quest for an ever-harder Brexit  was less about UKIP calling the shots and more to do with Boris Johnson’s determination to seize the Tory Party leadership.

The limits of this ‘moving right show’ were underlined by the disastrous Truss government and the decisive rejection of the Tories at the 2024 general election. Reform UK;s surge was important – but their continued popularity has much to do with the complete failure of the Starmer government to map out a popular and engaging vision of reconstruction. This vacuum has allowed the nationalist right to dominate the headlines.

If Labour is now borrowing from the populist right playbook in the hope of puncturing Farage’s popularity, that too is a political choice – and a doomed one. Anti-migrant exclusionary nationalist ideas will not be defeated by adopting them but by challenging the entire narrative that drives them.

This helps explain why Labour is doing so poorly in the polls, just fifteen months into its term. On key economic issues, like public ownership, austerity and welfare, the public is to the left of Starmer – in fact, more aligned with current Green Party and Your Party thinking. But to move in this direction would be unthinkable to the likes of Morgan McSweeney and others around Starmer, whose primary political passion is a desire to smash any remnants of Corbynite thinking – even if the consequences are electorally toxic. And this too is a conscious political choice, not some inevitable outgrowth of first past the post.

The fact that Donald’s argument falls short does not exonerate our current voting system. Proportional representation is fairer on many counts, but for socialists, a central question must be agency and engagement. A closed party list system, even if strictly proportional, would be useless from this standpoint, if it allowed party leaders to appoint their hardcore loyalists to all the most winnable positions. That would be no better than a first past the post system where democratic selection is increasingly supplanted by the parachuting into safe seats of leadership favourites, as is increasingly the case.

We need a proportional system with a constituency link which not only improves democratic accountability for voters but also enhances democratic selection of candidates too. Open primaries should be considered, alongside other reforms to improve participation and engagement.

Ultimately, you cannot leave the business of dealing with the far right to any electoral system. If you want to defeat them, you have to defeat their ideas and persuade people not to vote for them. There are many good reasons to have PR, but this report’s argument that a fairer voting system can neutralise the populist right – at the price of giving them legitimacy – is not persuasive.

The Temper Trap: How Proportional Representation Tames the Populist-Right is available here, by Stuart Donald, published by Compass is available here.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.