Farage Party Would Have Won 94 Seats Under Proportional Voting System: Report

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaks to the media during a visit to Wyldecrest Sports Coun
Joe Giddens/PA Images via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The British general election result has been described as the most disproportionate in history. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won over four million votes but only secured five seats in the House of Commons, sparking calls for a change to the electoral system.

According to the Electoral Reform Society, this week’s election in the UK saw “the biggest difference ever between how we voted and the MPs that now represent us.”

The campaign group said that under a proportional representation system such as those used in Wales and Scotland, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK would have been awarded 94 seats in the parliament with 14.3 per cent of the vote, compared to just five under the current first-past-the-post system.

The left-wing Labour Party, which won nearly two-thirds of seats despite only winning around one-third of votes, would still have come out as the largest party under the proposed proportional system.

However, rather than having 411 seats in the 650-seat parliament, it would have only been awarded 236, a 175-seat swing. Meanwhile, the Conservatives would have won 157 seats rather than 121, meaning that Sir Keir Starmer’s left-wing party would have been denied its massive majority.

The group advocates for the UK to adopt the Additional Member System (AMS), in which voters could cast ballots for their preferred local candidate as well as a secondary vote for their preferred party. Regional seats are then allocated on a proportional basis to parties after taking into consideration the number of local MPs each party won.

“No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote. Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics and we’re all paying the price. Under a proportional voting system, seats more closely match votes, so we can all have more impact on what happens in Westminster,” the Electoral Reform Society said.

So far, over 209,000 Britons have signed a petition from the Electoral Reform Society demanding that “seats in parliament should match how we vote”.

Nigel Farage told The Telegraph: “The fact that for every Reform MP there are 800,000 voters, and for every Labour MP there are 30,000 voters suggests there is something very badly and fundamentally wrong.

“A Labour Party that gets a third of the national vote and two-thirds of the seats is an absolute joke. These results will reinforce in people’s minds that we need [electoral] reform.”

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