Burnham’s Disproportionate Misrepresentation
The American Conservative · R · trust 38/100
The prospective prime minister aims to “reform” Britain’s democracy—into a disguised permanent dictatorship.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Proportional representation is an extremely boring thing. Which is precisely why, if you want to destroy British democracy, it is such a very useful tool.
The mind-numbingly tedious voting system is even known by the initialism “PR,” which is ideal for a structure whose main public appeal really is a matter of pure public relations. Marching into Parliament wielding machine-guns is far too obvious a way to stage a coup. Instead, you could more effectively enlist polling companies like YouGov to go out and ask the general public a harmless-sounding, but very carefully phrased, question like the following:
Some people support a change in the British voting system to proportional representation (PR), where the number of MPs a party wins more closely reflects the share of the vote they receive. Other people support retaining our present voting system, first past the post (FPP), which is more likely to give one party an overall majority in the House of Commons and avoid a hung Parliament. Which system would you prefer?
Well, when it’s put like that, how can you possibly say no to PR? YouGov may as well have asked voters whether they would prefer the fair system, where voters get what they vote for, or the unfair system, where they don’t? All PR means is that, if a party gets, say, 36 percent of the vote, they will end up with precisely 36 percent of the nation’s MPs. At first glance, this does indeed sound fair. Examined more closely, it resembles a recipe for oppression.
Significantly, figures show an outright majority of voters for the UK’s main left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem, and Green, want PR, whilst only a plurality of Reform UK and a minority of the Conservatives, do. This is because, whilst superficially more democratic in principle, in truth PR would most likely help deliver a permanent majority for a multiparty left-wing coalition government. All these parties want only slight variations of the exact same open borders, DEI, LGBTQ, Net Zero, tax-and-spend agenda—thus PR would transform the UK into an electoral left dictatorship.
There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament, and, under the current FPP system, the one with most votes in each individual constituency becomes that constituency’s local MP, even if only by a single ballot. If a party gets the magic number of 326 MPs, just one over the halfway mark, they can form a national government.
Generally, however, if you collate the sum total of votes gained by all the other opposition parties put together, it will represent far more votes than the actual new government got; under FPP a winning 30 percent share of national votes may equate to 60 percent of MPs. So, letting that same “winning” government with a 30 percent minority share of the ballot govern is in fact highly undemocratic, and it would be far fairer to let all the 70 percent of losers gang up into one big coalition and rule in their stead, right?
That certainly appears to be the opinion of the UK’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham—who, even more undemocratically, wasn’t really elected by 99.99 percent of the general public into his current role himself. In the run-up to his takeover, the left-wing Labour Party leader has spoken of the alleged need for “a different type of politics,” one based “less [upon] point-scoring, more [upon] problem-solving,” a more consensual, less oppositional way of doing things: less oppositional because, in practice, under PR there will be no meaningful non-leftist opposition remaining to stop him anymore, just to shout impotently from the sidelines.
In the past, Burnham has explicitly called for PR to be implemented, speaking of how alternative voting systems help build “collaboration, partnership and consensus-building”. But what he means by that is the building of an artificial consensus, one which does not in fact exist anywhere outside of the left-wing Westminster Uniparty bubble within which Andy blindly lives. PR will lead to a more “consensual politics” only in the sense that the politicians forming all future governments will fundamentally agree with one another on the core key issues beforehand, and undoing their legislation will be made impossible.
Burnham has called for as many UK parties as possible to fight the next general election upon a commitment to introduce PR for all future plebiscites. Then, he can claim he has a democratic mandate for it, when he knows most ordinary people won’t read said parties’ manifestos, or be aware the PR promise is even being made in them, just as many people were not aware of Labour’s manifesto promise to extend voting rights to 16-year-olds at the last general election— including the majority of 16-year-olds.
There is currently a left-wing cross-party agreement to bring in PR. Why? The ex-Green Party leader Caroline Lucas rather gave the game away:
Andy’s right that PR is a vital way of changing the wider political culture as well as better reflecting the wishes of the electorate [or one particular portion of it, anyway]. And, crucially, it’s also our best way of protecting our political system from a far-right government elected on barely a quarter of the national vote.
By this, Lucas actually means it is a better way of “better reflecting the wishes” of uniparty blobs like herself, forever. On issues like mass immigration, a large majority of the British public want less of it: but uniparty hydra-head offshoots like Labour, the Lib Dems, and Greens all want more of it, so under PR that is what they will get “democratically.” The only plausible party in existence at present who will try and change any of this is Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK—or a “far-right government” who could be “elected on barely a quarter of the national vote,” as Lucas would prefer to call them.
Reform has been leading national…
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