First Past the Post is a danger to the Union

The First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system, admired and defended by the Conservative and Labour parties alike may yet be what does for the Union. Labour was so protective of it that in drawing up its plan for a Scottish Parliament, it insisted that 73 of the 129 members should come from FPTP constituencies, only 56 by a form of proportional representation (PR), with MSPs elected from Party lists. Labour made this concession to secure the support of the Liberal Democrats and the SNP for its proposed form of devolution. Given Labour’s dominance of Scottish politics – thanks to FPTP – in the 1980s and 90s, no other scheme would have been acceptable.

It was assumed that this would make majority one-party government impossible. Instead there would be either a coalition or a minority government depending on ad hoc support from other parties to get government business done. This was a reasonable assumption, for there were parts of the country where Labour never won seats and indeed there were constituencies where it often came third or even fourth.

The growing popularity of the SNP upset calculations. Unlike Labour, the SNP’s appeal was national, not regional. It could win seats almost everywhere, and do so with no more than 35 per cent of the vote in some constituencies. In 2007 it emerged as the largest party though its first government was still a minority one. In 2011 it achieved the unlikely – winning a majority. That gave Alex Salmond the authority to demand a referendum on independence which David Cameron, Prime Minister in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats granted. The “Yes” for independence side lost that referendum, but its campaign stirred up more enthusiasm than many expected, and in the British General Election the following year the SNP achieved what many would have thought impossible, winning 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

Its support fell away somewhat in the 2016 Scottish Election, and the government Nicola Sturgeon leads is again a minority one, depending on the support of the Greens, though this is seldom remarked on. Then the SNP lost seats to all three unionist parties in Theresa May’s snap General Election of 2017, but regained many of them in the one Boris Johnson called two years later, in part at least because of the support of many who had voted Remain in the EU Referendum.

The SNP therefore does better in Westminster elections than in Scottish ones, and it does so because FPTP exaggerates its support. Given that it is the only nationalist party while the unionist vote is split between the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it is easy to see that FPTP is good for the SNP.

In 2019, the SNP won 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, the Conservatives six, the Liberal Democrats four, and Labour one. It did so on 45 per cent of the vote. There is no point Conservatives or Labour moaning; unlike the Liberal Democrats they have always opposed electoral reform. Yet calculations published by the BBC suggest that PR would have rewarded the SNP’s 45 per cent with 27 seats, the Conservatives’ 25 per cent with 15, Labour’s 18 per cent with 11 and the Lib Dems’ nine per cent with six – a very different picture.

Because the SNP has been in office in Scotland since 2007, though only from 2011 to 2016 with an overall parliamentary majority, and because it does disproportionately well in Westminster elections, it is easy to exaggerate its popular support. In his new book, “How Britain Ends”, the experienced journalist Gavin Esler does just this. Reflecting on Boris Johnson’s victory last December, he speaks of “the antiquated system by which we elect the Westminster Government” and remarks that his Commons majority of 80 “was not won with a majority of votes but with a plurality of 43 per cent.”

Fair enough comment; yet the 43 per cent of votes the Conservatives received is not very different from the SNP’s 45 per cent of Scottish votes in the same election which secured it 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats. It would be fair to say that in the 2020 General Election the Conservatives and Johnson were about as popular in the UK as the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon were in Scotland. Esler’s “antiquated system” favoured the SNP in Scotland just as it favoured the Conservatives in England and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Wales.

The SNP will almost certainly win the Holyrood election in May. It may do well enough to get a majority of the 129 seats there. It will do so because conditions and circumstances favour it. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the three parties opposed to Scottish independence cannot co-operate on any other question and so the Unionist vote is inevitably divided. Yet in the December General Election some 55 per cent voted for Unionist Parties, 45 per cent for the SNP.

When people talk of Saving the Union, there is no talk of electoral reform, no talk of getting rid of an “antiquated system” which distorts opinion to the advantage of – at present – the Conservatives in England, and the SNP in Scotland.

The Labour Party is much to blame. If it had not set its face against Electoral Reform in 1997 and if it had not preserved the First Past the Post system for 73 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, we would have had governments which more fairly represented public opinion, and it is safe to say that in Scotland there would have been no SNP government in a position to demand an independence referendum.