Keir Starmer Rejects Call for ‘Fairer Votes’ Despite MPs Voting in Favour of Proportional Representation

by backupJM

14 comments

  1. >Despite this MPs voted by 138 to 136 in favour of a bill brought forward by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney on Tuesday for a fairer voting system, with more Labour MPs who took part in the vote backing PR than opposing it.

    …

    >Lib Dem leader Ed Davey pressed the PM on the issue this Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions, telling Starmer: “The Prime Minister has rightly spoken about the need to restore and rebuild the public’s trust in British politics. We believe a crucial part of that is reforming our electoral system to make it fairer and more proportional, and so do a majority of the British public.

    >“This House voted [on Tuesday] in favour of a bill for electoral reform put forward by the member for Richmond Park,” referring to Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney.

    >“Will the PM find Government time to make available, so we can consider this bill on electoral form and restore the public’s trust in our politics?” Davey added.

    >But PM Keir Starmer replied that proportional representation “is not our policy” and “we won’t be making time for it.”

    It’s an opposition bill so obviously theres no obligation for Starmer to follow through on it, but i thought it was interesting that more Labour MPs voted for it than not, and that it ended up passing (albeit with a reduced cohort of MPs).

  2. Pr is dodgy because it will give minor parties disproportionately more power. That includes populist parties like Reform who will destroy our NHS and public services if they are given half a chance.

    Edit: I’m not sure if the downvotes are my stance on Reform or PR. I was very pro PR until I saw parties like reform gaining power across Europe through PR.

  4. The most obvious open goal on getting his popularity back up and he fucking ignores it…

  5. Very disappointing to see the SNP abstain on this – not sure if there’s any other reason for it, but this is a reserved matter.

  8. Of course Labour don’t support fair votes. They just won a huge majority with 1/3 of the vote.

  9. A party that gets 63.3% of seats from only 33.7% of the vote is never going to support proportional representation.

    Starmer’s issue is that he’s also incredibly short minded, not realising that he didn’t “win” this election through any sort of actual affirmative action, but that the Tories collapsed around him, and split the right-wing vote between them and Reform.

    He’s in for a massive shock when he loses the next election.

  11. Labour and the Conservatives will never vote for proportional representation because it won’t do either party any favours

  12. Lobbying in action.

    Remember, its not the faces and colours of our parties that rule us, it is those that lobby our governments.

  13. Of course he does, the establishment fucking slag that he is.

  14. I remember years ago there was a BBC Lecture called I think something like The Elected Dictatorship. It explained how basically the U.K. democratic system is a myth and all we get to do is elect in a dictatorship who can ignore our wishes and what’s worse they uses get massive majorities with less than 50% of the popular vote. Well here’s a classic example of the outcome Starmer thinks he has a massive mandate when actually he doesn’t.

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