Electoral reform could be a gamble too far for Burnham – but so far he’s on a winning streak| Zoe Williams

By Zoe Williams · The Guardian Opinion

Though proportional representation poses risks for Labour, it’s a change that feels necessary for today’s volatile politics A number of people have admitted to tears during Andy Burnham’s Labour party conference speech , and most of them mean when he talked about his father, who died very recently. But then there were a few (not me) who welled up when he announced a commission on electoral reform . It was just the sheer shock of it: that we may finally have a prime minister who will follow through on his own long-held beliefs and remain loyal to his long-term support base, even if it makes him avoidable enemies and, medium-term, destroys Labour’s only-trodden path to victory. It felt a bit like slipping through time, and I couldn’t even tell you to when (definitely not the 1990s). Burnham’s support for proportional representation has always been extremely unusual for a Labour politician. To this day, he ascribes that to his experience of winning an election as mayor of Greater Manchester on a supplementary votes system, where people get to choose a first- and second-preference candidate. He said that campaigning under that system “finally aligned the conversation on the door with what people want from politics, which is about problem-solving first and foremost, not about point-scoring”. He went a bit further this morning, asking Nick Robinson on the Today programme: “Can we really watch a party with less than 30% walk into Downing Street?” Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...