Nobody wants to defend Britain’s voting system any more – but here’s why I will | Gaby Hinsliff
The nail-biting Gorton and Denton byelection has shown the cracks in first past the post. I still don’t think proportional representation is the answerYou can’t always get what you want....
By Gaby Hinsliff · The Guardian Opinion
The nail-biting Gorton and Denton byelection has shown the cracks in first past the post. I still don’t think proportional representation is the answer You can’t always get what you want. And as Mick Jagger didn’t add, sometimes the best you can hope for is just to stop other people getting it. At the time of writing, I don’t yet know exactly how that process has panned out for the people of Gorton and Denton in the kind of byelection Labour should normally win at a canter but which instead became a three-way race with Reform UK and the Greens, and a broader metaphor for the collapse of old certainties. But for anyone chiefly motivated by keeping Reform’s Matt Goodwin out of Manchester, what’s clear is that the baffling process of trying to calculate your vote by second-guessing what everyone else is doing, while worrying that you might accidentally make things worse, did not necessarily feel like democracy at its finest. And unless something big changes, millions of us could be doing something similar at the next general election, in seats across the country where things have changed so much since 2024 that it’s no longer clear who is the “Stop Farage” candidate and who is the wasted vote. Which will lead some to wonder: is this really the best our electoral system can do? Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink? On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party Book tickets here Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...