the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Here’s a conundrum. Is the right thing to do, still the right thing to do if it is done for the wrong reason? I’ve been atop the horns of that particular dilemma for a week now. And all because the government is re-introducing previous voting system for electing mayors, reverting back to the Supplementary Vote system (SV) that been used up until 2024.

I know that this shouldn’t bother me. That to most people it’s simply a dull procedural matter of no importance and besides, there are more pressing concerns to worry about. But that is precisely why it bothers me so. I’ve never thought politics dull. Every single aspect of our lives is governed by political choices over which we have no control. Politics even decided whether you were born or not. 

Did your mother have access to contraceptive advice, let alone have access to them? If she chose to have you, how easy might ante-natal services be to access? How well funded would the hospitals maternity unit be? What about healthcare needs after the birth, the follow up checks, vaccinations, mother&baby clubs? Or could she have had a termination if she chose? If not, then how likely was it that she could choose to have the baby adopted. Everything is political, and so the method by which we choose our politicians is about as important as it gets. 

But what is the SV and how does it differ from the first-past- the-post system (FPTP). Well, as the names suggests, FPTP means that whoever wins the most votes wins. As simple as that. There is no threshold, no winning margin required, just coming first is all that matters. SV is a bit more complicated than that.  Its a ranked ballot, meaning that voters have the option to rank candidates. If no candidate gets more than 50.1% in the first round of counting, then the candidate with the lowest amount of votes is eliminated but the second choice of the eliminated candidate voters are then added to the tally. As soon as a candidate reaches the magic 50.1% threshold, thats it. It’s an just incomparably fairer. 

Does this renewed enthusiasm for proportional representation suggest the end is nigh for FPTP?  Is it a long overdue acknowledgement of the fundamental structural unfairness inherent our democracy? A belated acceptance of the notion that every vote should matter? And then if the answer to all of the above is ‘Yes’, then if FPTP isn’t fit for mayoral elections, it follows that it isn’t fit for general elections either.

But that is to forget what happened in 2024. In the space of a month, Reform UK came from basically nowhere to win over 14% of the vote at the 2024 general election. Since then, all political parties have had to adjust to a new political landscape. In the UK, this has been most problematic for the Labour Party. Despite ‘winning’ the 2024 election, it did so with the lowest ever share of the vote in any UK general election, 33% but ending up with 64% of the seats – hence the title of this blog – it was acutely aware that its traditional supporters were not supporting them in the way Labour had always assumed they would. The one word answer is Brexit. For more words, read this blog I posted a few days ago.

So clearly FPTP had its flaws. But canny voters realised that by voting tactically, they could vote in by elections for candidates not on the basis of wanting that candidate to win, but on the basis of wanting someone else not to.This happened in the Caerphilly by election of 2025 and in the Gorton and Denton one in 2026. I wrote blogs on both of them, full of boring statistics to prove my main point. Long story short; that rather than presenting a united front – a defiant coming together of different political tribes in order to defeat a common enemy – which the prevailing narratives were keen to promote, the very opposite was true.

Because in both cases the reason for the winning party’s increase in the share of the vote could be explained almost exactly by the decreases suffered by all three main parties from the last time elections were held there. And it’s not as if lack of voter awareness was to blame for the low turnouts. The media loudly trumpeted the threat that Reform posed.

This to me offers a more plausible explanation as to why there’s been a change back. Even before Andy Capp became Westminster bound, his chances of becoming mayor again were looking slim.  Yes, he got 63% of the vote in that election. But only 32% of the voters bothered to do so. And that was two months before the general election. Before Reform had even been a thing and long before all the various ‘Two-Tier Kier’ headlines that were shorthand for political ineptitude and institutional preferences. Instead of doing the ‘hard yards’ and changing political ideology to better align with with the values of the people the party was set up to represent, much easier to change the voting system expressly to deny them that

The last thing Andy Capp needs is for Manchester to elect a Reform Mayor. That would really rain on his parade.  Its fine for the people to speak, just as long as they’re telling what he wants to hear.