The ONLY Way Labour Can Still STOP REFORM! (Proportional Representation)

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]There is only one way left for Labor to stop reform and it isn't by tacking further to the right. It isn't even by making Andy Burnham prime minister. And it certainly isn't by returning Gordon Brown. The only way that Labor can beat reform is to introduce something that they've been reluctant to introduce for a very, very long time. Proportional representation. For those of you who don't know, the UK has a different system of electing its parliamentary members when compared to most of Europe.

[00:00:33]Whereas Europe has a proportional system, meaning that depending on vote share, everyone gets represented in their constituencies. In the UK, the way it works is that the party and the candidate with the most votes will win that seat and the rest of the parties, no matter how well they do, get zilch.

[00:00:53]What this effectively means is that you can have a party such as Labor at the last election winning a massive majority of the seats on only 30% of the vote.

[00:01:03]Meanwhile, you had the insurgent reform party that even though I don't like them, got about 3 million votes and ended up with just four seats. And this is only set to get worse as now we are entering an age of political fragmentation inside UK politics with the emergence of upstart parties like Reform UK and the Greens challenging the old duopoly alongside the Lib Dems and others. UK politics is becoming so fragmented but is still basically reliant upon a system that was designed for two party dominance. And this problem becomes increasingly clear when you plug in the latest local council results into a general election context.

[00:01:49]Now, to bear in mind, this is not completely scientific. I just took the numbers, dumped them into an election calculator, and saw what it spat out.

[00:01:58]But the results are pretty shocking, which is why I'm making this video to advocate it's time for proportional representation or at least some kind of electoral reform. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on it, but I just know that these results would be disastrous.

[00:02:14]Okay, but let's get into it. Also, feel free to subscribe if you're new. We do regular politics videos here on the channel. We've just hit 2,000 subscribers. I'd love to hit 3,000. Can we do it? We've been growing hugely at the moment. So, thank you all so much.

[00:02:26]But let's dive right in. So, as I said, I plugged in all the percentages from the locals while including where the nationalist parties, the S&P and Pied are in terms of um their current UK polling because obviously the local elections were only in England. Uh and what we can see is that Labour on 17% of the vote would get 131 seats. Reform would end up being the largest party on 26% of the vote uh getting 283 seats.

[00:02:56]far and away the largest party by over 150 seats. The Lib Dems would gain 14 seats on 16% of the vote, taking their total up to 86. The Conservatives on 17%, same as Labor, would go down 60 seats to 61 seats, bearing in mind they got a percentage more than the Lib Dems, and yet would still end up with less seats. But it gets worse. Obviously, the SNP would make gains from their historic poor performance in the 2024 general election going up to about 39 seats, up 30 in Westminster, others 15. But the big one here for me is the green result where despite coming second in terms of the vote share, they would come sixth in terms of seats. I don't know about you, but that doesn't look particularly democratic to me. Now, what would likely happen in this scenario is that it's incredibly likely that reform and the conservatives would form some sort of coalition government out of the remains because I think they would have enough between the two of them. But this would be disastrous. What you would have is a party getting a huge amount of the seats based on just a quarter of the vote and everyone else basically being on the same number of votes percentage-wise but having vastly different seat outcomes.

[00:04:23]This would significantly disenfranchise the UK public even further. And it kind of creates like if you look at this map out of context, it looks like reform are massively ahead and you know they're unstoppable and they are going to win every election from now until the end of time. But if you actually look at the vote share, not so. But the problem is our system is designed for two-party politics and reform are basically becoming the preeminent national party. Somewhat interestingly, reform did used to want proportional representation. Following their result in the 2024 general election, they said that we need proportional representation in order to get a fair representation in parliament.

[00:05:15]You don't hear them talking about that anymore. And that's because it's likely that they could very well win the next election. Similarly with Labor, they have always generally been proportional representation right up until the moment where they get into power and suddenly they don't want to do it anymore.

[00:05:31]>> The proportional representation is not our policy. We won't be making time for it. And I just gently say to him, he didn't do too badly under the system as it is. But the reality for Labor is if they don't do it, they are going to be out of power for the foreseeable future.

[00:05:47]Now, you might be wondering, okay, well, what would the result look like under a proportional system? And I wondered this too. So, I asked on Twitter and someone was basically telling me how it would look. Uh, so thank you to James over over on Twitter, Horuskull, who did uh the the calculations for me. So under a hypothetical perfectly proportional system, obviously bearing in mind, you know, there's going to be more variables to this, but if we purely were to look at it from that perspective, reform would get 164 seats. So still the largest party, but a lot less of a of a gap. The Greens would get 114 seats.

[00:06:25]That's over 100 more than what they would get in the previous calculation.

[00:06:30]The Conservatives would get 107. Labour would also get 107 which makes sense because they're on about the same amount of vote share. The Lib Dems would get 101 gaining actually even more than they would out of the first part of the post system. So it actually would benefit them as well and other so the SNP and uh ply Camry would get 39 and then you've of course got the Northern Irish parties. Any system with local representation is not going to be perfectly proportional though. So yeah, worth considering that there's caveats to that and everything. But if we're just to look at it purely as what a proportional result would look like under this system, that's what it would look like. And I don't know about you, but that looks a hell of a lot more proportional to what people actually voted for than this does. This is not reflective of this. This is a lot more reflective of this. Now, you might say that this would be difficult to form a government out of, to which I would agree. The only way it could realistically happen would be some sort of green labor libdem and potentially SNP pied coalition. Basically a coalition of the left-wing parties, but that is more reflective of British voting habits than you might think.

[00:07:45]Britain often gets basically presented as a pretty rightward country when the reality is that's not true. The farright vote encapsulated by reform accounts for 26%. The non-farright vote represents 74%. The right-wing vote represents 43% overall, including the conservatives, of course, the non-rightwing vote includes 57%. Now, of course, you can debate as to whether current Labor are leftwing or not, but the point is generally speaking, broadly speaking, if we're purely to look at it as the most basic left and right block, the left block has a significant majority over the right block, which would not once again be reflected in our poll here, where a right-wing government would carine into parliament.

[00:08:38]despite most of the country being against it. Which is why I'm saying, Kia, I know you say you don't want to do proportional representation anymore, but I need you to understand that your party and arguably British democracy is finished unless you do something about this. Our system was designed for two parties. That is not the world we are in anymore. No other European country works like this anymore for good reason. You might say that it will cause chaos having multiple parties form coalitions and maybe that is the case but ultimately that's still more democratic and we've seen in places like France where left-wing parties basically coales together to stop Marie Le Pen's party.

[00:09:26]That's what needs to happen at this election if we have a chance in hell of stopping reform. And that can only be done if the system is more fair and proportionate to what the vote is actually representing. But that's just my thoughts. So, if you did enjoy this video, be to give it a like, subscribe if you're new, and I will see you