Electoral Reform

Background information: Mention and link to Best for Britain’s Can’t Wait campaign which highlights the real world cost of our broken electoral system

• Best for Britain is campaigning to fix the UK’s broken electoral system.
• The current unfair and outdated First Past the Post electoral system consistently hands 100% of power to parties who secure a minority of votes. 
• More often than not, this has been the Conservative Party. This system has allowed the Tories to force through policies like austerity and Brexit which have been hugely damaging to the economy and living standards in the UK. 
• First Past the Post rewards concentration of votes rather than the number of votes a party receives and contributes to public disaffection with politics by creating seats where people feel like their votes don’t matter.

Supportive stats and facts

• At the last election:

• The Tories got one seat for every 38,000 votes they received. 
• Labour got one for every 51,000 
• the Greens only got one for securing over 800,000 votes

• If the share of seats matched the share of votes they received, the Conservatives would have only won a majority in 2 of the last 20 elections since 1945 and even Margaret Thatcher would have failed to secure a majority. – (Electoral reform society)
• The UK is the only European country apart from Belarus to use FPTP for national elections. 
• The Tories have been in power for 46 of the last 70 years almost twice as long as Labour