Britain Has Five Parties Now. Its Voting System Was Built for Two

Here’s a number that explains everything wrong with British democracy in 2026: Labour won a historic landslide in July 2024 with 33.7% of the vote – the lowest share for any majority government in British history. Two-thirds of voters didn’t get the government they voted for. And things have only fragmented further since.

Five parties now poll above 10% nationally. Reform UK leads at around 29%. Labour and the Conservatives are locked in a dismal tie near 19% each. The Green Party has surged to roughly 14%. The Lib Dems sit around 12%. Under any proportional system, this would produce a hung parliament, coalition negotiations, and – probably – a government that actually represents something close to what voters want.

Under first-past-the-post? It produces chaos. A More in Common MRP projection from January 2026 gives Reform 381 seats and a majority of 112, despite winning less than a third of the vote. Labour would collapse to 85 seats – its worst result since 1910. The Conservatives would get 70. The Greens and Lib Dems, with a combined 26% of the national vote, would share perhaps 40 seats between them.

That’s the system working as designed. The problem is that what it was designed for – two big parties taking turns – hasn’t existed for years.

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The Mismatch Gets Worse Every Election

The 2024 election produced what the Electoral Reform Society called the most disproportionate result in modern British history. The Greens won 6.7% of the vote nationally but just 0.6% of seats. Reform won 14.3% and got five seats – while the Lib Dems, with a lower vote share, won 72.

This isn’t new. But the scale of the distortion is growing because fragmentation is growing. The UK now has the largest “effective number of parties” since World War II, according to Brookings. Elections during the Brexit era masked this trend. Now it’s impossible to ignore.

The old two-party system relied on a simple bargain: you might not love your party, but one of the two big ones would win, so you’d hold your nose and vote for the least bad option. That bargain has collapsed. Voters are now choosing what they actually believe in – and the voting system can’t handle it.

📊 Key Stat: Under the Electoral Reform Society’s STV model, the 2024 result would have given Labour 228 seats (not 412), Reform roughly 100 (not 5), and the Greens around 71 (not 4). That’s a different country. (Source: Electoral Reform Society)

Who Wants Reform – and Who Doesn’t

The strangest coalition in British politics right now is the one demanding proportional representation. The Greens, Lib Dems, Reform UK, SNP, and Plaid Cymru all support it – in their manifestos, not just in speeches. Reform called for a referendum on PR. The Greens and Lib Dems want the Single Transferable Vote. Even Labour’s rank and file back it: party members voted for PR at conference, and a cross-party group of over 150 MPs supports the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections.

A YouGov poll from early 2025 found that 49% of Britons support switching to proportional representation, compared to just 26% who want to keep the current system. Support is highest among Green voters (72%), Reform voters (67%), and Lib Dems (61%). Even a slim majority of Labour voters (53%) back the change.

The holdouts? Labour’s leadership and the Conservative Party. Labour won its landslide under FPTP and isn’t keen to give up the system that delivered it. The Conservatives have historically benefited from FPTP and formally oppose any change. Kemi Badenoch’s party reiterated its commitment to the current system in its 2024 manifesto.

But here’s the thing: both parties are now being punished by the system they defend. Labour is hemorrhaging votes to the Greens and Lib Dems – votes that under FPTP mostly turn into nothing. The Conservatives are being eaten alive by Reform – and under FPTP, that vote-splitting could wipe them out entirely. The two parties clinging to the old system are the two parties the old system is destroying.

The Parliamentary Push

In December 2024, for the first time in history, the House of Commons voted in favour of a bill to introduce proportional representation for general and local elections. The Elections (Proportional Representation) Bill passed its first reading and is scheduled for a second reading in 2026.

It’s a Private Member’s Bill, which means it’s unlikely to become law without government support. And Starmer’s government isn’t offering that. But the symbolic significance matters: a majority of MPs voted for the principle that the voting system is broken.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections – backed by over 150 MPs – has proposed an independent National Commission on Electoral Reform. The idea is to take the question out of partisan politics and let experts and citizens design a new system. Wales is already ahead: the 2026 Senedd election will use full proportional representation for the first time.

Meanwhile, Labour has quietly taken one step forward: restoring the supplementary vote system for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner elections, reversing the Conservatives’ 2022 switch back to FPTP. It’s not proportional representation, but it signals that even the current government recognises the status quo is creaking.

Five parties are polling above 10%. The voting system was designed for two. Something has to give – and increasingly, voters think it should be the system, not their choices.

The Argument Against

Defenders of first-past-the-post have a case, and it’s not frivolous. FPTP tends to produce decisive results. One party wins, governs, and gets held accountable at the next election. Proportional systems often lead to coalitions, which can mean backroom deals, policy compromises, and governments that nobody specifically voted for.

There’s also the local link: every constituency has one MP who is directly accountable to voters. Under many PR systems, that connection weakens or disappears.

And there’s the practical problem: Labour has a huge majority in parliament right now. Asking it to vote for a system that would slash that majority requires a level of institutional selflessness that political parties almost never display. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

Why It Matters Now

The pressure isn’t going away. If anything, the May 2026 elections – local councils across England, plus Scotland and Wales – will intensify it. Under FPTP, parties with 15-20% of the vote can win zero council seats in areas where their support is evenly spread. If the Greens poll at 14% nationally but win barely any council seats, the argument for reform writes itself.

Reform faces the same problem from the other direction. Farage’s party could poll first nationally and still end up with fewer seats than parties half its size, depending on how the vote distributes.

The irony is that the two parties most likely to benefit from PR – Reform and the Greens – sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum. They agree on almost nothing except that the current system is rigged against them. If they ever coordinated on this single issue, the pressure on Labour and the Conservatives would become unbearable.

For now, Britain’s five-party democracy is being forced through a two-party funnel. The result is a parliament that doesn’t look like the country, governments elected by a third of voters, and a growing sense that the system itself is the problem. Whether that sense translates into actual change depends on one thing: whether the parties in power care more about democracy or about staying in power.

Sources: YouGov,Brookings,Focaldata