The general election showed why we need to ditch first past the post - Andy Brown

Is it really good for the country to have one political party holding such a secure majority in Parliament that it can ignore any nuanced opposition that seeks to improve its legislation or limit any actions?

We’ve always been told that big majorities result in strong and stable governments. All that happened when Boris Johnson won a dominating majority of seats is that his party fell to squabbling over who controlled that majority.

Governments have a dangerous tendency to interpret gaining power in Westminster as a huge public endorsement for their ideas. In reality, the public often votes against the last lot and has remarkably little enthusiasm for the victors. The arrogance that winning great power can induce is rarely good for the country.

Several popular political parties have very low representation in return for getting a lot of votes. In my view the Reform Party has some very mistaken ideas about what is good for the country – Nigel Farage did, after all, say that the Liz Truss budget was the best ever and stood on a platform of repeating the daft experiment of unfunded tax cuts. Nevertheless, his party won 14.3 per cent of the votes. They got less than 1 per cent of the seats.

My own party, the Greens got squeezed out in many seats by people saying they thought we had the best candidate but weren’t going to vote for us because they thought we couldn’t win and so were voting tactically. Despite that we won just short of two million votes. That earned us only four MPs which means it took half a million votes for each one whereas it took under 24,000 votes for each Labour MP.

What does it do for cynicism when people vote for a party and see little evidence of their vote being represented in Parliament? What does it do for cynicism when people feel they cannot vote for the candidate they like because a first past the post system will make that vote only symbolic not fully powerful?

The Labour Party may have won a huge Parliamentary majority but they haven’t won hearts and minds and their total vote actually declined. If Keir Starmer feels he has mass public endorsement for his agenda then he is mathematically wrong.

Few Labour members who wanted a more radical agenda were allowed to stand. So, he has huge power with limited internal opposition. What will he do with that power?

One massive positive about the result is that the outcome has been so starkly unfair that it must in time lead to the death of first past the post.

That leads to the obvious question of what needs to go in its place. In my view the only good thing about our current system is that we have a clear link to a local area. People know who their MP is and can engage directly with a local voice. It would be a serious mistake to lose that.

It is, however, entirely possible to produce a much fairer system without losing that local connection. Simply allowing people to list the candidates in order of preference and have their second choice counted if the first failed would enable people to vote for the best candidate rather than their calculation of the more likely winner. That would help smaller parties significantly.

If we want a more fully proportional system, then all that is necessary is to include a top up of 100 MPs that are allocated to parties that deserved better representation on the national vote. Scotland already uses a similar system.

There is also an obvious opportunity to replace the appointed House of Lords with people elected on the basis of entirely proportional representation who hold powers to scrutinise and improve legislation but not to block it entirely. It is way past time to move beyond a second chamber appointed on the basis of political patronage instead of votes.

It is relatively easy to come up with ways of keeping our locally elected MPs and making the system a lot fairer. What is hard is to come up with an electoral system which is more unfair or helps to promote the idea that your vote makes no difference more comprehensively.

At the moment most of the public shows more enthusiasm for voting to select the winners of a reality TV show than it does for electing the leader of the nation. If we want that to end we need electoral reform. And we need it quickly.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.