London's Rotten Boroughs

This page highlights the consequences of the continued use of the antiquated First-past-the-post voting system in London’s Borough Council Elections. Alongside is a table summarizing the results of the 2018 round of London Borough Council Elections.

As can be seen, there was no London Borough where the seats awarded matched votes cast. A ten-year-old could see that the maths isn’t correct.

For example, how is it right that in Lewisham, Labour took 100% of the seats for just 52% of the vote, with no opposition to hold it to account?

Continued use of this Victorian museum piece makes about as much sense as using Stephenson’s Rocket to haul trains on the HS2. We need to change the way we vote so that seats won match votes cast.

Victorian Voting: It’s old fashioned, undemocratic and stifles choice.

To elect all London’s Borough councillors, a Victorian voting system known as First-past-the-post is used. This antiquated system wastes many of the votes cast, and produces a distorted result with the remainder. For example, these are the vote totals for Islington Borough in 2018:-

Labour took every single seat in every ward in Islington with the exception of one in Highbury East. Labour’s total consolidated vote in the Borough represented 57% of the votes cast, so they should rightly have a majority of councillors, but the 43% who voted for other parties should have representation as well and there should be an effective opposition to hold the majority Labour administration to account, not just one solitary Green Councillor!

In addition to providing undemocratic representation, this old-fashioned system discourages voter participation in local politics generally because in many communities, the result is a foregone conclusion. There are councils in England where one party can rule forever without effective opposition to hold the administration to account, breeding complacency, inefficiency and corruption.

STV: The most powerful proportional vote on the Planet.

Proportional representation describes voting systems which apportion seats according to votes. So, if Labour polled 6 out of 10 votes, they would be awarded 6 out of 10 seats. Our current outdated Victorian voting system does not do this.

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the British system of proportional representation. STV allows voters to cast preferences for candidates in multi-member wards, which gives them more choice within and across parties. In the counting, the votes are distributed among the candidates according to the expressed preferences of each individual voter, allowing votes for a no-hoper or those surplus to a candidate’s requirements to be recycled. The way the votes are counted ensures that the corporate will of the ward’s voters is reflected in the result and that seats are awarded in proportion to votes cast. STV is the most powerful vote on the planet and has justifiably been described as “the Supervote”.

STV is used in many parts of the World and a large number of professional bodies and trades unions in the UK use STV for their internal elections. Conservative & Labour Governments have supported its use in Northern Ireland for local council, Assembly and European elections over a 40 year period. In 2007, STV was successfully introduced for local elections in Scotland, and the Welsh Senedd has recently passed legislation that allows local councils in Wales to use it.

So, why can’t Londoners use the Supervote?

To return to Islington, while Victorian Voting distorted representation there with 47 Labour Councillors and 1 Green Councillor, it is estimated that STV would have given residents a more democratic result with 28 Labour, 6 LibDem, 3 Tory, 1 Women’s Alliance & 10 Green Councillors.

Note: The above figures are based on the consolidated stats. published by Andrew Teale's Local Elections Archive Project.