Voters Left Waiting as Labour MPs Cool on Burnham's Reform Plan

When Andy Burnham stood before Labour activists in Liverpool last month and promised a new national commission on electoral reform, he was answering a call many of his own party’s members had made for years. But his colleagues in Parliament have responded far more coolly, and the people caught in the middle are the voters whose voices the proposed changes are meant to amplify.

Delivering his first conference speech as Prime Minister, Burnham told the activists: “In past years, you have voted twice to support electoral reform. I hear you, I agree with you, and today I am announcing a new national commission on electoral reform.” He went further, pledging: “We will contest the next election with a manifesto commitment to change the electoral system so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.”

For the ordinary members and campaigners who have long argued that the current system leaves many voters effectively unheard, that pledge carries real weight. Around 100 Labour MPs had backed a campaign for a national commission before Burnham committed to one in Liverpool, and a majority of Labour members support replacing first-past-the-post with proportional representation, a shift Burnham himself has championed for years.

The case feels urgent to those campaigners. Earlier this year, more than 50 academics wrote to the Labour government warning that first-past-the-post risked producing distorted results on an unprecedented scale, with growing numbers of candidates elected on low vote shares. “The collision of a multi-party electorate with a voting system designed for just two parties is creating new risks for Britain,” they said in a letter reported by PoliticsHome, whose broader coverage of the Prime Minister’s resistance among his own MPs can be found at https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/burnham-faces-labour-mp-resistance-electoral-reform.

Inside the Parliamentary Labour Party, though, the picture is far less united. PoliticsHome understands that Louise Haigh, the Deputy Prime Minister and a close ally of Burnham, has concerns about moving to proportional representation. Other Cabinet members have also voiced reservations about abandoning the system under which Labour, led by Keir Starmer, won its landslide majority in 2024.

Some of that scepticism runs deep. In 2022, Angela Rayner, now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, described herself as a “first-past-the-post girl” who was “yet to be convinced by PR”. Speaking on The News Agents podcast, she warned it could hand seats in the House of Commons to extremist parties such as the British National Party. John Healey, now Chancellor, campaigned against the alternative vote in the 2011 referendum, calling the system “perverse”. In a piece for The Independent he wrote: “Immediately after an election the parties would be scrambling to do coalition deals. They would feel free to jettison policies that had been firm pledges only a week earlier. This isn’t the new type of politics people have been calling for. They want politics that treats them with respect, not as fools.” Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, took the opposite side in that same referendum, while Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh and Communities Minister Florence Eshalomi both signed this year’s campaign for a commission.

Neal Lawson, director of the pressure group Compass and co-founder of the new Labour group Mainstream, believes some senior ministers will try to block change. “Some people in the Cabinet who are very opposed to it, who are old-school tribal, adversarial Labour, and they will try and do whatever they can to try and kick PR into the long grass,” he told PoliticsHome. Opponents within the party argue that proportional representation would weaken Labour’s electoral position, and the politics of coalition only sharpen their doubts. Burnham has refused to work with the Green Party while its conference motion describing zionism as racism remains in place, complicating any hung Parliament arithmetic. One Labour MP who supports scrapping first-past-the-post confided that “the prospect of having to rely on Ed Davey, or even worse the Greens, to get stuff through almost makes me physically sick”.

Charlie Buckley, senior research associate at More In Common, said building a workable majority “looks even more complicated” under proportional representation. “The Greens would go from a handful of MPs to a sizable bloc, while Restore Britain would arrive in Parliament in numbers, potentially giving these smaller parties a kingmaker role in the formation of coalitions,” he told PoliticsHome. Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, said witnessing proportional representation in Wales strengthened his opposition. “I saw on the doorstep ahead of the Welsh elections how democratic accountability can be lost under proportional representation and the broken link between the electorate and the representative. We should think very carefully about introducing any legislation nationally on electoral reform,” he told PoliticsHome.

Lawson, though, insists the mood has moved. “You’ve got the person at the top who’s instinctively and intrinsically pro-proportional representation, and you’ve got the whole body of the membership, and now the trade unions, and a big chunk of the PLP,” he said. “The overwhelming mood in the Labour Party is for PR.”

Whether that mood can overcome the doubts of Burnham’s own Cabinet, and deliver the commission’s promised changes to the voters it is meant to serve, remains the open question hanging over Liverpool’s pledge.