Britain has time to change its voting system before the next election, a position Andy Burnham has long championed. He should use that time.
“There is a piece of history that every defender of first past the post should know. It is the story of exactly how the Nazis rose to power, and it is a story about electoral systems as much as it is about ideology.”
I’m going to explain in no uncertain terms why we need PR. But first, I need to lay out the context for my argument and invoke Godwin’s Law to mention the Nazis. Bear with me, it will all hopefully make sense.
There is a comforting story doing the rounds in Westminster right now. Reform is imploding, the argument goes, so the populist moment is passing. Farage’s psychodrama will burn itself out, the froth will settle, and British politics will return to something recognisable.
I would love to believe that. I don’t.
Because waiting in the wings, ready to catch anyone who leaves Reform disillusioned but not deprogrammed, is Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. And if you think Restore Britain is a fringe curiosity, a group too small and too strange to matter, I would ask you to look at who is funding it and cheering it on. Elon Musk may be their most rich and famous backer, but there are others far more sinister.
Take Miles Routledge, also known online as Lord Miles. He is a self-described Restore Britain donor and activist, the kind of supporter the party is happy to have quietly propping it up. Routledge has criticised Steve Laws, a man who wants to deport millions of people from this country, for being too soft. Too “liberal”, in Routledge’s own words, because Routledge says he has “better solutions”. In this worldview, mass deportation is the moderate position.
It gets worse. In a post last July, Routledge wrote that what gives him joy and hope is the prospect that “by 2039 we’ll have another Hitler to lead another great uprising”.
I am not writing this to shock you for the sake of it. I am writing it because this is what sits underneath the political fringe we keep telling ourselves is manageable. It isn’t fringe forever. It only takes the wrong electoral conditions for it to move from the fringe of politics into the mainstream.
Which brings me to the point I actually want to make.
The system decides who wins, not just what people believe
There is a piece of history that every defender of first past the post should know. It is the story of exactly how the Nazis rose to power, and it is a story about electoral systems as much as it is about ideology.
The Nazi party never won a majority of the vote in a free German election. Their best result came in July 1932, when they took 37.27% of the vote. That is a substantial minority, higher than the vote share our current government secured (34%), but a minority nonetheless. Under Germany’s proportional system, that minority translated into a large but incomplete share of seats in the Reichstag. They could not govern alone, and relied on coalition partners, backroom deals, and eventually a series of catastrophic miscalculations by conservative elites who thought they could control Adolf Hitler. Proportional representation did not save Germany – or the world – from Hitler, but it did deny him a majority via the ballot box.
Lock this in your memory: Nazi party commander Hermann Goering, giving evidence at his own war crimes trial, argued that under the British electoral system, that same 37.27 per cent of the vote would have delivered the Nazis every single seat in the Reichstag.
Every seat. From little more than a third of the vote.
That is not a hypothetical dreamed up by campaigners like me. It is the testimony of one of the architects of the Holocaust, who explained precisely how first past the post concentrates power in the hands of a minority and hands it total control.
Why this matters for Britain, now
I am not saying Reform UK or Restore Britain are the Nazi party, and I am not saying Britain in 2026 is Weimar Germany. History does not repeat itself so neatly, and lazy comparisons do nobody any favours.
What I am saying is that the mechanism Goering identified is not a historical quirk. It is a structural feature of our voting system, and it is one that authoritarian populists understand better than most of their opponents do. First past the post rewards vote efficiency and geographic concentration over broad legitimacy. It can, and has, produced governments with commanding majorities built on a minority of the vote. There is no law of physics that says this always benefits moderate parties. It is entirely agnostic about who it empowers. It simply amplifies whoever is best placed to exploit it. Indeed, at his own press conference resigning as MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage himself poured scorn on electoral reform, saying:
“And just a couple of weeks ago, following the Makerfield by-election, they’ve changed the voting rules for the Manchester Mayoral by-election. They’ve gone away from first past the post again for fear that Reform (UK) might win.”
Restore Britain is positioning itself for Reform UK’s implosion, and men like Routledge are cheering it on because they understand, in their own crude way, what an unearned parliamentary majority could deliver.
Proportional representation does not banish extremism from public life. Obnoxious parties can and do win seats under this system. What PR reliably prevents is total control on the back of partial support. It forces compromise and coalition, exactly the kind of broad-based governing consent that first past the post can simply bypass altogether.
The choice ahead of us
At some point in the next three years the UK will head into another general election under the same voting system that has, time after time, handed disproportionate power to parties most of the country did not vote for. We are doing this at a moment when we can see, in plain sight, an ecosystem of increasingly extreme and hostile actors organising themselves for exactly that kind of unearned breakthrough.
Vigilance cannot just mean watching Reform UK’s psychodrama play out and hoping the moment passes. It has to mean fixing the system that makes moments like this so dangerous in the first place. I’m delighted that Alex Sobel MP’s amendment to the Representation of the People Bill calling for a National Commission on PR has reached more cross-party signatures than any amendment in the Commons since the 2024 General Election.
Britain has time to change its voting system before the next election, a position Andy Burnham has long championed. He should use that time. Because the lesson of 1932 is not that democracy failed. It’s that the electoral system chosen to express that democracy determines whether a minority becomes a governing majority, or remains what it actually is: a minority.
We should not need Hermann Goering to teach us that lesson twice.
*It is worth noting that Reform UK is listed among the signatories who support replacing First Past the Post with a proportional system, having signed a 2019 declaration alongside the Liberal Democrats, Green Party, and SNP. Not so keen now. Ed
This article is reproduced by very kind permission of the author, Naomi Smith, CEO of Best for Britain, on The Best for Britain Wire, to which you can subscribe. Please also look out for their podcast, Quiet Riot. Both are excellent, accessible and pacy.
