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This from Maggie Nelmes, Ventnor. Ed
On 8th May 2026, we received news of the least representative election results in Britain’s recent history. Under the antiquated First-Past-the-Post voting system, the winner takes all and votes for other parties or independent candidates count for nothing.
On the Isle of Wight, the leading party, Reform UK, got 31.9% of the vote, but won 49% of the seats. In other words, more than two-thirds of the electorate voted for other parties, yet Reform won almost half the seats on the Isle of Wight Council.
How the votes translated into seats
All the other parties lost out, getting fewer than their fair share of the seats. The Conservatives got 18.8% of the vote but only 5.1% of the seats. The Green Party got 12.5% of the vote but only5.1% of the seats.
The First-Past-the-Post voting system was designed for a two-party contest, not for the multiple parties we have now. Nearly all wards on the Island had four to six candidates. Most winners won on less than 50% of the vote, which means that most voters in that ward did not vote for them.
A system designed for a different era
On the Island, over two-thirds of those who voted did not vote for Reform.
In the recent past, both the Conservatives and Labour, traditionally the largest parties, have benefited from this undemocratic voting system to gain landslide victories on a small share of the vote.
That is why the Government’s Representation of the People Bill, due to have its Second Reading in the next few weeks, contains no provision to address our broken voting system. Labour clearly thinks it will benefit from this undemocratic system again.
The case for proportional representation
Most democracies have switched to proportional representation in one form or another because it produces fair representation. PR has the following advantages:
- It does not distort the outcome of an election by creating a big gap between the share of the vote and share of the seats.
- It does not normally produce huge majorities, which enable the winning candidate or party to ignore the concerns of the majority of the people.
- It encourages people to vote because even if their preferred candidate does not win, their vote is not wasted. Low turnout at elections on the Island and across the country is evidence of how frustrated most people are with our electoral system.
- It helps prevent extremist policies by making parties work together to produce consensual and well-considered policies.
The unpopularity of Starmer’s government is largely due to the fact that his party was elected to government on only one-third of the vote but gained some sixty per cent of the seats.
We urgently need a National Electoral Commission to study this problem and recommend a new voting system fit for our twenty-first century plurality.
