A lot of people who see the flaws in First Past the Post, and of course there are many, call for a change to proportional representation without knowing the different kinds of PR and what they entail. If we look at the recent EU elections we can see the problems that D’hondt proportional comes with. Party list PR works simply by the public voting for a political party and then the seats being given out in proportion to the vote share. The ‘lists’ refer to the ranked list of potential MEPs for each party. For example, Party 1 gets 10% of the vote in an area that has 10 seats, they get only their first choice of politician elected. Party 2 gets 28% of the vote, so they get their first, second and third choice elected.

This problem comes from the nation being divided into its component regions, each region only having a certain number of seats in relation to population, ranging from 3 in North-East England to 10 in South-East England. The hard leavers, who after the utter collapse of UKIP have almost all of their vote concentrated in The Brexit Party; polling at around 35%, do not face much of a problem. Hard remain parties on the other hand are far more split with The Liberal Democrats, Greens, Change UK, SNP and Plaid Cymru all fighting for vote share. Vote for the wrong party and you split the vote and no party you like gets a seat. Due to this issue, europhile activists have actually set up a website: https://www.remainvoter.com/ to help voters realise which party they should vote for to utilise their vote.

None of this would be happening if we used a ranked choice system such as Single Transferable Vote, as is used in Northern Ireland. The lesson here? Though all PR systems are likely better than FPTP, they are not all equal.