Labour should embrace a new Great Reform Act

The General Election result – with low turnouts, millions more unable to vote and many MPs elected with the backing of less than a third of local voters – shows how many people in Britain are disillusioned, disengaged and actively disenfranchised.

Although fixing our broken nation will be a slow and costly process, mending our broken democracy can be done at little expense if the political will and vision are there. The government has made a start with the King’s speech, but it needs to be bolder to fix our politics. It needs a new Great Reform Bill.

The Reform Act of 1832 swept away the ‘rotten boroughs’ which were entirely under the control of a few wealthy landowners. It also introduced a more open and transparent, if by no means democratic, system of elections and political parties. Today the need for bold electoral reform is no less pressing. Two hundred years later we need to reverse the insidious erosion of voting rights and political participation we have seen in recent decades and make voting matter again.

There were 19 million people who did not vote in 2024 and another seven million qualified adults not on the electoral register at all. Many on the register have effectively been disenfranchised by voter ID because they lack the photo ID documents now required to cast a vote, or because their registration details don’t match their voter ID. Predictably, only tiny numbers, about 60,000, exercised their theoretical right to apply for a special Voter ID certificate during the campaign. At the same time, the right to vote has been extended indefinitely to 3.5 million Britons who live overseas and don’t pay UK taxes.

Labour needs to act quickly to reverse this manipulation of the electoral system, to remove barriers to voting and, most important of all, to find new ways to rebuild engagement and trust in politics. Copying their opponents’ tactics and doing this quietly through piecemeal measures, in the hope that no one notices, would be a mistake. If they want their reforms to stick, they need bold legislation and a strong story about why it’s needed.

A new Great Reform Bill needs to be based around a clear principle – there should be no representation without taxation, and all those who pay tax should have a say in how we are governed. Yes, all 16 and 17 year olds should be enfranchised, as proposed in the Labour manifesto (although notably, and concerningly, omitted from the King’s Speech today) , but so too should all non-British residents with settled status. In turn, non-resident British citizens should retain the right to vote automatically for two years after leaving the country, but after that they the right to vote can be restricted to those paying UK taxes, or potentially an overseas nationals’ levy in lieu of paying UK tax.

The government’s proposed introduction of automatic voter registration is welcome, but they need to ensure that this is set up so that everyone registered automagically has the ID they require to vote (an app based solution would help here). Given the massive collapse of the two-party vote since 2017 the government needs to accept that it is very difficult to justify the retention of the old majoritarian, winner-takes-all system if we want to preserve confidence in our electoral system.

The government should move immediately to devolve the right to adopt more proportional voting systems to local authorities, partly as a way of demystifying electoral reform. But it should go further. We need a new national referendum on electoral reform, but one that avoids the mistakes of 2011 when the public was asked to choose between the existing system and a single, contentious alternative (AV). Instead, people should be asked to choose between the status quo and adopting a new system designed to deliver greater proportionality.

This does not need to be nailed down in all its details, that can be left to the Electoral Commission. The opposition will object, but this exactly what happened with with Brexit. The referendum would be about securing a mandate for change. Any reformed electoral system, whatever system is adopted, would likely increase the representation of radical groups from both the right and left, but this is to be preferred to a system in which so many voters feel their votes don’t count and the parties are ‘all the same’. Don’t forget, if France had first-past-the-post, the far right would already have an absolute majority in the National Assembly despite being opposed by two-thirds of French citizens.

Jon Lawrence is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter