Taking the debate to the heart of Westminster under the pro-democracy ‘Sort The System’ banner

• ON Wednesday May 24 hundreds of pro-democracy activists descended upon Westminster to lobby their MPs on the importance of proportional representation, PR, organised by a coalition of pro-PR groups under the banner of Sort The System.

We were from every region of these islands and represented thousands of people who couldn’t be there on the day. Before we met our MPs we attended a rally and were addressed by politicians from a wide range of parties, even including a Tory!

The Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “The Labour Party is now a party that, among the membership and the affiliated unions, after decades of striving, supports proportional representation. I can’t tell you how important that is.

“At the 2022 conference, there was no defence of FPTP, first-past-the-post, because the arguments have been comprehensively defeated. Everyone in the Labour Party knows our politics and our democracy is broken and at the root of that is the voting system.”

After the rally we split up to speak to our own MPs. We had contacted them in advance to arrange to meet. Some had not replied and some had said they had other business which made them unable to meet, but many agreed to meet and hear from their constituents including both Islington MPs, Jeremy Corbyn and my MP, Emily Thornberry.

From what I’ve heard, Jeremy Corbyn talked about “pure PR”, seemingly meaning a national list system as only used by two countries (Israel and the Netherlands), which does away with the constituency link, something he, Emily Thornberry, and many other MPs want to retain, possibly because they have an electorate who have already voted for them.

Emily Thornberry also seemed to want to pin us down to supporting a particular form of PR, which is not what we wanted to do.

We want to follow the example of New Zealand, who first decided in principle to replace FPTP and later on which system to use as they all have advantages and disadvantages.

New Zealand finally decided on the additional member system, AMS, which retains individual constituency members elected by FPTP, supplemented with top-up members to make everything proportional; as used for the Scottish, Welsh and Greater London assemblies.

A poll released the same day as the lobby found that the public supports a move to PR by a margin of more than two to one – including 50 per cent of Labour and 45 per cent of Conservative 2019 voters – with only one in five saying the United Kingdom’s political system is working well for the people.

The 2022 British Social Attitudes survey, a well-respected gauge of opinion, also found that a majority of people in Britain favour replacing FPTP with PR.

As we head towards the next election we will continue to push politicians to back reform and build upon the growing support for PR across the country to ensure that the next general election will be the last held under our broken winner-takes-all system.

BARRY EDWARDS, N7