Labour might regret its desire for vote reform

Turkeys don’t usually vote for Christmas, so just why have 43 new Labour MPs signed up to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections and its campaign to replace the first-past-the-post system with proportional representation? These are, after all, the beneficiaries of the most distorted UK election in modern history, where Labour won one of the largest-ever majorities on just 34 per cent of the popular vote – a lower share than any post-war governing party. To underline just how lucky they were, it took 24,000 votes to elect each Labour MP in July, but 56,000 to elect each Conservative. The electoral system has started to treat the Tories even less favourably than the Lib Dems, who required 49,000 votes to elect each of their MPs.

It gets even more curious when you consider that the APPG on Fair Elections is run by a pressure group called Fair Vote UK, which was set up to try to pick holes in the result of the EU referendum in 2016.