In his first conference speech as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham announced a National Commission on Electoral Reform, inviting every party to take part. It will report before the next general election, and Labour will fight that election on a manifesto commitment to change the voting system. It caps a remarkable September, in which 193 MPs, 101 of them Labour, signed an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill calling for such a Commission, only for it to be ruled out of scope.

Burnham is right, and not only for the reasons reformers celebrate. First Past the Post (FPTP) no longer performs even its traditional virtues. The 2024 election gave Labour 63% of Commons seats on just 33.7% of the vote, the most disproportional result on record. A September 2025 YouGov projection put Nigel Farage's Reform UK near an outright majority: 48% of seats on 27% of the vote. Public support for change has doubled since the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, to 53%. A year ago, Burnham called proportional representation 'an idea whose time has come'.

But the case for institutional redesign is separate from the question of when, and how, redesign should occur. Amid rising populism, that question deserves far more attention. By choosing a Commission over hasty legislation, the Prime Minister has answered it well.

What the evidence says

Reformers tend to dismiss concerns that proportional systems favour the radical right. Yet Michael Becher, Irene Menéndez González and Daniel Stegmüller, studying the UK's 1999 switch to proportional rules for European elections, estimate the reform raised the right-wing populist vote by 13.5%. The wider literature is mixed, and Herbert Kitschelt's judgement that institutional effects on the radical right are modest still broadly holds. But 'mixed' is hardly reassuring.

In the UK, the majoritarian logic that once contained insurgents now threatens to catapult one into power on barely a quarter of the vote

Honesty cuts both ways. FPTP is no populism deterrent: the majoritarian logic that once contained insurgents now threatens to catapult one into power on barely a quarter of the vote. This is Farage's 'inversion point', at which FPTP becomes his friend; tellingly, Reform UK has recently abandoned its support for proportional representation. My caution is therefore procedural. The evidence remains contested, and foundational change during party-system volatility requires strong democratic legitimacy.

Democracy's dual mandate

Rescuing democracy demands guardianship – what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt term ‘gatekeeping’, and what Karl Loewenstein, witnessing the collapse of interwar democracies, called militant democracy: protecting institutional gains against those who would instrumentalise them.

It also demands responsiveness. Peter Mair warned that governments which administer rather than represent create the vacuum into which populism flows. Rob Ford and Matt Goodwin traced the radical right's British roots to left-behind voters; Andrés Rodríguez-Pose called it 'the revenge of the places that don't matter'. Daron Acemoglu and co-authors find that where democracies fail to deliver, disillusionment encourages those promising to sweep the system away.

A politics that gatekeeps without responding merely manages decline. A politics that responds without gatekeeping leaves the door unbarred

A politics that gatekeeps without responding merely manages decline. A politics that responds without gatekeeping leaves the door unbarred. The fight to dismiss the far right is, first, a fight to dismiss its causes.

The corridor and the Commission

The Commission is the institutional answer to this dual mandate, and timing is central to it. Jon Elster's studies of constitution-making show that rules written during crisis tend to be worse. Acemoglu and James A. Robinson's 'narrow corridor' makes the point structurally: liberty survives where state and society hold each other in balance. Rewriting the rules when that balance is strained is a wager placed under the worst conditions.

In 1986, François Mitterrand switched France's elections to proportional representation, admitting the Front National to the National Assembly with 35 seats. The French reversed PR within two years

In 1986, François Mitterrand switched France's elections to proportional representation, admitting the Front National to the National Assembly with 35 seats. The French reversed PR within two years. Reform without legitimacy helped the forces it was meant to contain. Britain's 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, similarly, set the reform cause back a decade.

So, to the reformers' question – if not now, when? – the answer is procedural, not calendrical. Reform becomes legitimate when:

• an independent Commission has examined the options
• the Commission's recommendation commands support beyond the governing party
• the public has authorised the change.

Burnham's timetable – a Commission reporting before the next election, then a manifesto mandate – could meet every condition. But a pledge to change the system, made before the Commission reports, risks looking like a verdict in search of a process. The Commission must be free to reach its own conclusion, and voters must know what they are authorising. That is the difference between reform imposed and reform owned.

An ecosystem of democratic renewal

Electoral reform is also a question of belonging. Polarisation is deterred not by suppressing disagreement but by building civic ground on which citizens can disagree amicably – the principle behind democratic renewal work across Britain, including my own Civic Ground London CIC. A National Commission would scale that principle to constitutional level.

Critics say gatekeeping and reform are not mutually exclusive, and that Mair's argument favours proportional representation, since FPTP itself creates a representational deficit. Both points are exactly what an independent Commission exists to adjudicate, in public, with evidence.

Until this week, ministers said it was 'premature to legislate now for one approach'. The Prime Minister has drawn the right conclusion: prematurity is an argument for starting deliberation, not deferring it. The Commission now needs independent membership, a remit open to every option including FPTP, and parties beyond Labour – Reform UK included – at the table. Meanwhile, direct democratic energy at the regional inequality, insecure work and degraded public services on which the far-right feeds. Guard the gains; answer the grievances. That is what defending democracy demands.

💊 No.17 in a Loop series on 'Rescuing Democracy'

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