So, you’re probably wondering why our slogan is ‘Dismantle the Democratic Dictatorship’, which is fair enough, it’s a contradictory statement. The fact is, the UK has pretty much only been run by the same two parties for as long as any of us can remember: The Labour Party, and The Conservative Party. And while parties like The Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and The Green Party have all had their fair share of input into the political environment, it has largely been a space occupied by the two bigger parties.
Why Is That Unhealthy For Our Democracy
While the actual practice of our elections is completely and undoubtedly democratic – a point which the New Democracy Group would like to make very clear – if there is no noticeable change in government or political practices from one government to another, then ultimately, the true value of our democracy lies only in the practice of voting, not the result of our elections.
This became all too clear after the result of the 2024 General Elections. With the Labour Party taking hold of 61% of the seats within the House of Commons, while only receiving 33% of the vote across the entire country, while the second largest party, The Tories, received 23.7% of the vote and only ending up with a mere 18.5% of seats.
This alone is enough to question the clarity and purity of our electoral process, but it gets worse. Think about the fact that Reform UK won 14.3% of the vote, and received only 5 seats, which is roughly 0.6% of seats in the house, as well as the Green Party’s 6.7% of the vote equating to only 4 seats in the House of Commons.
It doesn’t make much sense that a party with 10% less votes than the winning party ends up with 42% less seats than the victor. And as mentioned earlier, it only gets worse the further down the party list you go. This is the critical flaw of the First-Past-The-Post system used for our General Elections.
This Is Why We Use the Term Dictatorship
Our main issue with this current system, and the reason we go as far to call it a democratic dictatorship is because all those votes that have gone towards parties that haven’t been able to form a majority under first past the post are almost worthless – or at least worth less than a vote cast in favour of the winning party.
It’s clear from previous elections that this system works only in favour of Labour and the Tories, and therefore it is a system which does not allow for a real and genuine form of Democracy. This is why it is a Democratic Dictatorship. We can vote, but we can’t necessarily win.
“Well, It’s Got Us This Far, It’s Not THAT Bad”
But that’s the problem, take a look around, we see massive amounts of homelessness, unemployment, growing international tension, looming threats of conflict domestically and internationally, economic instability, volatile housing markets, migration followed by nationalistic tension, growing levels of racism on all fronts, upside-down flags… we could go on for days.
Or… We could go on to make the best decision this country has ever made. We could demand a referendum for Electoral Reform, and we could take our democracy into our own hands and create a future for the UK that all of us can take part in and prosper within.
