The United Kingdom did not always use First Past the Post,and in the old days it did not even use single-member districts always.
Until the late 1800s, United Kingdom had many multi-member districts. Its last multi-member district was not disbanded until 1948. (Canada has this beat - our last MMD used in government elections was disbanded 50 years after 1948 - around 1998.)
Usually block voting, almost as bad as FPTP, was used in these MMDs but not always.
Here's what happened -
Old England
Multi-member districts were used at the start of parliamentary democracy in old England. In 1265, Simon de Montfort convened a Parliament that contained two knights from each shire (county), and two burgesses from each borough (city) — one of the earliest examples of representative parliaments in the world. Single-winner First Past The Post did not come into use until later.
In 1793, Charles Grey (Earl Grey, II), a 28-year-old MP, brought the attention of the House of Commons to a petition formulated by the society named the Friends of the People. The petition described the iniquitous districting and allocation of seats in the country and called for "parliamentary reform." The petition related that at that time, The House of Commons was to a large degree elected in two-seat districts and many of those had rather few voters, This unfair situation meant safe seats for the Tory party, but also regional democratic deficit, a dis-proportional make-up of the House of Commons, and dis-empowerment of working-class towns and cities.
The petition stated that there were
70 MPs elected in 35 very small boroughs ("burgage tenements" where the landlord determined how tenants would vote),
88 MPs elected in 44 boroughs of less than 50 voters each,
36 elected in 18 boroughs with less than 100 voters each,
52 elected in 26 boroughs with less than 200 voters in each.
These plus 45 members elected in Scottish boroughs and burghs that contained less than 250 voters in each (the number of seats in each is unknown) made up the majority of seats in the House of Commons. Thus perhaps as few as 20,000 voters determined the composition of the majority in the House of Commons. Britain at the time had more than 10 million people. so to say the situation was unfair and basically un-democratic is an understatement.
This actually sheds light on why proportional representation was not a topic of reform. Alexander Paul's 1884 book The History of Reform points out that Proportional Representation (minority representation) was not considered a pressing matter in the early 1800s and gives the reason -- "our forefathers suffered too much and too long from the representation of nothing but a minority, to think much about that in their plans of reform." (p. 83)
The House of Commons voted down Earl Grey's motion in 1793 but years later he rose to be Prime Minister. And at that time he and his Whig party pushed through the Great Reform Bill of 1832. By passage of this bill, 56 "rotten boroughs" (all but one having two seats) were disbanded altogether, another 30 lost their second member (going down to being just a single-member district); one district (Weymouth and Weyton Regis) went down from four seats to two. Altogether 143 English MPs lost their seats.
But the point of the reform was not to change the number of MPs in the House so the following additions were made to cover the reduction.
The Act (the Great Reform Bill of 1832) created 130 new seats in England and Wales:
-- 26 English counties were divided into two divisions with each division being represented by two members.
-- 8 English counties and 3 Welsh counties each received an additional representative.
-- Yorkshire, which was represented by four MPs before the Act (including the City of York, a separate district within the county), was given two additional MPs and split into three districts -- East Riding, West Riding and North Riding -- so that each of its three ridings was represented by two MPs).
-- 22 large towns were given two MPs.
Thus at least 88 districts elected two members each, or more (three or four were used occasionally). Usually block voting was used to elect the members in these, but sometimes other - fairer - voting systems were used, as described next.
In 1867 some districts were switched from Block Voting to Limited Voting. Co-incidentally this change was done at the time of Canada's Confederation.
The Limited Voting system "was applied in England to constituencies returning more than two members from 1867 to 1885…. Limited Voting was applied to 13 constituencies each returning three or four members and included Glasgow, Birmingham and the City of London." (Phillips, Challenges to the Voting System, 1867-1974 (p. 17)
As well, STV was used to elect some members of the House of Commons in MM districts for many years.
In 1918 STV was adopted for the university constituencies of Cambridge, Oxford, and others. These constituencies it seems had two seats each. They used STV until their abolition in 1948 (or 1922 in the case of Dublin University).
But in 1948, the last MMDs were disbanded and replaced by single-member districts where no amount of fair voting (in the district) can make things proportional.
And the UK has never - yet anyway - used an overall top-up or allocation of additional seats to make right the dis-proportional results produced through FPTP.
"Multi-member constituencies existed in the Parliament of the United Kingdom and its predecessor bodies in the component parts of the United Kingdom from the earliest era of elected representation until they were abolished by the Representation of the People Act, 1948."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-member_constituencies_in_the_Parliament_of_the_United_Kingdom)
The United Kingdom, like Canada and many other countries that still use FPTP, needs to go back to the old ways when many districts had multiple members - more than one (five is a good round number for the future!). And then, even if nothing more sophisticated is brought to bear as a voting system, just having each voter cast a single vote (not multiple votes), a rough balance and fairness will result - at least in each district so composed.
==============================
the above information is partially an excerpt from my multi-blog essay on the use of multi-member districts in Canada.
see https://montopedia.wixsite.com/montopedia/post/canada-federally-and-in-the-provinces-and-territories-used-multi-member-districts-part-1
Alexander Paul's 1884 book The History of Reform provides much detail on the drive for fair district-ing in the UK in the 1700s and 1800s. It is available for viewing on the Hathi Trust website.
Earl Grey's two-year struggle to pass the Great Reform Bill of 1832 is outlined on Wikipedia. It involved two (or three) changes of government, two elections, rioting, arson attacks on officials' mansions, mass meetings, police repression, banishment, imprisonment or injury for many. The House of Lords were bigoted opponents of the Bill but they too were eventually forced to give into the democratic will - eventually. Such a story.
Let's pray that no people, living in a self-professed democracy, will ever again have to go through such travail to get their fair voice in the chambers of power.
==================================================
Comments