There will be no durable UK-EU reset without electoral reform in Britain
The UK's FPTP electoral system overcomplicates its approach to improving relations with the European Union
For the first time since the 2016 Brexit referendum, every serious contender for UK Prime Minister wants to move Britain closer to the European Union. Yet, this may not be enough.
Since Labour’s abysmal performance in the local elections triggered open challenges to Keir Starmer’s premiership, the Prime Minister and his two main rivals, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, have each argued for deeper ties with Brussels. As real as this shared desire may be, the EU knows it may be all too fleeting because of how Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system could just as easily produce a future Eurosceptic government that would tear up such agreements instead.
Moreover, few observers on either side of the Channel would doubt that Starmer’s own pivot is merely a desperate attempt to bolster his collapsing premiership with yet another embarrassing policy U-turn — this time on his Brexit red lines. Nevertheless, even the most ambitious UK-EU agreement that Starmer or his successor could strike in this parliament risks being torn up by a Eurosceptic government in the next parliament, thanks to FPTP’s tendency to accelerate political polarisation and produce lopsided parliamentary majorities which overrepresent small pluralities of voters.
Consequently, any durable reset with the European Union will be predicated upon electoral reform. Replacing the increasingly dysfunctional FPTP system with proportional representation (PR) would correct Britain’s perennial democratic deficit while forging a pro-EU consensus that would outlast Starmer’s faltering tenure.
Despite only occurring at the municipal and regional levels, the 2026 UK local election results demonstrate that the Labour-Conservative electoral duopoly has ended after over a century of dominance. In its place is a deeply fragmented and polarised political landscape, with five major parties that all poll below even the 34 percent plurality of votes in 2024 that formed the basis of Labour’s parliamentary supermajority.
Additionally, Labour’s supermajority owes its existence entirely to FPTP overrepresenting the collapse of the Conservative party base. In other words, the 2024 general election’s results were down to one bloc losing instead of the other side winning, contributing to its status as the most unrepresentative election in British history.
Notably, Labour has not even recovered from its own earlier base collapse either, with their national vote share only marginally higher than their historic losses in the preceding 2019 general election. Now, Labour’s popularity hovers around 20 percent, putting the party on course for an electoral disaster in the next general election that would simultaneously wipe away its supermajority and knock it down to third place in parliament.
Given that context, the European Commission is allegedly considering inserting clauses into future UK-EU agreements where Britain would be liable to pay a penalty if it tried to withdraw from them, under the assumption that such penalties would either deter UK withdrawal or offer compensation to the EU from any such action. However, these potential clauses would cap the depth of cooperation possible because both sides must assume that a future anti-EU government may frustrate any interdependency that gets built, as Brexit itself demonstrated.
Relatedly, EU officials are similarly hesitant to engage further with the UK until Starmer or an immediate Labour successor outlines a specific list of what Britain wants in a reset. FPTP once again overcomplicates this process, as UK policymakers remain undecided over what requests to include based upon how anti-EU resentment could be too easily magnified by the current electoral system.
The outsized influence that the anti-EU voting bloc has is especially problematic given how the public is consistently more supportive of strengthening UK-EU relations as well, meaning that any attempts to reset UK-EU relations would require a much greater degree of electoral stability. PR, not FPTP, would be the key to achieving this stability.
Under the PR Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, voters rank candidates on their ballots in multi-member constituencies. If a voter’s top choice has already been elected or eliminated, the vote transfers to their next preference until every seat is filled. Crucially, Britain already has experience with using STV in the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and local assemblies in Northern Ireland and Scotland. It could likewise easily study the implementation of STV in the Irish electoral system for the Dáil when considering how to apply it to the Commons too.
Accordingly, it is hard to overstate the opportunity that is now present: for the first time in a decade, the incumbent Prime Minister and his closest rivals recognise the public’s increasing pro-EU stance. Although workable alternatives to ensure better UK-EU relations do exist, the political consensus to recognise and adopt them does not. Without electoral reform, political polarisation will ensure that none of them can deliver it.