Proportional Representation is bad for Jews and bad for Britain

If the Holy Land is where the highest of all idealism goes to die, please let this be the case when it comes to Andy Burnham’s enthusiasm for bringing in proportional representation. Like a lot of British Jews, seeing how it works in Israel has inoculated me against this progressive temptation for life. Labour desperately needs to inoculate itself against the swan-song of proportional representation Who won the Israeli election? Well, I can’t really tell you.

It’s over a week since Israelis went to the polls, from the most secular Tel Avivis or devout Jerusalemites to bedouin riding out of the desert to the vote. And there still isn’t a government. In fact, the politics of forming one has only just begun because proportional representation, by design, takes it out of the day and puts it in the fraught and secretive coalitions talks that comes next. So much for more power to the people. But that’s not the worst thing proportional representation has done to Israel, a nation on the brink of new war with Iran which could really do with a new government pronto.

The worst thing it has done is make a society whose politics are entirely driven by ethnicity and attitudes to religion even more so. Their now hung parliament have plunged the country into an existential debate about whether Gadi Eisenkot’s liberal and secular opposition bloc, which fell far short of a majority, should partner with ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews who refuse conscription into the IDF or Arab parties, some of whom refuse to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, who hold the balance of power.

That’s proportional representation at work for you. Because again, by design, the system is supposed to make small parties kingmakers by making majority governments highly unlikely and complex coalitions the norm. Over the years, Israel has paid dearly for this system. The one trick Bibi Netanyahu has pulled over and over again throughout his entire career to stay in power is giving Israel’s two Haredi parties whatever they want. Needless to say, shovelling tax payers cash to the Rabbis who lead them to build a yeshiva seminary system where the men not only don’t serve, but hardly work at all – has fuelled massive resentment in the 84 per cent of the population that isn’t Haredi.

To the point, in their growing numbers, they are viewed by many in the liberal opposition as a more toxic coalition partner than even the country’s Islamist-rooted Arab party. Most popular Alexander Larman The sudden end of the World of David Walliams John Sturgis Russell Brand didn’t even have to hide in plain sight Tim Shipman Burnham has finally come clean about the welfare bill Labour desperately needs to inoculate itself against the swan-song of proportional representation because if it was ever introduced here, it would make our politics not more collaborative like in the Netherlands, but much more fragmented along the lines of ethnicity like Israel.

It would simply be a bad thing to stress test our fragile Union so severely every few years with the toxic campaigning around whether or not a progressive government could be stood up thanks to the Scottish National Party or Plaid Cymru. Worse, it won’t make the amenable Liberal Democrats, Labour’s de facto junior partners but the Green Party, which considers Zionism racism and even according to its own leaders has been infiltrated by hard left activists.

In European countries, the junior coalition partner typically gets the foreign ministry as a reward. Is the Foreign Office really what we’d like to give Zack Polanski? Luckily, Burnham has taken the brave step of ruling out any coalition with the Greens and dissolving Labour’s existing coalitions with them on councils across the country. I really salute this. But then why are we still flirting with proportional representation? It’s actually far worse than just the Greens.

Bringing proportional representation into the House of Commons would make it very hard for the Right to form a coalition without Rupert Lowe, who, channeling a fusion of the worst of Gen-Z and the worst of the old Monday Club, conspicuously declines to condemn antisemitism. Dozens of Islamophobic Restore MPs would be a disaster for British Muslims. Downloading to the chamber the worst rhetoric you find on X. Moreover, we could easily wake up with PR to the fact that Gaza Independents, or an even more nakedly sectarian party that succeeds them, holds the balance of power.

Both Britain’s demographic transformation and growing polarisation around immigration and ethnic change are now only fuelling these tendencies. Better, then, to look at another form of electoral reform. One that would actually hold back ethno-nationalist politics and resentment. Many of the Gaza Independents, not to mention Rupert Lowe himself, were elected on far from a majority of the vote. It’s been extremely corrosive for our politics for years, since George Galloway pioneered it in Bethnal Green in 2005, that you can win election under First Past the Post by only super mobilising a minority to get 30 per cent of the vote to win the seat in Parliament.

That way, time and time again, the sectarian interest of as little as 15 per cent of the total population can get 100 per cent of representation of the MP in Parliament. That’s why I think the sensible thing to do is back alternative vote, such as was proposed in the 2015 referendum on electoral reform, which gives voters a second choice and stacks them up until somebody hits the majority. Rather than empowering ethno-nationalists and sectarians through PR, the right thing to do would be to reduce their ability to run the Galloway playbook through alternative vote.

I very much doubt if we had such a system we’d have seen Blackburn or Leicester South fall to the Gaza Independents on just 27 per cent and 35.2 per cent of the vote. The fewer ethno-nationalists and sectarians in Parliament with the least chance to be king makers, the better for integration. The worst thing for British politics would be to become balkanised thanks to a new electoral system. I don’t see how that could do anything else but bring more far right Islamophobes or sectarian antisemites into Parliament.

The sad truth is PR’s idealistic proponents are not looking at British society as it actually is and not thinking through the consequences for minorities if it ever happened. But this is my bottom line. Proportional representation has been bad for Israeli Jews over there. And I’m certain it would be bad for British Jews, not to mention the rest of us, over here.