This is literally the entire problem of our political system in a nutshell. People voting Tory or Labour not because they genuinely want to, but because they believe only those two have a chance of winning and they would rather keep the other out. We then end up with unpopular governments because many people didn't actually want to vote for them and just ping pong between the two with no real change.
Yup - we need some form of PR; even the shittest form of PR that we were offered by Cameron is preferable to FPTP; and that was deliberately the shittest form available (coupled with no real explanations of how it would actually work)
My preference is an adaptation of the Kiwi system (if I've understood it right).
If I've got this right:
You have
X seats for a region, of which half are constituency MPs that are elected with FPtP as per normal. The other half are then filled up from the best performing losers in such a way that total
X is fully proportional (and not just flown in by the party's preference).
A party only gets into the PR portion if they ran candidates in every constituency within the region (so SNP do for Scotland, PC do for Wales, Count Binface doesn't for wherever he stands).
Sensible to add transferable vote in there as well, which would boost the representational value of the PR portion.
To take a fictional region in England, and let's call it... Central.
Central has 60 seats in Westminster, split into 30 constituencies.
Those constituencies get their seats filled by FPTP, winner takes all.
Which may end up as (figures taken from GE2024) Lab 19, Con 6, Ref 0, Lib 3, Green 0, Other 2
But with a vote split of Lab 33.7%, Con 23.7%, Ref 14.3%, Lib 12.2%, Green 6.4%, Other 9.7% (this "Other" really doesn't help the maths)
The losing candidates for each party in Central, are arranged in order of vote share locally
The 2 best performing, losing Labour candidates, get a PR seat (21 total) for 35.0% regional representation
The 10 best performing, losing Conservatives candidates, get a PR seat (16 total) for 26.7% regional representation
The 9 best performing, losing Reform candidates, get a PR seat (9 total) for 15.0% regional representation
The 5 best performing, losing Lib Dem candidates, get a PR seat (8 total) for 13.3% regional representation
The 4 best performing, losing Green candidates, get a PR seat (4 total) for 6.7% regional representation
Assuming that "Other" isn't represented across the whole region, they get 0 extra seats (2 total) for 3.3% regional representation
Each constituency gets the most popular local MP
Each region get represented proportionately, with the MP based on the vote share of each candidate.
FPTP from GE2024 would have given: Lab 38, Con 11, Ref 0, LD 7, Green 0, Other 3 with 1 seat up for grabs (between Reform and Green).
33.7% of the 2024 vote, gave labour a 63.2% representation in parliament
Of course, do this, and tactical voting becomes far less of a thing, and after a couple of cycles, you'd get more representative voting, and more representative parliament.
Personally, of courses, I'm in favour of devolved power (about the same as Scotland's) to the 9 English regions anyway (and bringing Wales and NI up to the same power-level), with elections as above, and then PR representation from each regional parliament to Westminster for national issues. But that's very much me.
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