Britain’s Rare Shot at Real Electoral Reform

Bills like the RPB come once in a decade at best. Here's what’s in it – and what's concerningly absent.

Easily missed in the sea of political chaos that is Westminster today, there is a diamond in the rough: Britain actually has positive elections legislation on the docket in Parliament. Imagine that.

I’ll tell you what I like about the Representation of the People Bill (RPB, formerly referred to as the Elections Bill) - and why, given everything going on around us, I think it still needs to be a lot more ambitious.

Let’s first get our timelines straight here. This new Bill is significant, even if for no other reason that electoral reform packages like this one are staggeringly rare. In my lifetime, we’ve basically only had Blair’s Lords Reform endeavour in 1999 and then the Conservatives’ disastrous Elections Act - which broke far more than it solved.

Despite some quite significant victories in devolved Parliaments, bills that seek to reform elections across regions and nations are a precious treat indeed. And this one has some genuinely forward-looking, ambitious stuff in it.

The Good:

Votes at 16 for Parliamentary, Local and and PCC Elections: This is the Bill’s flagship policy. Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age to 16 in their devolved Parliaments in 2014 and 2021 (respectively). It seems completely reasonable to me that people who are eligible to work and pay taxes, who imminently have to build a future in this country, should get a say in how it’s run. It would be first expansion of the franchise since 1969 - good stuff.

A Big Step Towards AVR: The Bill would not quite introduce full Automatic Voter Registration (which we’re big advocates for) but it’s a big step in that direction. It tasks electoral registration officers with registering eligible people (those who don’t opt out) and actually encourages the Government to run pilot schemes testing out bolder schemes.

Beefing Up the Electoral Commission: This has been a key tenet of any serious democracy agenda for a solid decade now. The good people who run Britain’s elections watchdog - informing us about election procedures and calling out malfeasance and dirty campaign finance tricks - are doing incredibly important work. The Bill would give them stronger enforcement powers, expand their ability to issue civil penalties, and ensure meaningful fines for serious breaches - giving them a better toolbox to properly police modern campaigning and political finance.

Decent (But Lacking) Campaign Finance Reform: There is some good stuff in here on campaign finance. They’re finally bringing in a requirement for ‘Know Your Donor’ risk assessments on donations (amazingly, that wasn’t already a thing) and significantly tighter controls on donations from unincorporated associations (a key vehicle for dark money) and Limited Liability Partnerships. It’s quite good on curbing foreign financial interference (thanks to Reform’s Nathan Gill), and it’s all broadly welcome stuff. There are some big omissions here as we’ll see.

And some more good bits in the Bill:

• Stronger digital imprints regime, requiring campaigners to include clear information about themselves on electronic material;

• Requires candidates to provide identity evidence when submitting nomination papers (anyone remember Reform’s ‘ghost candidates’?);

• Common sense measures to protect candidates, campaigners, and electoral staff from abuse and intimidation;

• Early registration for young people starting at 14.

• Vastly expands the list of acceptable forms of Voter ID (way overdue!)

• Supports schools, colleges, and youth groups to roll out “practical voter and civic education”. This one would pay dividends down the line.

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The Absent:

So yes, this is clearly a well-intentioned and broadly welcome piece of legislation. But it risks ending up as a historic missed opportunity. We’ve been repeating it for years and years now: we’re going to need a fundamental democratic reset if we realistically expect people to put their faith in politics again.

This is a pretty good start, but it isn’t quite that. A lot of this should be seen as the bare minimum.

So what amendments, specifically, do we need MPs who are fighting the good fight to add?

Ditch the E.C. Strategy and Police Statement (!): This short-sighted measure comes from the Tory’s 2022 Elections Act, and it basically allows Ministers to set an agenda for the all-important independent elections watchdog. It’s not something we’ve explicitly seen abused yet, but it’s the kind of thing a Trumpian Government could easily exploit to disastrous effect. (“I direct you not to worry about my dodgy crypto donors,” that sort of thing)

A Cap on Donations: The Government have really honed in on foreign interference, and rightly so, but it’s sort of distracted from the bigger picture. Yes, foreign oligarchs should not be bankrolling our elections - but should British oligarchs get a pass?

And even when it comes to the foreign billionaires and multinational corporations, we can definitively say there’s nothing in this bill that would stop (or even mitigate) Elon Musk from handing a ludicrous sum to Reform UK or whatever bizarre far-right start-up he’s into these days. And for that matter, it would also still be open season for Palantir, oil giants, cigarette companies, gambling lobbyists and arms manufacturers. Seems like a big sniff test to fail.

The Epstein Files has further exposed what people are starting to call the “Authoritarian International.” It’s a malignant network composed of some powerful and quite noxious rich people - the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Steve Bannons of this world - who believe they have the right to prop up our politicians to do their bidding and stream roll our democracies (ridiculously, in this humble writer’s view) to avoid pesky laws and taxes. I don’t see this bill doing anywhere near enough to guard against those existentially destructive forces.

And a major part of people’s distrust in politics is the sense that politicians are out for their paymasters instead of ordinary people. The job people most associate with economic crime is now, you guessed it, ‘politician’. Corporate donations tripled over the past three elections. While it would certainly be desirable to avoid another Nathan Gill fiasco, we also need an overall cap on donations to drive big money out of politics.

It’s the cleanest way to do it, and funnily enough it’s one of the only things the Authoritarian International are genuinely afraid of.

(Our friends over at Democracy For Sale and 38 Degrees are running a petition on a donation cap – check it out).

And finally, the big one…

A National Commission on Electoral Reform (NCER): This Government has actually admitted that First-Past-The-Post is a dysfunctional system - and they’ve got other legislation in the pipeline right now to scrap it for Mayoral and PCC elections. Yet their supposedly big, ambitious, sprawling democracy package has absolutely nothing to say about our busted electoral system.

An NCER offers a clear and decisive path to securing meaningful voting reform. Let an independent body decide whether the current system is actually fit for purpose, and if it isn’t, what should replace it. It just sounds eminently reasonable to have a bunch of smart people discuss the best electoral system for Britain. Hard to see how the Government could object without looking defensive. After all, who’s afraid of a serious, independent look at how our democracy works?

We lay out the case in more detail on our petition page calling for an NCER amendment to the Bill. Speaking of which, please go and sign that if you haven’t already.

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The Opportunity:

This Bill does prove something important: bold democratic reform is indeed possible.

When Parliament gets around to it, it can expand the franchise, clean up campaign finance, and strengthen the institutions that protect our elections. That’s not nothing.

But if we’re being honest here, we should have seen most of these measures years – if not decades – ago. This is a victory only in the sense that the bar for democratic reform is so low it’s smashed through the floor. We need to dream a lot bigger than this.

Think about it in terms of all of those 16 year olds soon to be added to the franchise. What are we meant to tell them? “Welcome to democracy, children – don’t mind the billionaires buying your politicians or the broken voting system that has good odds of rendering your ballot utterly inconsequential.”

If you’ve read my work, you’ll be quite aware of my pervasive cynicism about politics today. But this Bill does genuinely give me a smidge of hope. I’ve talked to others who feel the same.

But come on. If we’re going to do electoral reform, let’s go all the way and properly seize the opportunity. The alternative is we wait around another decade or so for another one. Who knows what the world will look like by then?