Andy Burnham will use his first Labour conference speech as prime minister to formally launch a process toward replacing first-past-the-post with proportional representation. Government sources describe the commitment as "broad strokes" — a signal of direction, not a bill — but the intent is to have concrete proposals in Labour's next manifesto, giving the party an electoral mandate to act. The scale of the commitment should not be understated. Britain's electoral system has not been fundamentally altered since the Representation of the People Act 1918. Every reform attempt since — the 1998 Jenkins Commission, the 2011 AV referendum — has either been shelved or defeated. Burnham is betting that the political conditions have finally shifted, and polling suggests he may be right: 53% of MPs surveyed by YouGov support a review of FPTP. The mechanism matters. Burnham's preferred route appears to be a national commission for electoral reform, an idea he endorsed as Greater Manchester mayor. This is politically shrewd — a commission buys time, builds cross-party legitimacy, and insulates Burnham from choosing a specific PR variant before the manifesto. But it also introduces delay and the risk of the process being captured by incumbent interests who would prefer the status quo. Almost 100 Labour MPs backed the Representation of the People Bill this month, though minister Florence Eshalomi was careful to say it was "premature to legislate now for one approach." That language tells you the real fight: not whether PR happens, but which variant — party-list, STV, MMP — and therefore which parties benefit. Every system has a different set of winners. Burnham's framing is characteristically structural rather than partisan. He has consistently argued that Britain's overcentralised, London-centric governance rewards two-party dominance at the expense of regional representation. Proportional representation, in this telling, is not a progressive hobby horse but a corrective to a system that produces policy failures by concentrating power in too few hands. Critics have a genuine point: PR systems tend to produce coalition governments, and coalitions can be slow, fractious, and vulnerable to small-party vetoes. Germany's traffic-light coalition collapsed in 2024. Italy and Israel offer cautionary tales. The question is whether the costs of coalition instability outweigh the costs of manufactured majorities that govern with 35% of the vote. The 20-year question is whether this process survives contact with reality. Commissions can be buried. Manifestos can be vague. Referendums can be lost. But Burnham has done something no sitting PM has done in a century: committed his political capital to changing the rules of the game that put him in power. Whether that is generosity or calculation — or both — will depend entirely on execution.
