Andy Burnham's push to move the UK toward proportional representation has drawn a sharp counterpoint from an unexpected quarter: an Italian settled-status resident in Bristol who has watched both systems from the inside. Gian Lorenzo Spisso's letter to the Guardian draws on direct experience of Italy's PR-adjacent systems to argue that the cure may be worse than the disease. Spisso's core argument is structural, not sentimental. PR, he contends, severs the link between MPs and constituents, empowers tiny parties to hold coalitions hostage, and produces governments that are both unstable and ineffective. Italy is the canonical example: the country has had over 70 governments since 1946, with coalition mathematics routinely overriding voter intent. The left, in particular, has splintered repeatedly under proportional incentives, dissipating its history and electoral power across micro-parties. The affirmative case he makes for FPTP is less intuitive but worth examining. He points to two episodes as evidence that the current system already self-corrects. First, UKIP's insurgent pressure forced the Conservative Party to adopt Brexit — a catastrophic outcome in Spisso's telling, but proof that minor parties can reshape major-party platforms without holding government hostage. Second, Labour's journey from Miliband to Corbyn and back to Starmer demonstrates that FPTP's winner-take-all logic forces internal reinvention rather than comfortable splintering. The weak spot in the argument is what it leaves out. FPTP's democratic deficit is not abstract: the 2015 election gave UKIP 3.9 million votes and one seat, while the SNP's 1.5 million votes yielded 56 seats. Millions of voters in safe seats effectively have no representation at all. Spisso acknowledges FPTP is the 'lesser of two evils' but doesn't engage with hybrid models — like Germany's mixed-member proportional system — that attempt to capture constituency links while correcting seat-vote mismatches. The letter is also, implicitly, a Labour partisan document. Spisso hopes to vote Labour at the next election and frames PR as an existential threat to the party's ability to govern. This aligns with a long-standing Labour establishment view: PR would permanently fracture the centre-left coalition that FPTP currently forces into a single tent. That calculation is real, but it is a party-interest argument dressed in democratic theory. Burnham's intervention lands in a context where electoral reform sentiment is rising but institutional resistance remains heavy. The Liberal Democrats and Greens have long backed PR; Labour's official position is cautious. The Italian cautionary tale is a useful data point, but the debate won't be settled by anecdote — it will turn on whether reformers can design a system that preserves constituency accountability while reducing the grotesque seat-vote distortions that FPTP produces. What makes this letter worth reading is its honesty about trade-offs. Most electoral reform debates operate in pure advocacy mode. Spisso concedes Brexit was self-harm, concedes FPTP is an evil, and still argues for the status quo on structural grounds. That kind of reasoning — uncomfortable, comparative, rooted in lived institutional experience — is exactly what the debate needs more of, even if the conclusion is debatable.
