Though proportional representation poses risks for Labour, it\u2019s a change that feels necessary for today\u2019s volatile politicsA number of people have admitted to tears during Andy Burnham\u2019s Labour party conference speech, and most of them mean when he talked about his father, who died very recently. But then there were a few (not me) who welled up when he announced a commission on electoral reform. It was just the sheer shock of it: that we may finally have a prime minister who will follow through on his own long-held beliefs and remain loyal to his long-term support base, even if it makes him avoidable enemies and, medium-term, destroys Labour\u2019s only-trodden path to victory. It felt a bit like slipping through time, and I couldn\u2019t even tell you to when (definitely not the 1990s).Burnham\u2019s support for proportional representation has always been extremely unusual for a Labour politician.<\/p>\n
To this day, he ascribes that to his experience of winning an election as mayor of Greater Manchester on a supplementary votes system, where people get to choose a first- and second-preference candidate. He said that campaigning under that system \u201cfinally aligned the conversation on the door with what people want from politics, which is about problem-solving first and foremost, not about point-scoring\u201d. He went a bit further this morning, asking Nick Robinson on the Today programme: \u201cCan we really watch a party with less than 30% walk into Downing Street?\u201dZoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though proportional representation poses risks for Labour, it\u2019s a change that feels necessary for today\u2019s volatile politicsA number of people have admitted to tears during Andy Burnham\u2019s Labour party conference speech, and most of them\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}