his county is in reverse gear. Feel the tidal tug backwards in everything from extreme inequality, to rising infant mortality and a retreat from key international alliances. The latest regression is the home secretary’s announcement that tiny steps towards a modern voting system are to be stamped out. Mayors and police and crime commissioners will be elected on the same rotten first-past-the-post (FPTP) disproportionate system as the House of Commons and councils. Until now those elections have been run on a supplementary vote system, offering a first and second choice: if no candidate gets over half of first preferences, the top two candidates have a runoff, counting second preferences of the losers, guaranteeing the winner’s approval by over half the electorate. This system has opened the door to independents and smaller parties. A voter could risk choosing Green or Ukip first, with a backstop second choice to keep out their most hated option. This repressive move will cut out newcomers, securing the duopoly of the two old parties. Why do that, when YouGov polling shows 44% of people in Britain want to change to a more proportional system, against 28% opposed? People well understand the conspiracy to deny them choice: councils such as Havant in Hampshire elect only Tory councillors, though 54% voted otherwise. Why would the Tories revert to FPTP? Pure gerrymandering. We can soul-search for deeper reasons for the Conservatives’ continuing dominance in Westminster, but the greatest cause is FPTP elections. The government is abolishing second preferences because Tory candidates are the second choice of many fewer voters. The right drove out, via Brexit, a proportional system for the European parliament by abandoning it: now they drive it out of the remaining elections that expose how people vote once freed from the FPTP straitjacket. A third of people were forced to vote tactically in the general election of 2019. All this the Tories understand, and Labour must too: out of the last 20 elections since 1950, 19 have had a majority of voters choosing parties to the left of the Tories, yet the Conservatives have seized power two-thirds of the time. Boris Johnson won his 80-seat majority on a just 1.3% increase in vote share over Theresa May’s lost majority in 2017. Counting votes by constituency helps the more geographically dispersed Tories, as Labour votes are concentrated increasingly in urban areas, denying a national democratic result. That’s why it took 50,835 votes to elect a Labour MP, but only 38,264 to elect a Tory, 336,038 for a Liberal Democrat and a shocking 865,697 for a Green. This isn’t just a British phenomenon. A 2015 paper in the British Journal of Political Science found that, in established democracies since the second world war, “countries with majoritarian rules more often elect conservative governments than those with proportional representation electoral systems … Majoritarian systems have a substantive conservative bias.” That’s why no Tory MPs back a proportional system for the Commons, according to the Electoral Reform Society. Instead the party gerrymanders by planning to bring in ID requirements at polling stations, a US rightwingers’ way to bar poorer voters, the non-drivers, non-passport holders and renters frequently moving residence. It stamps on attempts to give 16-year-olds the vote that they have locally in Scotland and Wales. Little effort is invested in updating electoral registers, as Labour voters are at most risk of exclusion. The next boundary changes by 2024 will create more Tory seats in the south, as Labour piles up wasted urban votes. A devastating report from Compass exposes the near-impossibility of Labour winning alone at the next election. We divide, they conquer, by Grace Barnett and Neal Lawson, shows Labour now needs at least a 10.52% swing, greater than in 1945 and 1997. This grim analysis should be compulsory reading for every Labour MP, member and supporter. This makes an irrefutable case for a pact of some kind between all centre and centre-left parties. The report finds their 2019 manifestos remarkably similar. It might take open primaries, stand-asides or, at the very least, tactical electioneering. There are virtually no Lib Dem-Labour contests, as almost all Lib Dem winnable seats confront Tory MPs. A progressive alliance winning just once on a platform committed to electoral reform would change the political landscape forever. And, of course, the Tories know it. Keir Starmer indicates openness to reform. Labour has many more MPs in favour of proportional representation now than in the dark days when dinosaurs such as Jack Straw stopped Tony Blair from implementing Roy Jenkins’ commission on PR. Gordon Brown is heading a constitutional review, radical on devolution and the House of Lords, but the party needs to take the plunge for PR or it will never be in power to change anything. Start making the broader case now by vociferously opposing the government’s attempt to reimpose FPTP on these elections. Here’s the choice for Labour: share power most of the time, or be out of power most of the time – or, possibly, for ever.