Is Proportional Representation the best way to defeat Fascism?
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Britain’s democracy is rotting under First Past the Post (FPTP). A rigged, outdated system that rewards fear, division, and populism while silencing millions of voters. It’s the perfect breeding ground for modern fascism: not marching in black shirts, but sneering through Nigel Farage’s grin and shouting on GBeebies. FPTP fuels hopelessness, turning alienated voters toward demagogues who claim the system’s rigged, because it is. Labour and the Tories both cling to this broken setup, terrified of real democracy. Proportional Representation (PR) isn’t a magic fix, but it’s the firewall, exposing extremists instead of mainstreaming them, and forcing collaboration instead of domination. PR would make every vote count, break the two-party stranglehold, and rebuild faith in politics. The fight against fascism starts there. Because if we don’t reform democracy soon, the next Farage won’t need to take power, the system will hand it to him.
TetleysTLDR: The long bit
There’s a sickness running through Britain. You can feel it in the airwaves, the tabloids, the comment sections of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and the smug grins of grifters who trade in resentment and fear. The same reactionary bile that once put Oswald Mosley on the streets of Stepney is back, this time wearing hi-vis jackets, shouting about 'woke agendas' and draping itself in the Union Jack. Fascism, in its modern British form, doesn’t march in black shirts anymore, it slithers across GB News, sneers through Nigel Farage’s over-platformed bile and festers in the corners of Facebook where conspiracy theories breed like maggots on rot. The question that should terrify anyone who still believes in decency, solidarity or democracy is this: what if next time they actually win? Because here’s the truth, the British political system, built on First Past the Post (FPTP) is a breeding ground for fascism. Not because it elects fascists directly (though that day may come), but because it rewards fear, division and populism. It creates political deserts where millions of people’s votes are binned like litter and that’s where the weeds of authoritarianism take root. So yes, if we want to defeat fascism: not just argue with it, not just 'debate' it into the ground but crush it politically and structurally, then the fight starts with tearing down FPTP and replacing it with Proportional Representation (PR). Fascism thrives where democracy is weak, and our democracy, let’s be honest, is a zombie wearing a rosette.
The British disease: A Two-Party straitjacket
FPTP is a system designed for the 19th century: a relic of empire that assumes the people are sheep who must choose between two shepherds. It’s built to protect the establishment not empower the electorate. The Tories and Labour, the self-anointed and laughingly self-portrayed 'grown-ups in the room' have spent generations feeding off it like ticks on a dying dog. Under FPTP, millions of votes simply don’t count. In 2019, more than 22 million votes made no difference to the final result. Twenty-two million people effectively disenfranchised. And it’s not just the Greens or the Lib Dems or even the far-right parties. Working-class voters in safe Tory seats and left-wing socialists in Red Wall constituencies that went blue. Ordinary people across the UK have been reduced to spectators in their own democracy. When people realise their vote doesn’t matter, they don’t just give up, they get angry. They look for someone who says 'the system’s rigged, the elites are laughing at you'. They find Farage, Reform UK Ltd or whatever rebranded snake-oil salesman comes next. They find the language of betrayal and it starts to sound true, because in a way, it is. That’s the seedbed of fascism: in a field of political hopelessness. FPTP is its fertiliser.
When democracy Fails, demagogues rise
It’s no coincidence that the fascist right keeps finding new life in systems built to entrench the powerful. Britain’s FPTP system is like an old fortress with a crumbling wall and the far right keeps testing the weak spots. Look at the pattern:
- In 2009, the BNP took nearly a million votes in the European elections and won two MEPs under a proportional system. That visibility exposed them for what they were and then they imploded.
- Under FPTP, however, those same sentiments were absorbed and sanitised, channelled into UKIP, then the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK. The system didn’t defeat fascism; it mainstreamed it.
Nigel Farage never needed to win a Westminster seat. FPTP protected him, it let him wield power without accountability. He could spook Tory backbenchers, shape national policy, and drag the Overton window hard to the right, all without ever being directly answerable to the people. That’s not democracy. That’s hostage politics. FPTP gave us Brexit: a far-right fever dream born of media manipulation and elite cowardice. It gave us Boris Johnson, a man who treated Parliament like an after-dinner speech circuit. It gave us Suella Braverman, barking about 'hurricanes of migration' while her own government crashed the economy. And it’s now handing oxygen to Reform UK Ltd: the same fascist-adjacent rabble rousers who will scream 'betrayal' the moment they lose again. Proportional Representation, by contrast, doesn’t eliminate fascists, it exposes them. In a PR system, extremists have to stand in the sunlight, not hide in the shadows of the Tory Party or wrap themselves in faux 'anti-establishment' clothing. You can see them, hear them, challenge them and defeat them politically.
The Labour problem: fear of real democracy
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The biggest barrier to democratic reform in this country isn’t the Tories. It’s Labour. Labour knows the system is broken. They’ve known it for decades. Every conference motion, every grassroots debate, every year the members call for PR, and the leadership ducks it. Why? Because they’ve convinced themselves that FPTP is the only way to win power. That they must cling to it like a life raft, even if the ship of democracy is sinking beneath them. It’s cowardice dressed as pragmatism and it’s also hypocrisy. Because the same Labour leaders who wail about 'populism' and 'the threat to democracy' refuse to build a system that could actually defend democracy from populism. Keir Starmer, the man who promised integrity, democracy and honesty has turned out to be the most conservative Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald. His obsession with 'stability' is exactly what keeps the door open for instability: for fascism. Every time Starmer panders to right-wing narratives about immigration, nationalism or crime, he strengthens the fascist narrative that the 'centre' is weak and frightened. Every time he purges the left and silences dissent, he tells millions of voters that their voices don’t matter. Fascism doesn’t need to win elections to win power, it just needs a system where democracy has already been hollowed out.
History’s warning: Britain isn’t immune
We like to think Britain is somehow special, that 'it couldn’t happen here'. But history laughs at that arrogance. Britain’s establishment has always had a soft spot for fascism, so long as it keeps the workers in line. The upper classes flirted with Mussolini and Hitler before the war. The Daily Mail literally ran the headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” in 1934. Churchill himself admired Mussolini’s 'efficiency' before it became inconvenient. And the police? They’ve always been more comfortable cracking down on left-wing protesters than confronting actual fascists. From the Battle of Cable Street to Palestine Action’s criminalisation, the state’s instinct has always been to preserve order not justice. Today’s far-right movement might look different, no uniforms, no goose-stepping but it carries the same DNA. It’s authoritarian, ethnonationalist, paranoid and built on the myth of lost greatness. It feeds on economic despair, cultural insecurity and media scapegoating. And the best defence against it isn’t moral panic, it’s democracy that works. A system where every vote counts, where every citizen feels heard and where no one can hijack power with 35% of the vote. That’s what PR delivers. Not utopia, but accountability.
PR Isn’t a cure-all, but it’s a firewall
Now PR alone won’t kill fascism: Germany’s Weimar Republic had PR and we all know how that ended. But context matters. The Nazis rose in an economic wasteland amid humiliation and chaos. Modern PR democracies like Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands are proof that with the right institutions, proportional systems are not a weakness, they’re a strength. PR doesn’t prevent fascists from speaking, it prevents them from monopolising. It forces coalition, negotiation, compromise: the very opposite of fascism’s obsession with purity and domination. It turns politics from a winner-takes-all slugfest into something resembling pluralism. Under PR no single demagogue can hijack the system on a minority vote. You can’t have a Boris Johnson majority built on 43% of the electorate. You can’t have a Farage manipulating Tory MPs through fear of losing their seats. You can’t have one party holding an entire nation hostage while millions go unrepresented.PR doesn’t guarantee justice. But it gives it a fighting chance.
The moral imperative: democracy first, everything else later
There’s a phrase worth repeating: in the first instance, defeat fascism: the rest comes later. Because if we lose democracy, we lose the ability to fight for anything else, the NHS, workers’ rights, climate action, Palestine or social justice. Every struggle of the left depends on the survival of democracy. And democracy, as things stand, is dying by design. The two-party system isn’t just inefficient, it’s corrupt. It’s engineered to protect those already in power, to rotate elites between red and blue ties while the same corporations pull the strings. That’s how you get Labour frontbenchers taking donations from property developers while pretending to care about renters. That’s how you get a government declaring war on refugees while billionaires dodge taxes. Proportional Representation is the beginning of a democratic revolution, not the end. It’s the foundation on which the left can rebuild solidarity, participation, and accountability. It gives voice to regional movements, anti-racist coalitions, environmental parties, trade unionists and working-class communities long ignored. If you want to kill fascism, you have to make democracy worth believing in again.
‘Give a fascist proportional representation and you kill him twice: once by denying him a majority he never earned, and again by forcing him to face a country he can no longer bully into silence.’
The media, the myth and the mob
The press will tell you PR leads to chaos. That it creates 'weak governments' and 'endless coalitions'. What they mean is: PR stops them controlling the narrative. It stops billionaires buying entire parties wholesale. It stops the old boys’ network of Etonians, lobbyists, and hedge fund donors from playing musical chairs in Westminster. The British press is fascism’s megaphone. The Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph: they live off outrage. They rely on division. A PR system that produces consensus politics is their worst nightmare, because it would kill the culture war economy overnight. Imagine if every vote counted. Imagine if the Greens had 50 MPs. Imagine if working-class socialists from Liverpool to Glasgow could actually sit in Parliament instead of being told to 'hold their nose' and vote Labour. Imagine if the far right had to compete on facts instead of fear, because the electoral map couldn’t be gerrymandered through FPTP. That’s what terrifies them. Not chaos, accountability.
The road to reform
PR isn’t an abstract reform. It’s an act of defiance. It’s a refusal to let the bastards keep rigging the system while pretending to defend it. Britain could adopt PR tomorrow. It’s not a technical impossibility, it’s a political choice. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland already use forms of it. The only part of the UK still trapped in FPTP is Westminster: the rotting heart of a former empire, clinging to the illusion of stability as the walls crumble. It’s no wonder the Tories and Labour alike fear it. PR would mean real pluralism. It would mean no safe seats, no hereditary MPs in all but name and no unchecked majorities bulldozing the country every five years. It would mean the British public, at long last, had power and power terrifies the powerful.
The stakes
Fascism doesn’t arrive in jackboots anymore. It arrives wrapped in the flag, talking about 'common sense', smirking about 'taking back control'. It whispers about 'national pride' and 'security' and 'order'. It finds a face that looks respectable and a party willing to dance with it. Under FPTP, it can't win. The question isn’t whether PR is perfect. It’s whether we can survive much longer without it because if we keep letting our democracy rot, if we keep telling ourselves 'one more tactical vote', 'one more lesser evil', 'one more election cycle', then one day we’ll wake up and find democracy gone, voted out by a system that was never democratic in the first place.
The real battle
In the first instance: defeat fascism. The rest comes later. Fascism feeds on despair and despair grows in systems that don’t listen. FPTP has given us despair on tap, a generation that doesn’t vote because they know nothing changes. That’s not apathy, that’s realism. PR won’t make everything better overnight but it will make everything possible again. It’s the difference between fighting fascism from the gutter and fighting it on level ground. Between having a voice and screaming into the void. Between a democracy that’s alive and one that’s on life support. The question isn’t whether PR is 'the best' way to defeat fascism, it’s whether it’s the only way left - because if we don’t fix the system, the system will finish us. And when the next demagogue comes, and they will, they won’t need to storm Parliament. They’ll already own it.
Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK. A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.
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