By David Osland

I didn’t vote Labour at the last general election. But before the compliance unit seizes on this damning admission as a pretext to boot me out, I should stress I was within my rulebook rights to back the Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz last October.

After all, it’s a formal sister party in the Progressive Alliance international and a cousin of mine is a reasonably prominent activist. And besides, the chance to support a decidedly unradical but recognisably centre-left manifesto is a rare treat for Labour Party members these days.

The story starts with Brexit. Although I have been a British-Swiss dual national for decades, I hadn’t previously bothered to apply for a Swiss passport.

But with the European Union set to introduce visa requirements and long queues at border control for UK citizens – just one of the fabulous range of Brexit benefits the Tories promised us –  I finally got round to obtaining a second set of travel documents, and registered for political rights in the process.

Forgive my lack of detailed knowledge on how Swiss politics functions. I am a rookie first-time voter, after all. But from the British perspective it all looks impeccably democratic.

The SPS won three of the 16 seats allocated to the canton of Aargau, historically one of its strongholds, in line with the now-attenuated 16.4% support it secured at the ballot box. Nationally, it marginally increased its vote from 16.8% to 18.2%, which was enough to be awarded 41 seats in the 200-seat lower house.

But the big winner was the obnoxious anti-immigration merchants of the Schweizerische Volkspartei, which strengthened this populist outfit’s place as the single largest party. Most pundits painted the overall election outcome as a shift to the right.

Elsewhere on the left, the Francophone Trotskyists of solidaritéS ran a joint slate with the German-speaking Putinites of the Partei der Arbeit der Schweiz. The ticket picked up 1.0%, giving it two national council seats.

Proportional representation doesn’t get any more mathematically precise than that. The MPs have formed a parliamentary bloc with the more radical of Switzerland’s two Green parties, who are on 28.

Voting is based on party lists. But one of the novelties is that if you don’t like a candidate, you can cross their name out and write in the name of another candidate. The vote then counts twice. Alternatively, there is a blank ballot slip for those who prefer to pick ‘n’ mix in the time-honoured fashion of 1970s Woolworth sweet counters.

Swiss democracy doesn’t stop there. Groups in civil society can table referendums, and the country is currently deciding on a call from the Swiss equivalent of the TUC to give pensioners a ‘thirteenth month’ additional payment, topping up a pension that is already worth £44,000 a year for a couple. Yes, you read that right. Fear not, my emphatic ‘Ja’ vote is in the post.

At the more local level, I now potentially have a direct voice in future big decisions affecting the good residents of Aargau. Let’s face it, that’s more than I get in Hackney. That said, I have no informed opinion on whether towns I have never been to in my life need a bypass road or not, and will likely therefore abstain.

Britain has had a tepid flirtation with PR in recent decades. The Additional Member System is in use in Scotland and Wales and the London Assembly and Single Transferable Vote System in Northern Ireland.

Supplementary Vote, which is not proportional but gives you both a first and second choice vote, was previously in place for mayoral contests, although this year’s London mayoral election will revert to first past the post, largely in the vain hope of boosting hapless no-hoper Susan Hall.

Calls for Britain to ditch FPTP for Westminster and move to some form of PR have long been a Liberal Democrat stock in trade. They now also have backing from sections of the Labour left, not least Norwich South MP and Socialist Campaign Group member Clive Lewis.

On balance, I’m with Lewis. The democratic case in favour of PR is unanswerable. The complexion of the UK Parliament should be broadly in line with the political outlook of the UK electorate. That it does not is bad for the wider political process.

While polls undoubtedly exaggerate the number of voters likely to plump for Reform at the next general election, that party does represent a real strand of thought that should not be artificially suppressed. Likewise, limiting the Greens to one MP when it should have a couple of dozen is increasingly untenable.

However, the contention from more fervent advocates that that PR would inevitably mean a permanent centre-left majority at Westminster seem wide of the mark. What we would get instead is a recipe for permanent deadlock.

The lure of PR is superficially appealing, especially for older lefties who remember the Thatcher era, with the Tories empowered to do untold damage on a low fortysomething percentage point vote share.

But the Swiss experience perfectly encapsulates the old anarchist gag that whoever you vote for, the government gets in. The four major parties have been in permanent coalition since – get this – 1959.

In other words, the ostensibly socialist Swiss equivalent of Labour cheerfully joins forces with the Swiss equivalents of the Lib Dems, the Tories and Reform. Every single time.

The most exciting thing that ever happens is that seats on the seven-member federal council are periodically redistributed to reflect shifts in support. That gives the hard right a veto on progressive change.

Elsewhere, Germany has repeatedly seen Social Democrat-Christian Democrat coalitions, a mechanism known by the unlovely portmanteau word ‘GroKo’, standing for Große Koalition.

In the UK context, who would trust the Liberal Democrats not to link up with the Tories when it comes to the crunch, as they did in 2010? Come to that, who would exclude a rightwing Labour leadership forming an administration with the Conservatives if such a step was somehow dressed up as ‘in the national interest’?

Some socialist proponents of PR see it as the best way to enable a small socialist party to pick up a handful of parliamentarians, and there might even be a feelgood factor to pulling that stunt off.

After all, proportional representation allowed the Scottish Socialist Party to win six MSPs in Holyrood in 2003, although leftwing PR success stories have subsequently been scant.

But the most likely impact of that will be to hive off socialist ideas from the wider labour movement, which is a big price to pay for a couple of Trot and tankie MPs.

Proportional representation for Westminster has largely been parked as an item in the British national conversation since the lost referendum of 2011 and with a Labour landslide in the offing shortly, there’s no obvious reason for it to shoot up the agenda.

Back it by all means, because that’s the right thing to do. Just don’t expect it to happen soon, or to change anything much if it ever does.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time leftwing journalist and author and writes for Labour Research magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Swiss flag and Alpine peak https://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousexpeditions/544119961. Creator: Curious Expeditions. Licence:  CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic