Sir John Curtice

speaker

115 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Sir John Curtice’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Pat Kenny Show · Can Burnham’s ‘new path’ revive Labour? · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

Certainly,

If you look at public attitudes, British social attitudes, which I held to run, has been tracking public opinion all the way since the 1980s on this, using a question which historically has always found a majority of people in favour of keeping the existing system.

But that began to be eroded during the course of the last parliament.

And actually now more people say that we should be changing the electoral system in favour of one that is more proportional and are against continuing the current system.

Now, this is partly because people who support the Conservative Party have traditionally been in favour of the system when they saw what happened to the Conservative Party in 2024.

They have changed their minds.

But certainly, we of course did have a referendum back in 2011, not on proportional representation, but on the alternative vote, which is, to translate for you, it's like SDV, but only one member being elected in each constituency.

We did have a referendum on that.

It was defeated.

But I think public opinion now is in a different place.

from what it was 15 years ago.

Yeah, that's exactly the trade-off.

Essentially, the trade-off you make in this whole debate about electoral systems is, do you say it's more important that we have a parliament like a Doyle that is representative of the broad swath of public opinion as expressed by the parties they vote for in the ballot box?

And we then rely on a process of negotiation between the parties to determine who's going to run the government.

Or do you prefer a system that while it might be disproportional, emerges with a clear winner and therefore, as a result,

It's the electorate who are seemingly determining who is in government rather than negotiates between the parties.

The problem the UK now has is that the current electoral system isn't able necessarily to deliver that second scenario.

And therefore, the argument as to whether it should be retained certainly appears to be weaker than it might have been thought to be historically.

Yeah, constitutionally there's no requirement to do so.

I mean, arguably by convention, the President of 2011 suggested perhaps you ought to do so.

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