\n READ MORE: Danny Dorling: Scottish independence ‘already begun as UK political culture diverges’<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n What they don\u2019t know \u2013 because they have never been told \u2013 is that within those constraints, Scotland has quietly done something the rest of Europe would recognise immediately as straightforward, evidence-based social policy. It identified child poverty as a problem. It introduced targeted payments to address it. And it worked.\n<\/p>\n \n The sums involved are not enormous. The timescale was not long. The impact was measurable and fast. Which is precisely what makes Dorling\u2019s game so pointed \u2013 because what Scotland has demonstrated, beyond reasonable doubt, is that this works.\n<\/p>\n \n The evidence is live, the risk is low, the cost is manageable. Scotland has done the hard work of proving the concept so that Westminster<\/a> wouldn\u2019t have to.\n<\/p>\n \n And yet Westminster Labour won\u2019t touch it.\n<\/p>\n \n Not because they can\u2019t. Not because the evidence is unclear. But because under a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, the electoral calculus points in a different direction.\n<\/p>\n \n \n Reducing child poverty in England would require spending that might unsettle the Tory swing voters Labour need to hold power under FPTP. And in the brutal arithmetic of majoritarian politics, holding power matters more than reducing child poverty. That is not an accusation; it is what my four years of research, published this week by London-based think tank Compass as Lifting The Lid On Britain\u2019s Pressure Cooker Politics, predicts and has now evidenced in detail.\n<\/p>\n \n My paper maps for the first time the direct causal chain between FPTP, the inequality it produced, and the political consequences now arriving. FPTP doesn\u2019t just produce bad policy \u2013 it makes good policy politically irrational.\n<\/p>\n \n Scotland, operating under a proportional system, has shown what becomes possible when that constraint is removed. But Westminster Labour will not say so.\n<\/p>\n \n READ MORE: Danny Dorling: Why did the BBC uphold its flawed claim on UK income inequality?<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n Here, Dorling\u2019s game becomes something more than a parlour trick. Because what Scotland has achieved within the constraints of devolution is precisely what Lifting the Lid argues proportional systems make possible. A government accountable to a broader coalition of interests, unable to ignore the poorest, forced to take seriously the kind of redistributive policies that FPTP\u2019s electoral arithmetic makes toxic at Westminster.\n<\/p>\n \n Free university education. The Scottish Child Payment. Welfare provisions that are not radical by European standards, they are simply normal. Normal across a continent where proportional systems keep redistributive politics viable; abnormal only where FPTP has made them electoral poison.\n<\/p>\n \n And here is the uncomfortable truth that Westminster Labour and, for that matter, the Unionist case more broadly, has so far refused to confront.\n<\/p>\n \n This is not an argument about SNP competence or Labour hypocrisy. It is an argument about structural arithmetic.\n<\/p>\n \n \n Under first past the post, Westminster governments will always face the same electoral calculus \u2013 redistributive spending risks the swing voters that determine outcomes in marginal English seats.\n<\/p>\n \n It doesn\u2019t matter which party holds power. The system selects against the policies that would serve Scotland and the poorest parts of England, because the voters who decide elections are somewhere else.\n<\/p>\n \n Devolution has proved this. Scotland, under the PR system Labour themselves designed for Holyrood<\/a> has shown what is possible when that constraint is removed.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has U-turned on his support for a change of UK electoral system (Image: Stefan Rousseau\/PA))\n<\/p>\n