VOTERS IN THE United Kingdom will go to the polls on May 5 next year – almost precisely a year after the general election – to decide whether to drop the country’s ‘first past the post’ electoral system in favour of a modified version of proportional representation.

A bill to put the amendment to a referendum received royal assent last night, after a last-minute push to have the bill rushed through so that the vote could take place alongside assembly elections in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and English council elections.

The measure, if passed, would see the current method replaced by the ‘alternate vote’ – a system identical to that used in Ireland for presidential elections and Dáil by-elections, where the traditional system of proportional representation is modified to take account for the single-seat constituency system used by the UK.

The new system – championed by the Liberal Democrats before the election, and which formed a major aspect of the party’s coalition deal with the Conservatives – may see a split develop between the coalition parties, however; David Cameron’s Conservatives are likely to oppose the motion, despite having permitted its passage through Westminster.

The referendum’s prospects have also been boosted by the decision of the House of Lords to drop its insistence that the referendum require a quorum of 40 per cent turnout in order to become valid.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, however, said he would be backing the referendum, writing in the Guardian that the new system “offers an opportunity for political reform, ensuring the voice of the public is heard louder than it has been in the past”.

Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats had long advocated scrapping the first-past-the-post system, believing that it would give it a larger representation in the House of Commons – in last year’s election, the party won the votes of 23 per cent of voters but fewer than 9 per cent of seats.

Though referenda in individual parts of the UK are not uncommon, only one previous referendum has seen voters go to the polls across the entire UK – a referendum to endorse its membership of the European Economic Community in June 1975, which passed by a significant margin.

A proposal similar to that proposed by the Liberal Democrats – with single-seat constituencies elected by the amended form of proportional representation – features among Fianna Fáil’s electoral plans in next week’s general election in Ireland.