Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Was the cones hotline an innovation before its time?
He quotes a recent speech by Major in which the former Prime Minister argued that recent General Elections have thrown into doubt the continuing validity of the “first past the post” system of voting, and that as voting preferences spread more widely it provides distorted results. Major argued, quite correctly that the democratic case for examining this is growing. Bush says:
The last political campaign I was involved in, before I realised I didn’t have the necessary qualities to be an effective political activist, was the doomed “Yes to AV” campaign. I still really like the alternative vote, because I think it captures how most of us vote — we don’t have a clear and fixed preference for any one party, we have preferences that we are willing to compromise on and red lines that we won’t cross. I continue to think that ranked choice voting is also a more psychologically healthy way of thinking about who you support and why, and I think that preferential systems encourage candidates to converge on the common ground, though this isn’t quite the same thing as the political centre.
But the case for changing our electoral system has I think grown much stronger since that alternative vote referendum in 2011. As Major sets out, our voting preferences have spread yet further in the past 15 years, and the first past the post system has become even more of a lottery. One reason why voting has become more diffuse, I think, is that people have grown used to a more bespoke and personally tailored set of choices.
That similar impulse is precisely what Major’s “cones hotline” was designed to address. See some roadworks? Want to know what they’re for? Call the cones hotline! And what is one of the most frequent uses of social media today? It is to find out what is causing some kind of roadworks, or to use the estate’s WhatsApp group to find out if anyone else has reported the broken lift to the council. That direct ability to see something and find out what is going on is what we now all take for granted, 34 years after the cones hotline was so mocked.
And that desire for a more personal service is, in my view, why people will continue to vote for smaller parties and why our electoral system is going to become more and more of a lottery without change.
Stephen Bush is absolutely right in this. Old party loyalties have broken down, people like to pick and choose from election to election from a wide range of options and that means that first past the post is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. Now is the time to change that.
