The nations

Rev. 01 Feb 26

The UK is the union of four separate nations, and three of them have their own devolved national parliaments.

  • Scotland uses the Additional Member System (AMS) for elections to its devolved national parliament, with 73 of its 129 MSPs elected by FPTP and 56 of them by regional party lists.[1] Scotland has 57 UK parliamentary constituencies.
  • Wales. Elections to the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) are currently by AMS but from the election in May 2026 they will be by pure D’Hondt. There will be 16 constituencies, each electing six Members to the Senedd.[2] Wales has 32 UK parliamentary constituencies.
  • Northern Ireland (NI). The Northern Ireland Assembly has 90 members elected in 18 five-member constituencies by the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. NI has 18 UK parliamentary constituencies.

England itself has its business handled by the UK parliament, which sometimes causes confusion. England has a total of 543 UK parliamentary constituencies. These are in 9 regions identified for statistical purposes, which were also used as constituencies for EU parliamentary elections.[3]

UK. We are looking for a new electoral system for UK to replace its current FPTP system. Which in the short term has to be PV (ORCV),
But if the system is to change in the longer term, after the Commission has reported, is there any reason to insist on having a uniform system for the whole UK? Would it not be more congenial to allow each of the four nations to choose what system to use for UK elections?[4]
In which case each might choose to adopt the same system as it has for its national elections (AMS, D’Hondt or STV). Or, having had the chance to try it out, they might possibly see the benefit of changing their national system to PV.

In which case we might, after the Commission has reported, be looking for a longer term option for England only, leaving it to the devolved nations to “do their own thing”.
Indeed, there is no obvious reason why they should not be given that option for the next UK general election, as an alternative to PV.

  1. Wiki: The Scottish Parliament comprises 129 members known as Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), elected for five-year terms under the regionalised form of Additional-member system (MMP): 73 MSPs represent individual geographical constituencies elected by the plurality (first-past-the-post) system, while a further 56 are returned as list members from eight additional member regions. Each region elects seven party-list MSPs. Each region elects 15 to 17 MSPs in total. ↩︎
  2. Everyone 16+ will now have one vote, choosing a political party or independent candidate. And anyone standing for election must live in Wales. ↩︎
  3. These regions contain 47, 61, 75, 27, 73, 91, 58, 57, 54 UK parliamentary constituencies. ↩︎
  4. That same freedom is exactly what the EU gives for elections to the European Parliament; which is why we were able to have our awful version of D’Hondt, with small constituencies. ↩︎