OUR Labour candidate David Drew’s defeat in the General Election on May 7 was a tragedy for all progressive opinion in the area.

The fact that by 2020 Stroud will have been represented by a Conservative MP for a decade is scarcely believable, given the area’s growing national reputation as a centre of radical leading-edge thinking and social innovation.

But we must not forget that our newly elected government has little if any legitimacy, with an extraordinary three in four of the registered voters in the United Kingdom not having voted for what is, in effect, yet another five-year “elected dictatorship”.

In Britain we manifestly do not live in anything approaching a democratic society, and progressive opinion must now accept, after a quarter century of neo-liberal (Thatcher) and neo-liberal-lite (Blair) elected dictatorships, that the time for proportional representation has come.

PR’s best chance of success is for Labour to introduce it in their next election manifesto, which would then encourage many minor-party supporters to vote tactically for the party to ensure its election.

Once introduced, PR would then mean that we would never again be subjected to a right-wing elected dictatorship that could do whatever it wants to our country for five years.

But I fear that Labour is still far too wedded to dinosaur “two-party dictatorship politics” to have the sense to pursue this eminently achievable scenario – and would sooner have a Conservative government than give up the possibility of being an elected dictatorship again themselves.

How ironic that both the Tories and Labour are engaged in this disreputable Faustian pact that denies the people a truly authentic democratic system.

Future historians will surely look with contempt upon their power-driven, anti-democratic self interest.

Dr Richard House

Green Party member Stroud