Case for reform

First, B Coates’ ‘earthbound alien’ would have witnessed a relentless, carefully orchestrated right-wing media assault on Labour, and a series of repeated lies in the Tory campaign, that left Goebbels' propaganda machine looking like a Church of England newsletter.

Our non-dom owned ruling-class media will do absolutely anything, short of law-breaking, to stop a party to the left of Tony Blair (‘the best Conservative leader Britain has ever had’) gaining power in Britain.

What a ‘democracy’ to be proud of (not).

It is our disgraceful media (the SNJ excepted, of course!) which demonstrates the ‘astonishing contempt for voters’ bemoaned by B Coates, not those who expose the scarcely believable machinations of our current apology for a ‘democracy’.

Francis Ray claims that no-one beyond my own family believes in my ‘blue skies policy’ of proportional representation.

Try telling that to the more thanover half a million citizens who have to date signed the petition demanding PR (it looks like I must have a rather big family).

Adrian Bishop’s more intelligent letter raises the important issue of different kinds of PR, and the five per cent threshold.

But his projection of the recent election result if held under such a system ignores one crucial point: under PR, everyone knows they can vote for the party they really support, rather than tactically to stop the candidate they most don’t want to win; so it is entirely illegitimate to assume that under a PR system, the electorate would have voted in the same proportions as they did under first-past-the-post.

Indeed, my own hunch is that if the last election had had a PR voting system, Ukip and the Greens would have gained at least seven million votes, with both parties easily gaining more than five per cent of the vote.

True democracy requires a system where everyone votes positively for what they want, not one which propagates Machiavellian inauthenticity and the cynical negativity of the ‘spoiling’ vote.

But the strongest case for PR concerns the very legitimacy of our polity itself, which is fundamentally undermined when an ‘elected’ government supported by less than a quarter of the electorate passes ideological legislation that is repugnant to most voters.

For why should large sections of the voters see any reason to obey laws which have no authentically democratic mandate?

The resulting alienation and, at worst, civil disobedience that could result from such ‘governance without mandate’ should be what really concerns apologists for the current first-past-the-post system – and in my view makes the case for urgent electoral reform unanswerable.

Dr Richard House

Green party member

Stroud