Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Sir: I write in disappointment at your lead story of 10 May. Again PR is falsely portrayed as the saviour of the electoral system. The articles do not address the obvious flaws in any PR system, such as unstable and fragmented government, disproportionate power given to minority parties in government, and a rise in the prominence of single-issue parties... It also fails to address the biggest failure of PR, and that is the lack of local involvement in political decisions. Where would the next Martin Bell come from? How can voters choose a hardworking local candidate, when the choices they are faced with are simple bland party affiliates? It would mean the end of the awkward squad, and a beginning of totalitarian party lists - is that more democracy or less democracy?

Whereas the current political system of cronyism and people who Tony bLiar likes being given numerous extra chances in power despite being shown to display poor moral judgement is obviously so much better. And I'm not convinced that 'unstable and fragmented government' is necessarily a bad thing, to me it would make all parties work a darn site harder for our votes to ensure that such a thing wouldn't happen. To have a situation where the BNP could sit on the House of Commons might encourage the Tories and New Labour to stop using immigrants as their whipping boy and debate about the issue sensibly (which doesn't happen at the moment, someone in New Labour will pop up and say they want a sensible debate and then a few hours later Shiteyes or nowadays Clarke will announce a measure to horsewhip immigrants as a measure to further deter 'bogus claimants').

The Independent is talking about electoral reform. I'm looking with real interest at Make My Vote Count, though sadly I'm not free to go to the meeting tonight at The Commons. I've been eligible to vote since about '94 and have voted in every election I was entitled to vote in, so roughly one a year since then. I've only voted for a winning candidate twice as far as I know, Ken for London mayor last year and for the Labour candidate in a council election a few months ago. So that's about eight times when, if I'd stayed at home, it wouldn't have affected the result at all.

We invaded Iraq to bring democracy. When do we have democracy here?

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