Lack of political representation shows the need for vote reform - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Hugh Boyd, Bishopthorpe, York.
Courses in school on various voting systems, specifically for youngsters who are about to vote at the age of 16 and 17, have been proposed.
There can be a significant discrepancy between the number of a party’s supporters who vote and the number of that party’s candidates who become MPs. Recent polls have recorded that 26 per cent of voters support the Reform Party. It is predicted, however, that this will result in 42 per cent of MPs in the House of Commons, sufficient to form a government. While it is only a prediction it does show to what extent the actual support and number of elected MPs can differ.
Where there are winners there are losers.
The 74 per cent voters who favour other parties would be represented by 58 per cent of MPs. The party you voted for could well be underrepresented in parliament.
The way we currently elect MPs has been accepted for a long time but has never worked fairly, even when there were only two main parties in the contest. Once three or four parties came into the fray, scope for discrepancies increased. This is not due to human manipulation but is inherent in the first-past-the-post voting system. There is little doubt that many previous parliaments were biased one way or another. Nothing can be done about the past but the sooner this unfairness can be removed, the better, preferably before the next General Election.
By good fortune, there already exists an act of parliament, passed in the House of Commons, after due scrutiny and voting, which legislates specifically to balance the number of MPs to the number of supporters in the various parties which has been used in Britain since 1998 when Scotland and Wales were devolved.
At that time the UK government introduced this legislation for the devolved Parliament and Assembly as their voting method. It has been running unobtrusively ever since.
If the political will exists, it will be possible to expand this tried and tested electoral reform to the whole United Kingdom before the next General Election to general benefit.
How can we get our senior politicians to realise this is an important and urgent part of our democracy? We hear these same politicians eulogising the 1940s generations for defending democracy at great personal sacrifice. Well, here is their opportunity to do similarly but in a less hazardous manner, just a little political turmoil.