Proportional representation has proven to work in Northern Ireland - Yorkshire Post Letters

In your letters column January 1, Paul Morley of Long Preston takes me to task (or attempts to) for my letter of December 28. Mr Morley asserts that the prophecies made with respect to Brexit “did not come to pass”. There are two points here.

First, in the immediate aftermath of the June 2016 vote the Bank of England reduced interest rates and engaged in “quantitative easing” (pumping money into the economy) to head off what otherwise would have been significant adverse economic reactions. Absent those Bank actions and the prophecies would have, to some extent, come to pass.

Secondly, in the longer run, just about every adverse consequence that had been predicted has been with us. Mr Morley's letter seeks to bat away statistics and data. His action is understandable because over 90 per cent of the evidence is against him. Estimates by dispassionate research teams of how much smaller the UK economy is as a result of Brexit vary between minus 4 per cent and minus 6 per cent.

Moving on to my suggested ditching of the ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, yes, we had a referendum in 2011 and those who wanted change lost.

In consequence the country lost, because it remains saddled with a system that maximises the numbers of wasted votes. This has engendered cynicism and apathy on the part of many voters, who do not see the point of voting.

The print media (almost all, close allies of the Conservative Party) did a great job for Cameron and co. by doing a dishonest hatchet job on the proposed reform.

Mr Morley points to the political impasse in the Stormont Assembly as evidence that proportional representation does not work. Again, two points here. The impasse is caused by the intransigence of Democratic Unionist behaviour that would be just as true if First Past the Post remained in position. Secondly, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in Northern Irish politics has been a significant success. Research by The Electoral Reform Society reports the following:

What it (their research) shows is that STV allows a significant chunk of citizens to ‘cross the divide’ when it comes to different communities, with a quarter of all Protestant preferences and a third of Catholics’ preferences going to non-unionist and non-nationalist candidates respectively.

My guess is that only a small minority of voters in Northern Ireland would want to go back to something as Neanderthal as ‘First Past the Post’.

Finally, Mr Morley attempts to take a pop at Labour's record in government 1997 - 2010. I am a paid-up Liberal Democrat and do not carry a torch for Labour. However, Labour's record in office is hugely better than what we have experienced since 2010 under the Conservatives, especially since 2015 when the Tories achieved unfettered power.

Ask a focus group of fifty year olds, “Were you happier, politically, in 2004 than you are today?” and I bet a pound to a penny 80 per cent would hark back nostalgically to the earlier period. Under today's Tories we have become ‘The Country Where Nothing Works’.