28 June 2022
Dear editor,
I completely agree with Mike Baldwin that we need a new voting system, based upon proportionality, to refresh and renew our ailing democracy and prioritise the interests of all citizens. In the 2019 General Election it took 38,300 votes for every Conservative MP elected, 50,800 for every Labour MP elected, 336,000 for every Liberal elected, and 866,000 for the Green Party's one and only MP. How can that be fair? How is that representative? The result has been an elective dictatorship run by a man who has torn up the rulebook, continually twisted and turned and lied, and played fast and loose with the very fabric of our weakened democracy. He is maintained in power by a desperately poor-calibre cabinet of sycophants who are out of touch with the real problems experienced by ever- increasing numbers of the British public. The people will make their voice heard eventually but once again it looks like, as in the mid- term of the Theresa May Government, it will be that select elite - the Parliamentary Conservative Party - who will decide upon changing their leader, who also happens to be Our Prime Minister. And the next Leader/Prime Minister will then be chosen by the declining cohort who constitute the aging membership of the Conservative Party. We need constitutional change, protection of public standards and the rule of law, and the accountability of all public servants, not least that of a moral and honest Prime Minister. We desperately need Proportional Representation. But it is the Labour Party - currently the second Party in terms of votes in England and Wales - who hold the key to the door of progress. They must open up to the more progressive side of politics and realise that it is in the national interest that we throw out this chronic voting system. Change must come through the modernisation of our democracy, supported by all the democratic political parties, and not through official or unofficial pacts and agreements. Its time to wake up and smell the coffee! Its time to come into the twenty-first century!
Paul Goodman
Loughborough
