The more your think and hear....

Eric Pickles, Tory Party Chairman, has a letter in today's Times on the subject of proportional representation.

He suggests that the system has two major defects - you can't "kick the rascals out", and that it would strength political parties rather than electors. His letter is brief and we are left to think out the reasons for ourselves.

Getting rid of the "rascals". In virtually every example of PR the result is coalition government. Indeed, this is held to be the main advantage of the system. If parties in a coalition can persuade the electors that they are different, then disillusioned voters from one may switch to the other and the coalition can survive with a different balance. Even if the major party is discredited and voters switch to the opposition, the minor party will continue in government in a hung parliament situation. So smaller parties could continue for years within coalition government, on each occasion extracting concessions which would be supported only by a minority of the electorate.

There seems little doubt that The LibDems are hoping for a hung parliament to begin this process, while G. Brown & Co are hoping to continue with LibDem support. Hence the interest in PR suddenly.

The second point is the further reduction in voter power to choose candidates. Under the system for the EU we effectively vote for parties, with no control over who the successful candidates will be. The party lists are decided at HQ. Even in the "plus" system, where we vote for candidates and where subsequently when total party votes and proportions are discovered and "extra" representatives are deemed to be elected to make the total representation proportional, the same objection applies. In an attempt to overcome this the proposal is made to have "multi-member" constituencies with huge areas to elect , say, six representatives, there are still problems - what if there are more than six parties, and how is one representative going to deal with all those who voted for him or her in the half million or so voters in a huge area? This looks awfully like our electoral EU list system again.

As Pickles says, once you remove the immediate link between local parties, candidates and voters, you take contact and influence away from voters and transfer it to the party hierarchy in London, or wherever, and all in the name of achieving a certain mathematical result.

If you have concern about uneven voting within and between areas, of "safe" seats, then there are other things to do, such as primaries and recall.