"Renewing our democracy is at the heart of our reforms" the Government claimed a year ago today but, a year later, it's still not how it's acting. The quotation comes from Jack Straw's written ministerial statement of this time last year, in which he set out the Government’s alleged progress in meeting the then one year-old objectives of the Governance of Britain programme of constitutional reform.

The full sentence is "Renewing our democracy is at the heart of our reforms, building a new relationship between citizens and government and ensuring that the rights of individuals are fully respected." What is the most basic relationship between citizens and government? It is the way the legislature is elected and the Government chosen. What has the Government done about that in the intervening year? Nothing!

In the meantime, the MPs’ expenses scandal has stimulated growing calls for electoral reform that are unlikely to go away. True, some ministers have suggested half-hearted reforms like AV and AV+, but the Government as a whole still shows no signs of introducing even either of those systems or, much better, letting the people decide in a national referendum.

STV is especially relevant to the expenses scandal because it would allow voters to express their views in the ballot box on the relative integrity of candidates; it would enable them to re-elect the honest and careful and boot out the dishonest and careless without having to vote against their own party.

Bishop Colin Buchanan’s views should be more widely disseminated. Roger Bolton could have been more helpful in promoting STV in his interview with Bishop Colin on the "Sunday" programme on 14th June. He on the contrary in effect dismissed the Bishop’s arguments with the usual phoney argument about unstable government under "PR" - "look at Italy!"

Of course to expect any support for PR of any kind from anyone in the BBC would be unrealistic - indeed I have heard it suggested that they have been "got at" by the government, anxious to avoid anything drawing attention to their 1997 electoral reform commitments or above all their cynical reneging on these commitments So could it be that, as a matter of policy, presenters are required either to side-step the issue or defend the current undemocrtic first-past-the-post system as always in fact they seem to do?

I was moved to e-mail Roger Bolton as below. As expected I have not received any reply; nor of course was there any mention of it on the Feedback programme

"Dear Roger,

I was interested in your discussion with Bishop Colin Buchanan on your programme Sunday ( Sunday June 14th) which came round to electoral reform. As one would expect, Bishop Colin - closely associated as he is with the Electoral Reform Society - supported the Single Transferable Vote.

The one absolutely essential reform is to get rid of the current electoral system - first-past-the-post (FPTP) - which however many members of both main parties wish to hang onto for tribalist party reasons.

That Bishop Buchanan should have the opportunity, rare indeed on the BBC, to express his views on electoral systems was welcome. I was, however, disappointed at your apparent support for retaining the present system, and at your assumption that PR means the Italian closed list system. This is one myth among many deliberately fostered by the two main parties and is particularly hypocritical on the part of David Cameron since the Tory party is the party that in 1973 introduced STV into Northern Ireland.

To precede this change they produced an excellent pamphlet enthusiastically explaining the merits of STV, and by implication the shortcomings of FPTP. STV is the system that the Irish Republic have also used successfully for many years. It is significant that oppponents of reform always refer to Italy and never to either Northern Ireland or the Irish Republic.- or indeed the many PR systems used for many years in the EU. (The UK is the only EU country using the antediluvian FPTP system for its main legislature.)

I attach a scan of the Northern Ireland pamphlet which Feedback and Sunday may in present circumstances perhaps find interesting and useful.

Finally I would emphasise that nobody campaigning for reform would call for anything like the Italian system ;and the majority are calling for STV as recommended by the Electoral Reform Society.

Kind regards
Joe Patterson

We welcome the Northern Ireland Executive’s decision that local authorities in the province must elect their committees by STV.

Your chance to tell the Speaker's Conference how STV would increase the representation of under-represented groups.

Visit the Speaker's Conference forum now

The Parliamentary Outreach Officer wrote to STV Action and asked us to promote this forum.

Please do use this opportunity to express your views. When you visit the site, you will find three questions. "What is the best way to increase ...?" is the one most relevant to electoral reform. If you think that electoral reform, especially STV, would increase the representation of under-represented groups, this is your chance to say so.

For those of you who twitter or perhaps would like to read what others have twittered. It might be worth visiting:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ref2010

(hash tag: #ref2010)

to see what people have written so far about Referendum 2010.

We warmly welcome today’s action by Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, in putting electoral reform high on the political agenda by calling for a referendum on it. In particular, we welcome the proposal to let voters – not MPs – decide on the voting system. When so many MPs (although not all) cannot be trusted to restrict their expenses claims to acceptable items and amounts, we cannot trust them to decide how they should be elected.

However, although it is understandable that Alan Johnson proposed the AV+ system for the referendum because the Jenkins Commission recommended it in 1998, politics have moved on since then. The current scandal of MPs’ expenses makes it essential to have a voting system that makes MPs really accountable to voters. STV, more than any other system, would allow voters to choose between candidates of the same and different parties and enable them to reward the honest and remove the dishonest without any risk of splitting the party vote.

The current scandal of MPs’ expenses and allowances has triggered a popular demand for reform and some people think that proportional representation (PR) should be an important part of a reform package. Beneficial though PR would be in other ways, it would do little or nothing in itself to solve the expenses scandal.

STV, however, would have a very direct effect. Unlike other PR systems, STV would abolish safe seats; all candidates would have to compete for election with rivals from other parties and their own. If voters felt that Joe Bloggs MP had exploited the expenses system, they could replace him with another candidate from the same, or another, party or with an independent without any risk of splitting the party vote. In practice, voters may not need to replace MPs because knowing they were going to have to compete for their own seats would probably make them much more careful with their expenses in the first place. Of course, for STV to have this effect, voters would need legitimate access to MPs’ expenses claims so there would have to be complete transparency; they would have to be published in detail fairly soon after being made.