THE REAL ISSUE

Dear Janice Parker,

Here is a 1997 safe seat election result which I have selected at random:-

Rother Valley: Lab 31,184; Con 7,699; LD 5342; Other 1,932. So 7699 plus 1 = 7700 voters were represented by the Labour winner. Every one of the remaining votes was represented by no-one: one Labour MP went to Westminster representing 7,700 voters, ie 17% of those who voted, or 11% of the total electorate. (Electorate 68584; voters 47157 = 69%; ie abstentions = 31%)

In this case , if we generously exclude the Tory "yardstick" vote of 7699, the proportion of wasted votes is 67%. Moreover the result would have been the same if 23,484 of the Labour voters had stayed at home, or if all the people who abstained from voting had voted for the Tories: one Labour MP would have been elected.

It will be seen that turnout was a mere 69%; but it is surprising that so many Labour voters turned out; and, in this regard only, it is reasonable to ask why the the proportion of abstainers was not nearer to 65% than to the actual 31%. The fact is that, particularly in safe seats, voters go down to the polling booth, election after election, in the knowledge that their vote will probably not make the slightest difference to the outcome. Voters are becoming more aware of this and we are seeing turnout continuing to decrease.

In the face of this we find the government (incidentally apparently more concerned with turnout than fair representation - as if the purpose of elections was to achieve the highest possible turnout) fiddling about with the mechanics of voting instead of introducing a truly democratic representive electoral system, preferably STV. The latter system would elect representatives on the basis of quotas, instead of whether one party had a couple more votes than its nearest rival.

While we continue with FPTP it will matter little whether people vote in a polling booth, by post, on the Internet, on Thursday or Saturday or Sunday. There may be a marginal increase in turnout (of which 70% would in any case be wasted under FPTP) if we voted on Saturday - who knows!

But in any case it is -as demonstrated above - wholly irrelvant so long as we hang onto FPTP despite the fact that there is still outstanding an unequivocal 1997 manifesto commitment, to move towards a democratic PR system, that was so cynically reneged on in 1998. (And as a result we still have a minority elective dictatorship with a phoney wholly unrepresentative majority of 65 seats even though it has the support of only 35% of those who voted and a mere 21% of the total electorate. Contrast this with the minority executive in Edinburgh with its real representative majority of just one over its nearet rival - Labour).

Best wishes

Joe Patterson