Proportional representation

Sir,

I see Alastair Redman is back in the Courier’s letters page and titled Councillor, and not Conservative and Unionist candidate for something or other.

His letter seems to be a rehashed Tory party press release and a spokesman takes some statistics and twists them into an SNP bad story.

The Courier should be careful when printing these. Recently many Scottish papers published corrections having used a Labour press release to compile knocking stories about ScotRail without checking the facts.

Back to Mr Redman. I have always favoured proportional representation and Scotland uses a variety of methods to attempt a true reflection of people’s wishes.

However, they only work if people express those wishes. On a poll of 54.1 per cent of 5,250 electors, under single transferable vote (STV), 648 wanted Mr Redman as their first choice for councillor.

I’m also surprised it was that many, 12 per cent. He was duly elected at the fifth stage and in my ward, Kintyre and the Islands, is now one of three councillors.

For Holyrood elections Scotland uses the D’Hoyt system with top-up list MSPs.

That gives us a Conservative who has never won any election and yet has been an MSP for 17 years.

For the European Parliament, another variation of D’Hoyt gives us a UKIP MEP on 10.5 per cent of the vote of 33.5 per cent of the electorate, that is 3.5 per cent.

There is a sense in which these are fair systems, but only if the electorate use them. To return representatives favoured by so few people is absurd. The answer is to make using your vote a statutory duty with penalties for not voting.

For conscientious objectors, there should be a none of the above option on every ballot paper.

If none of the above wins, then the seat should be left vacant until the next election. A vacancy would do less harm than many of our current representatives.

Tony Williams, Grumpy old man, Muasdale.