Voters should look beyond the main parties

Mark Edon, Millbeck Approach, Morley.

There is only one way to hold our politicians to account: don’t vote for them. I’m talking about the politicians in our main partyie’s and I’m not suggesting you don’t vote. I speak as the ex-constituency secretary of one of the main parties. Let me explain.

Sir Terry Pratchett tells a tale of a city suffering from a plague of rats with the government responding by offering a reward of a penny a tail. Costs climb and climb until the patrician says it’s time to “tax the rat farms”.

This wise advice shows an understanding of human behaviour we can learn from in the real world. We now have all our main party politicians being given donations by the rat farmers in exchange for raising the reward per tail with a hefty subsidy on top.

Substitute the climate crisis for the rats and the oil and gas companies for the rat farms and you have the UK today.

We are busy subsidising oil and gas companies who are making record profits whilst playing a major role in the cost-of-living crisis and destroying our environment. They are not just getting away with it scot free, we are paying them billions in subsidies.

From profits made follow the donations, in exchange for ever more favourable policies and subsidies, and so the spiral of corruption continues.

In the US we see ‘for profit’ prisons in a society that locks up more of their citizens than just about anyone else on Earth. I’m suggesting it’s not a coincidence. Private health makes huge profits in the US and surprise; US healthcare costs twice per head what the NHS costs us and the US population health measures are worse than ours.

All our main party politicians are now trousering large wads of cash from both these sectors and the policies being pushed by those politicians are no surprise.

They are loudly described as reforms for efficiency and more patient power and choice whilst the money is being quietly handed over. How can we break this spiral of doom? Simply not voting doesn’t work. Thirty per cent plus of us have been doing this for decades. If you don’t vote at all, the main parties simply don’t care about you.

It’s time for all of us to look further than blue, red or yellow and vote for a minor party that isn’t on the take. If enough of us do this, we might just start to see some change.

This kind of voting has shaken up legislatures and led to progress, in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

So it’s up to us. I’ll probably vote Green for this reason but I’m going to see who is on the ballot, check their manifestos and go from there.

Freedoms exploited

Jim Buckley, Ackton.

Peter Hyde (The Yorkshire Post, February 16) drew attention to his inability to understand how Americans select their President. Malcolm Naylor (The Yorkshire Post, February 24) follows with our home-grown example, adding that it represents democracy in action.

More than that, it illustrates a weakness of democracy. When people do not pay attention, and engage their mind in the democratic process, the system is vulnerable to exploitation. The freedoms of democracy are being exploited because we let them be exploited.