Will of people?

It seems that T Gardiner has got himself into a bit of a muddle over his definition of democracy and sought to cover it with a substantial layer of bovine excrement (Tried and tested, The News, February 8th) In our representative democracy sovereignty is the express will of Parliament, not the people.

The people are only sovereign for one day every five years, when they choose their parliamentary representatives at the ballot box. His version of direct democracy is outlawed by a constitutional convention to prevent our faith in the democratic process from being undermined by the tyranny of the majority.

Prime minster Cameron and MPs deliberately set the convention aside when they voted to put their EU membership squabble to a populist vote. The 2016 referendum abandoned the protection of representative democracy and substituted a winner takes all public

In our representative democracy sovereignty is the will of Parliament, not the people R THOMSON

vote instead.

Coupled with a grossly unrepresentative electoral system where only 34 per cent of voters delivered a government with a 80 plus parliamentary majority, small wonder why the public have lost faith in politicians and democracy. If Democracy is just majoritarian – not representative rule – then every vote must count, not just that of voters who strongly believe it’s their unalienable right to speak for the entire nation, when the remainder

don’t matter at all.

Those who voted for the other parties don’t get a look in, and are in effect disenfranchised fuelling the current crisis in the democratic process by their wasted votes.

It all boils down to what you mean by democracy.

The language of dictators or government where everyone has confidence that representative democracy is able to resolve political differences and deliver a Parliament that more accurately reflects the society we live in and the views we hold. Because of our increasingly dysfunctional democracy, where only one level of our parliament has supreme absolute power to make or unmake any law, the winner takes all is simply a five year span of elected duopoly dictatorship, with one party or the other exercising absolute power in the name of all the people.

Mr Gardiner’s definition of democracy is simply rule by numbers, not the unequivocal consent of all the electorate and is unfit for purpose in the 21st century.

Richard Thomson Gosport