DOUGLAS R Mayer could hardly be more wrong (Letters, June 3).
We do need PR for Westminster elections. The other changes he suggests may or may not be beneficial, but without PR nothing fundamental will change.
In the election just held, the first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP) left just over half of those who voted without representation in the Parliament. What Mr Mayer seems not to realise is that even if only the same two large parties contested every constituency in the whole of the UK, the defective FPTP voting system would still leave around half of those who voted without representation. And even with only two parties, FPTP would still leave us with "electoral deserts", where one party or the other appeared to have no support in large swathes of the UK because it won few seats despite its local votes. It is a complete myth that FPTP worked well when most voters supported only the two largest parties.
And to Alastair Wallace (Letters, June 3) I would say the Electoral Reform Society did not miss the fundamental point. If the parliament were elected by the single transferable vote system of proportional representation (STV-PR), any majority government (single party or coalition) could be a majority only because it represented a majority of those who had voted. The advantage of STV-PR over other PR voting systems is that it gives the voters the greatest freedom of choice among the candidates. That way we should get a parliament that was properly representative of the people.
Dr James Gilmour,
24/12 East Parkside, Edinburgh.
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