THE suggestion from the political think-tank the Electoral Reform Society that Theresa May was kept in power due to the UK's archaic electoral system will chime with the concerns of many Sunday Herald readers.
This newspaper has always believed that Westminster's First Past the Post (FPTP) system should be consigned to the dustbin of history. It is anti-democratic.
Electoral reform campaigners objected in the 1980s to a system which allowed Margaret Thatcher to win Commons majorities of over 100 on roughly 42 per cent of the vote and impose hated polices such as the Poll Tax. Some three decades later, the same democratic deficit remains.
The ERS finding that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) - a system of proportional representation used for Scottish council elections - would have seen the Tories defeated will add to fears that democracy is not work fairly and for all.
As such, it is time to look afresh at scrapping FPTP and replace it with some form of proportional representation.
That a quirk of Westminster's voting system may have artificially kept the Tories in power must fuel the cause of those who want to see PR introduced.
In the months that follow - with the Tories pressing ahead with a disastrous hard Brexit, as well as their a brutal policies on the Welfare State - it will be tempting to wish that the June election had been conducted under PR.
In a 2011 referendum the UK electorate rejected the option of replacing FPTP with the Alternative Vote, a hugely watered down version of PR that few people were enthusiastic about, after the LibDems recklessly accepted that option in the coalition deal with the Tories.
But in the six years since that vote we have seen the Tories remain in power, firstly on a minority of the vote and now propped up by the hardline DUP - and all this has been coupled with the democratic outrage of Scotland and Northern Ireland being dragged out of the EU against the will of voters.
The Sunday Herald fully endorses the ERS claim that our current electoral system is broken. As such it is time to restart the argument for proportional representation in the interests of democracy.
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