Membership News:

At Easter 2007 SYMVOS had recruited supporter number 426, the 47th from the Hampshire East constituency - which is the fourth of the 121 constituencies from which support has emanated

Call To Action

May I remind all Electors that New Labour promised a referendum on the way the House of Commons is elected in their manifesto before the 1997 general election. Despite a massive majority, they called another election one year before necessary and they have done so again with no referendum in sight. This despite 'The Independent' (15 May 2005) citing that 100 Labour MP's support electoral reform and believe it is in the interests of democracy to pursue it.

You can follow the Labour Party's attempts to pursue electoral reform at Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform

May I also remind each Supporter of the urgency of finding another who will go and do likewise. Please forward a link to our website to any interested party. Many thanks.

Letters To The Editor

THE NEWS, Monday March 19 2007

I have just received the government's response to a petition I signed asking the prime minister to initiate legislation requiring the single transferable vote (STV) for all British elections.

It adds nothing to all the Government's earlier responses on the issue but the misinformation must not go uncorrected despite its reiteration. Firstly, it is patently not true either that 'first-past-the-post' (the current voting system for Westminster)is straightforward or that it creates an obvious link between a constituent and his/her representative in Parliament.

On the contrary, X-voting, far from being straightforward, is increasingly used to vote tactically.

Far from creating the claimed link, about half those who vote elect no-one, and those who do have a party-list-of-one foisted on them. In truth, thousands don't know who their MP is, and of those who do, many genuinely do not find their views represented.

Secondly, the government highlights that it has introduced new voting systems for :

* the devolved administrations - a horrible hybrid system

* the European Parliament - a ghastly continental party list system

* Mayoral elections - an absurd supplementary vote system where the winning margin is smaller than the number of voters disenfranchised during it

* Assembly elections - another horrible hybrid system

The common factor is that the government has imposed these unsatisfactory systems on the electorate. Significantly, the only two occasions where the government concedes that STV has been introduced is in the Assembly in Northern ireland, where STV was already in use, and for Scottish local elections this May, for which the government can claim no credit.

The government concludes that it is undertaking a review of the experience of the new systems it has imposed upon us. What it should do is to hold the referendum on the way we elect MPs as it pledged to do in the 1997 manifesto which brought it to power, ensuring that STV is an option.

Bernard Black

ESSENTIAL LINKS:

Learn more about the Single Transferable Vote system

Link to STVAction

Link to the Electoral Reform Society