I think Alun Evans and Peter Hennessy identify drift where most of us see that the democracy boat has already sailed. (“Our democracy is drifting. It’s time to act”, News). Their 10 big issues miss the most important one. Unless we abandon our first-past-the-post system in favour of proportional representation we will continue, as at our last election, to vote in majority governments from only 34% of votes cast and the 7.3 million voters (25% of our electorate) who put their cross against a Ukip, Lib Dem or Green candidate will have no more to show for their vote than 10 MPs between them. hey might certainly be envious of the 1.5 million Scots who voted for SNP and got 54 MPs elected to parliament to represent them.
If proportional representation does not speed to the top of the democracy agenda soon, then a large proportion of the population will continue to be disenfranchised, their votes will be seen to have unequal value and disengagement with politics will grow deeper.
The sails of UK democracy are disappearing fast over the horizon and the Tories and Labour are happy to wave them on their way.
Jasper Dorgan
Edington, Wiltshire
Our buzzards need protection
When I was a young boy – I am now 87 – it was a cause of great delight to travel from London to the west country and actually see a buzzard (“Buzzards back in hunters’ crosshairs over threat to UK pheasant shoots”, News, last week). Even more exhilarating was a trip to mid-Wales where my brother and I saw red kites which had been so persecuted that only 14 existed. These are native birds in our countryside, and it beggars belief that Natural England, the government agency tasked with protecting England’s wildlife, should issue a license to a gamekeeper to shoot up to 10 buzzards. This will encourage farmers, who raise thousands of pheasants, to believe that they too can kill buzzards with impunity.
In the autumn, when these foreign birds are released in order to be killed for fun, they stream into our garden and wood where for free they feast on insect life and any slow-worms, grass snakes or lizards that have not yet hibernated. The A361 to the west country is littered with squashed pheasants, and it would be interesting to know how many accidents they cause motor cyclists and car drivers.
John Butter
Barnstaple
Politics is not just for the few
While Sonia Sodha’s article (“Backing every protest without question harms progressive collective action”, Comment) was a provocative read, it was also flawed. Collective association and action is as much as part of our democracy as elections and neither is perfect.
Collective action may start from a specific concern but can lead into broader systemic issues of which the original concern may merely be a symptom. As a result, collective movements can be hijacked or perceived to be. I am sure there were the same arguments about the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s as there are now about Black Lives Matter. In terms of the junior doctors’ action, this has widened out, but is this a bad thing? The article could have chosen climate change as an example where collective action, however imperfect, could change things where no government has the stomach.
Even when collective action is enhanced by technology we hear MPs putting this down to armchair protesters. The benefits of an imperfect civil society and collective action on the part of people far outweigh the serious misgivings people have in our parliamentary democracy and a weak opposition to boot. We cannot leave politics to the politicians. It is all of our business, however imperfect.
I wish Theresa May luck in her quest to put this government on the side of the many and poorest rather than the few. Even Adam Smith recognised that government was in the hands of the owners of society. She has about three centuries of history to undo.
Richard Szadziewski
Wotton Under Edge
South Gloucestershire
Vocations need brains, too
Children at secondary moderns were only “less academic” for the time it took to sit the 11-plus exam. (RJ Roscoe, Letters). Why should only they have “a good vocational training for the workplace?” Now more than ever, given Brexit, we need a highly educated and motivated workforce across the board. How insulting to assume that vocational work does not need brains.
Helen Edmunds
Billericay
Frackers’ inconvenient truth?
You report that fracking for shale gas causes “inconvenience”, which is to be mitigated by cash payments to local communities (“In Ohio frackers are drilling…”, Business). The UK government apparently thinks the same way with its plans to offer fracking sweeteners to individual households.
It is ironic that at the same time you run a leader urging the UK to sign up to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Is this the same climate change that is largely caused by fossil fuel emissions and which is already causing havoc worldwide through extreme weather events and rising sea levels?
Perhaps the companies set to frack in the UK regard those as just an “inconvenience” as well.
Duncan Forbes
Charlbury, Oxfordshire
