As a Canadian member of the Conservative party, I find myself among the 0.2% of the population who can vote on who the next prime minister will be (Truss v Sunak: how do Tory PM contenders differ on policy?, 15 August). The reason for this is supposedly that we have a parliamentary system, not a presidential one.
My party is currently dominated by a small, unrepresentative group of increasingly cantankerous old southerners who want to abandon Conservative sound finance for la-la land economics, while the rest of us pay them to pretend that there is no inflation.
What about the new Tory-curious voters in the north who gave us the seats we need to govern, but are not yet well represented among the Conservative party membership?
A simple change would go a long way to fixing this: give equal weight to the vote from each constituency. That is what the Conservative party of Canada did when they were nearly obliterated in the 1990s. If we do not do this now, we may be forced to – after an election defeat.
Joseph Molto
Mitcham, London
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