Sir, – Bill Redmond (May 13th) highlights perceived unfairness with respect to the asserted lack of proportionality with respect to the UK general election result.
In particular the British media has focused on the statistic referred to also by Mr Redmond whereby Ukip obtained 3.8 million votes across all constituencies, yet only secured one seat.
First, the Ukip result represented a typical vote of between 6,000 and 9,000 seen across English constituencies. This sort of return in a given constituency would not be remotely close to the requirement to win a British single-seat constituency, with or without transferable voting.
One of the great ironies of the alternative vote (AV) proposal is that if it had been passed in a referendum, it would have made practically no difference to the result for the Liberal Democrats, owing to the frankly brutal returns seen by the party in most constituencies.
Second, it must be appreciated that there would be colossal pragmatic difficulties inherently concerned in any attempts to calibrate the UK system to introduce more proportionality along the lines of the proportional representation through the single transferable vote (PR-STV) system in Ireland.
There are 650 lower house parliamentary seats for over 46 million UK voters, whereas for the current Dáil, 166 TDs were elected by 3.2 million voters in 2011.
To satisfactorily address the primary complaint made that UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party should have garnered more seats, six-seater constituencies would need to be evident if adopting the Irish model, resulting in massive readjusted constituencies.
If the UK system alternately incorporated a national party list system for half of its seats (a drastically different beast to the current system, which may be considered as unlikely to be approved by voters, given the AV referendum experience) elected MPs for local constituencies would then be required to represent an electorate size double to one done so presently.
Finally, Barry Walsh’s central point is correct in asserting that 35 to 38 per cent representation is not an inappropriate level for an overall majority in the UK. Even in the Irish model, a party can potentially reach an overall majority once obtaining 42 per cent or more. – Yours, etc,
JOHN KENNEDY,
Goatstown,
Dublin 14.