Sir, – In answer to Neil McCleane (September 14th), the reason the Netherlands can make do with 150 MPs for 16 million people is that seats are allocated from party lists based on a national percentage of the vote, not by region.
This means that they can ignore MP to population ratios when deciding on the right number of MPs; they merely need to ensure a big enough parliament to provide a decent government and an effective opposition.
All local politics in the Netherlands is therefore genuinely local: municipal authorities raise their own (property) taxes for a wide range of services and are answerable for how they spend that money at local election time. Contrast with the Irish experience where local politicians are routinely bypassed and national politicians spend their time worrying about potholes, civil service positions and hospital admissions.
It depresses me that local government accountability has hardly figured in the Irish property tax debate, surely this reform would fundamentally change our politics for the better. – Yours, etc,