‘Ideas about moving from a FPTP, first-past-the-post system are more problematic’

• IT is quite possible that a sadly low turnout for London Assembly member choice arose because of “uncertainty among voters as to what assembly members actually do”.

This will not have been helped by the mayor’s decision to move the assembly from its previous location alongside Tower Bridge, to its present home by the docklands.

The Foster building with special provision for citizens to witness proceedings should have been more actively marketed and help recruited from the Westminster government to resist commercial pressures that have now lost this iconic facility for our city.

Ideas about moving from a FPTP, first-past-the-post system are more problematic.

A straight proportional representation method too often leads to nightmare situations such as now observed in Israel where mainstream parties are at the mercy of tiny factions which would never win majorities for their extremist standpoints.

There are suggestions for hybrid systems involving both FPTP and PR, but it would fall to organs such as your newspaper to organise protracted discussion to put any such arrangement in place.

There is also the matter of low turnouts delivering non-fully representative outcomes. A first step – sadly largely ignored by mainstream press, broadcasting and internet – has been to ignore this matter and to infer that results from the “hardcore” first one-third of the electorate would point to what would arise from UK election turnouts of some two-thirds of the electorate.

Such outcomes are again not to be taken as always indicated by polling surveys, which deliver something closer to total electorate samples.

Eager comments assuring their makers (but hopefully leaving their listeners more cautious) that this or that party are so many “points ahead of” or behind their main competitors, also need to be treated with caution.

MALLORY WOBER
Address supplied