Why change Westminster’s voting system? It’s unfair to parties, not to voters.

Listening this week to someone from the Electoral Reform Society droning on about how we have just had the least representative election ever, I suddenly had an aperçu. Until now, I had argued that it was true that ‘first past the post’ was unfair, but this was a small price to pay for the way it usually produced a decisive national result.

I now realise that this is to concede too much to the proportional representation case. The present system is unfair only to parties. It is not unfair to voters, unless one can prove that voters expect the system to represent their party preferences mathematically or wish that it would. This cannot be proved. Indeed, it was disproved in the referendum of 2011. The PR people ignore the fact that MPs represent all their constituents.

I have lived in both Labour and Conservative constituencies and it has never occurred to me to think that I will not be served by my MP because, in some cases, I did not vote for him.