A letter by Islington Green Party Member, Andrew Myer
Councillor Joe Caluori has some valid reservations about proportional representation (PR), particularly his point about the importance of the link between citizens and their representatives (Letters page within the Islington Tribune, June 13). No democratic solution is ever perfect, but PR doesn’t have to be as bad as he suggests.
A system similar to that used for the London Assembly, for example, could have one or two directly-elected councillors in each ward, with the rest of the council “topped up” according to how many votes each party gets across the borough. And if he is concerned that the “identikit lists of candidates” for PR elections are “drawn up by party bosses”, at least the Green Party’s are directly elected by its membership.
Cllr Caluori is also right that Islington Green Party focused much of its effort in the last election in just one area, but this is an inevitable distortion caused by the first-past-the-post system. If our efforts had been spread equally across all of Islington, as would make sense for a PR election, then our voters this time would have ended up without a single Green to represent them on the council – hardly a proper reflection of our 20 per cent vote share.
In the 2011 referendum a majority of Islington voters preferred to modernise our voting system but sadly the rest of the country didn’t agree. Sometimes it takes a while to change things. But we’ll keep on trying.
ANDREW MYER
Islington Green Party
This letter was first published in the Islington Tribune on 27th June 2014