Reviving our 'dead parrot' democracy

Democracy in the UK is stone dead. Democracy is no more. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It is bereft of life. It rests in peace. If we didn’t engage in the charade of voting every five years it would be pushing up the daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It has shuffled off its mortal coil, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! This is an ex-democracy.

Anyone who tells you that the way in which we elect our MPs at the moment is fair or democratic is either deluded, has something to gain from the current system or is just plain lying to you.

We live in a Britain where under the current voting system in 2001, Labour were returned to power with just 23 per cent of the support of all registered voters. 77 per cent of people registered to vote in this country did not vote for a Labour government. Yet, because of the voting system, a Labour Government is what they got. In that election 23 per cent of the votes up for grabs netted the Labour party 63 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. Is it just me or does that totally stink?

On that screwball mandate Labour took this country into an illegal war against the wishes of the majority of British people and ignored the outrage of millions, like me and many of you who took to the streets of Glasgow and London in 2003. And despite that outrage, this system gave power and an overall parliamentary majority back to Labour in 2005 with the backing of just 2 out of every 10 registered voters.

Put simply, the cost of our broken democracy can be measured out in lives, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives.

We now have a once in a generation opportunity to bring this broken democracy crashing down, and to build in its place, a better, fairer way of electing our Parliamentarians. If we secure a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum for the Alternative Vote system next may, every MP in this country will need to secure the support of at least 50 per cent of the voters in their constituencies. At a stroke this will obliterate the idea of a ‘safe seat’ (places where one party has such a strong vote, it is in fact the local party that chooses the MP rather than the voters). It will mean that MPs have to work harder and listen more attentively. It means no more duck houses, no more expense fiddling and no more illegal wars.

Most importantly it means that every single voter in this country can go to the ballot box in the knowledge that the preferences they put down on the ballot paper will count towards the shaping of this country and its future.

Democracy is dead, but voting reform is the crash cart. The paddles are charging and in May we all get the chance to shock it back to life.