Letters to the editor

Bring the party to an end

Why fiddle with Britain’s electoral system (“The breaking point”, February 21st) when we could do away with political parties? Reduce the size of a constituency to, say, 20,000 voters so that most can get to know prospective candidates. Instead of bringing the MPs to London, let them sit in their regional offices and participate in proceedings via laptop or smartphone. Pay them enough so that they work full-time at being an MP without having financial worries.

Parliament would remain in session for a whole year, sitting for several hours each day. Any MP may introduce legislation and let the majority decide its fate. As for the prime minister, elect him directly and allow him to take ministers from outside Parliament. Similarly, elect the Speaker directly. The great advantage would be the accountability of government to voters without any party considerations.

MUHAMMAD ABD AL-HAMEED
Lahore, Pakistan

Proportional representation is not the panacea you think it to be. The Australian Senate is elected under PR. Senator Ricky Muir, of the Motoring Enthusiast Party and famous for participating in a kangaroo-poo fight in a YouTube video, was elected with just 0.51% of primary first-preference votes.

Hardly proportional and certainly not representative.

ANTON PETROV
Melbourne

It is wrongheaded to think that Britain’s electoral system is unfair because it disadvantages smaller parties. Electoral systems should serve people, not parties. Small parties can change government policy before they have won a single MP, as the influence of the UK Independence Party demonstrates. Moreover, in all democracies parties are merely convenient chimeras, evolved under the specific selection pressures of their respective electoral ecosystems. It makes no sense to say that if Britain had PR, the Greens would have more seats, because if the Green Party had more seats it would be a different party.

NEAL HOCKLEY
Lecturer in economics and policy
Bangor University
Bangor, Gwynedd

Britain’s House of Commons does not meet in a “Victorian chamber”. The current chamber dates from after the second world war, the previous chamber having been destroyed by German bombers in 1941. It leaks at the joints where other bomb damage was repaired around it. This austerity-era rebuilding job is part of the problem with the fabric of Westminster.

NICK SUTCLIFFE
Ash, Surrey

* The disenfranchisement of British citizens living abroad—who lose their right to vote in UK elections after living abroad for more than 15 years—should be added to the list of criticisms of the British electoral system. Since a foreigner’s right to vote in general elections in the country they live in is entirely at the discretion of the host country, Britons can find themselves in a position where they are unable to vote in any general election that will affect their lives—as is the case for many British people in Spain.

Luckily, as long as British remain European Union citizens, they are at least able to vote in local and European elections in whichever EU country they live in.

MAXIME CALLIGARO
Former adviser on EU constitutional affairs, European Parliament
Brussels, Belgium

* Having studied many democratic voting systems, I have learned to appreciate the German one: with one half each of all MdBs voted by either regional first-past-the-post votes or country-wide proportional representation (coupled with a five percent threshold for eliminating fragmentation), Germany has a rather robust way of assembling its Parliament. After all we have learned our lesson from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
JOSEF HEB
Aachen, Germany

The Olympics are still gold

The latest in a number of negative articles you have written about the Olympics over the years lumped the event together with the new European Games in Azerbaijan and the World Cup in Brazil (“Games that must stop”, February 28th). The comparison is wrong. The World Cup, for example, is awarded to a country and is a single-sport tournament; the Olympics are awarded to a city, where 10,500 athletes compete in many different sports that require many different venues.

Nor did you mention the reforms introduced by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, to tackle excessive budgets and “white-elephant projects” through Agenda 2020, which was unanimously approved by the IOC last December. One immediate effect was that the organisers of the Tokyo games in 2020 cut $1 billion from their budget.

We cannot change the political problems in various countries, though the IOC did get Russia to guarantee no discrimination against any of the participants in the Olympic winter games in Sochi. We have made great progress in modifying the rules and needs of the athletes, media and spectators. It saddens me that you ignored all this.

You expect us to work in a perfect world. That is beyond our power. What is within our power is to do our best.

ALEX GILADY
Member of the International Olympic Committee
Tel Aviv

Valuing Berkshire Hathaway

You criticised Warren Buffett for moving the goalposts by now giving more weight to Berkshire Hathaway’s share price than its book value (“Corresponderous”, March 7th). But the goalposts should have been moved long ago. The previous practice of using book value per share versus the total return of the S&P 500 was an apples-to-oranges comparison of an accounting measure with a market-valuation measure.

Naturally, Berkshire Hathaway’s book value per share would underperform when the S&P’s price-to-book ratio was soaring, as it did by 21% in 2013. Likewise it would outperform in years like 2008, when valuations were plunging. Comparing the change in Berkshire’s market value to the S&P’s total return is the best way of measuring how the market judges Berkshire’s strategy.

A.B. CAMPBELL
Minneapolis

New clear direction
* You dismiss President Barack Obama’s ambition to eradicate nuclear weapons as fantasy (“The unkicked addiction”, March 7th) but it must become a goal of world leaders. The impact of nuclear weapons on civilians, on future generations, on the environment, on food production and on countries not involved in the conflict is horrific. The current modernisation and proliferation of nuclear arsenals are steps in the wrong direction and undermine global security.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has largely operated amid armed conflict and situations of violence for the past 150 years but its work through history to outlaw weapons like poison gas, blinding lasers and cluster munitions has shown that war must have limits. Your call to revitalise the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict is welcome but insufficient. At the next NPT review meeting states must commit to a timetable for negotiating a legally-binding agreement on abolishing nuclear weapons. Otherwise we risk the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of another Hiroshima.

PETER MAURER
President of the International Committee of the Red Cross
Geneva, Switzerland

* Your diagnosis of increasing danger of nuclear conflict, driven by an “unkicked addiction” to nuclear weapons, is correct. However, your prescription, in particular the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, can never do more than delay proliferation and postpone the inevitable catastrophe. As long as nuclear weapons are considered legitimate and valuable, possessors will seek to keep them, and others will seek to acquire them.

The only solution is therefore to render such weapons illegitimate. An international effort to examine the humanitarian impact of nuclear detonations has opened the way to building an equivalent norm against nuclear weapons. The nuclear addicts will never kick their habit on their own, for all the reasons you enumerate. Only when the countries without nuclear weapons act in their own self-interest and move to stigmatise and outlaw nuclear weapons—with or without the cooperation of the nuclear-armed states—will nuclear disarmament become possible.

RICHARD LENNANE
Chief inflammatory officer, Wildfire
Geneva, Switzerland

* We ought not be surprised that there are still threats of nuclear war (“The New Nuclear Age”, March 7th), for as long as these weapons exist there is the not insignificant threat of utter worldwide annihilation. The only answer is abolition. And in order to secure that, we will almost certainly need to abolish war altogether.

Thus, we need alternatives to war. In particular a four-stage system of: 1) compulsory negotiation (which one historian believes would have likely avoided WWI); 2) compulsory mediation (which would eliminate about 99% of any remaining conflicts); 3) compulsory arbitration (proposed by Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, but rejected by the Republican Senate); and 4) compulsory adjudication by the World Court (proposed by Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987).

JAMES RANNEY
Professor of International Law
Widener Law School
Wilmington, Delaware

In pursuit of the politicians

In his dismissal of the absurdity of the ban on fox hunting Bagehot (March 7th) was a little lenient in his treatment of those who tried to stir up class hatred (ineptly as he points out) for political ends. He might have asked why there is never any attempt to ban the sinking of barbed hooks into the mouths of fish, often only for those fish to be returned to the water so that other “sportsmen” might have the same fun.

The answer lies in the electoral damage a ban on fishing would do to the political interests of the anti-hunting lobby and other proponents of a class war. Perhaps if the debate on field sports were to be resurrected a case might be argued, in the interest of subsidiarity and democratic fairness, for making such bans local issues, thereby maintaining a ban on hunting in north London and probably allowing it in the countryside. After all we country people did not expect to prohibit the 700 hours of pointless parliamentary debate on hunting that Bagehot mentioned, while being without adequate transport and other services that are considered the right of town dwellers, and which should be considered much more fully by our lawmakers and the executive.

RUPERT RIDGE
Brockley, Somerset

Although it is useful to specify the incongruities of the fox-hunting ban, the definitive word on the hunt is Oscar Wilde’s: “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”.

PAGE NELSON
Charlottesville, Virginia

Personal email relations

* You imply that by choosing to own and control her own email server only Hillary Clinton had access to her emails and that the main consequence of that is a lack of transparency (“Nothing to hide?”, March 7th). I’d argue that the greater issue is that she probably harbours confidential correspondence in a vulnerable manner, undermining state security. A quick inspection of her domain shows it has lacked basic protection from spoofing (measures that prevent people from pretending they are [email protected]), along with having shared storage space with parties unrelated to State Department work (chelseaoffice.com being one of them).

WES JOHNSON
Toronto, Canada

A natural clause

If, as mentioned in “Bobby Jindal’s parsimonious pitch” (March 7th), Governor Jindal of Louisiana came to the United States in utero, and with many conservatives believing that life begins at conception and the constitution stating that a president has to be a natural-born citizen, would he be eligible for the Oval Office?

It would be an interesting issue for the Supreme Court to consider.

ALANN LIPOWITZ
Loveland, Colorado

* Letter appear online only