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The broken Euro voting system needs change

We can never have real democracy while MEPs are forced to represent such large areas, argues DAVID HAMILTON

LAST week we saw the results of the European elections announced. Reading the mainstream press, you might be forgiven for thinking that Ukip is now the Westminster government in waiting. 

But when the dust settles, you and I know that Ukip will be lucky to get any seats throughout the UK and definitely won’t get any in Scotland.

If you look more closely at the results, it’s obvious that the system through which MEPs are chosen made all the difference. 

Protest votes, combined with a low turnout, give fringe parties a disproportionate number of seats in Europe. 

In Scotland we ended up with Ukip — a party that took just 10 per cent of the vote — getting one of only six allocated seats to represent our nation in Brussels.

Remember, this is a party which has no councillors in any of Scotland’s 32 local authorities. That’s 0 out of 1,223 councillors, not a single MSP from the 129 in the Scottish Parliament and no MPs among the 59 Scots represented in the Westminster Parliament. 

Yet the protest votes of the European elections have given Ukip a national platform in Scotland, just like protest votes gave the hateful BNP seats in England last time round.

And of course, protest votes are always going to be more likely when the voter never has to actually meet the person they just elected. 

MEPs each cover a patch with millions of voters and even the very best of them can’t possibly claim to be a major part of a community that huge.

The whole system makes a mockery of representation and accountability. Accountability, in my opinion, is key to the democratic process — people need to identify not just the party but the individuals responsible for the decisions taken in Europe. 

At the moment, individual voters have no idea who represents them in that parliament.

The current system gives us the worst of both worlds — two Labour MEPs (and two Nationalists, a Tory and a Ukip man) have to spread themselves across all of Scotland. 

It’s impossible to cover a constituency of five million people properly, but at the same time, we have the embarrassment of a Ukip MEP “representing” our nation to the European Parliament.

There is a better way than this. A single MEP should represent a single, reasonably sized geographical area, instead of each MEP’s constituency being the entire country.

Put simply, voters in, for example, the Lothians in Scotland should be able to vote for their own, single, MEP. 

Not only would that give my constituents a better reason to actually find out who their local MEP was, but they could turf him or her out at the next election if they didn’t think they were doing a good job. 

Protest votes become a lot less likely when you know and care who your representative is.

I strongly believe that all of the major parties in Scotland should put their differences aside on this issue. After all, none of us supports racism and we shouldn’t prop up a daft system that lets extremists into the European Parliament.

Let me be 100 per cent clear — I do not believe that the 2,361 Ukip voters in Midlothian share Ukip’s right-wing, fringe views on immigration, the minimum wage or much else. 

In Midlothian Labour has spoken to thousands of voters in the weeks leading up to the election and since. 

People are frustrated and they don’t think politicians are listening. 

The financial crisis has given other countries in Europe a similar challenge. 

I believe Labour is meeting that challenge head-on with a raft of radical and positive ideas from Ed Miliband.

But I also believe that the ridiculous European voting process reinforces the already huge distance between MEPs and voters and was bound to end up giving us results like the ones we saw last week.

Mainstream political parties should unite to fix a broken system by giving voters more of a stake in who represents them to Europe.

 

David Hamilton is Labour MP for Midlothian.

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