Thread by @BallotBoxScot

Returning to this once again given recent events; BBS being BBS, I'll be talking about PR a lot during this campaign anyway, but once again as a partial outsider I have been struck by the attitude of those at the heart of the Westminster bubble to representation of diverse views.

https://twitter.com/BallotBoxScot/status/1770800481289298085

So many people, including senior people, people who should know better, are so absorbed in elections as a sport, where the parties are teams, that they forget what they are actually about is voters. Voters are electing people and parties to represent them, to give voice to them!

But at best, when voters are remembered at all, it's not in all their glorious, bizarre, chaotic, contradictory, messy diversity, it's a flattened median voter, who rarely exists in any real individual, whose views are presented as an acceptable norm everyone else must align to.

Hence, column after column, article after article, podcast after podcast of being archly told by our betters, by people who understand politics (the sport) in a way us mere mortals not in the lobby could never, how denying millions of voters a voice is clever politics actually.

What a nonsense! What a farce! What a sordid, miserable, grotesque corruption of the very concept of democracy! It is so bizarre, so disheartening, so infuriating to me as a relative outsider, up here in a mostly-PR country, to know how little care there is for principle.

If the UK is anything like your average other Western European country, around 15% would be in "Green / Left of Labour" column, nearly 5 *million* actual voters in 2019 terms, yet those millions are told to sod off, shut up, and accept their views aren't allowable in the Commons.

On the other side of the spectrum, albeit the side that achieved its core aim regardless, in 2015 12.6% - 1 in 8, nearly 4 *million* voters! - voted UKIP and got 1 MP.

What a travesty, what a mockery, what a perversion of democracy to say these voters must go unrepresented!

It shouldn't need saying but politics isn't actually a sport. It shouldn't be a clever little game where we praise politicians for moving their pieces on the board oh-so-smartly. It's people's lives. And everyone - everyone - deserves genuinely fair representation of their views.

The fact the UK refuses to offer that, the fact we all just accept that, the fact we even tie ourselves in knots to pretend that is somehow good democratic practice and not an appalling failure of democracy, is an outrage. Every single one of us deserves better than this.