Someone asked me the very good question: “Do smaller parties deserve MPs?”

In other words, is it a good idea to let those parties scoring just a few percent of the vote have access to Westminster? Aren’t they just a bunch of cranks and fringe politicians?

It is not the job of the electoral system to judge who is suitable or deserving to become an MP; that is the job of the electorate. A system that deliberately impedes the popular choice is anti-democratic.

The purpose of a representative democracy is to represent the political wishes of the voting public. Our current system is broken and does not, by any stretch of reasoning, provide an accurate snapshot of the public wishes for our country.

The only reason that some of the smaller parties, such as the Greens, don’t have MPs is because of geography. They certainly have enough voters out there to secure many MPs, but because they are widespread, rather than living in a few concentrated constituencies, the party loses out. If they could persuade all of their supporters to move to a dozen locations, they would probably have a dozen MPs. They are losing out solely because of a flaw in our electoral system. Regional Top-Up fixes that.

Lastly, part of the reason our smaller parties are often seen as amateurish is because they don’t have access to the resources that the bigger parties do. Most of them are run by part-time volunteers and survive on donations. Given enough public support and some elected officials, those parties would quickly transform into more professional organisations, giving the voting public a greater choice of credible alternatives at election time.