Your interview with our MP was welcome and he emerged as a sincere and decent man.

I wish him the best, but guarantee that after five years of government, the main issues we have today will have barely been touched.

There will be several reasons for this but an important one is that our democracy is not fit for purpose – for starters, far more of us didn’t vote for Mr Alexander’s winning party than did.

That means his party has the underwhelming support of a minority of the citizens.

If a democracy is defined a ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ then Britain is no longer one.

That might be tolerated were it not for the fact that the remaining MPs who between them garnered 66 per cent of the vote are now expected to act as the opposition: rather than Parliamentarians co-operating to improve Britain, the MPs will be doing battle hoping to score points and ruining, rather than running, the country.

Democracy isn’t working.

The ancient Athenians who invented it often avoided its problems by handing the decision-making to the gods, to chance, in a process very similar to the excellent way we choose our jurors for courtroom trials.

They named that system sortition. At one stroke, it replaces political parties, career politicians, vested interests and ideologies and constant struggle with the collaborative common sense of the person in the street – recommended!

Tim Flinn

Beech Cottage

Garvald