I used to believe in the importance of proportional representation, but have come to realise that it is merely a misdirection, addressing a symptom while masking the true pathology of modern parliamentary democracy.

In the current Scottish Parliament I am nominally represented by 8 MSPs; 7 of them are party apparatchiks, chosen by the parties, to make the results of our voting more proportional for themselves. And here lies the problem: ‘proportionality’ in this system means rebalancing of the power between political parties, i.e., the entire system is built on the assumption that political parties are somehow representative of the people.

Of course, once you become disenfranchised, this no longer holds for you. In Scotland this I think now applies to the majority of us; 47% Scots didn’t vote outright, and there will be great many others who are fully disenfranchised, but still voted in some desperate hope of preventing what they perceive as worst possible outcome; I fall into the latter category myself.

The fundamental problem with our politics is not the ways in which we count our votes, but the very existence of political parties, they are the single biggest obstacle to fair representation of the interests of the people by actual people. In the new Scottish parliament there are no independents; this is no accident, the system makes it nigh impossible for independents to win in a general election, it’s not about people at all.

The argument is often made by the opponents of proportional representation, that the FPTP system promotes personal accountability, because votes are cast for actual persons. This would be true, if in the FPTP elections we were actually able to cast votes for individuals, but we aren’t, we are gain just voting for (their) parties. So in fact in the Scottish Parliament I am represented by not 7, but 8 party apparatchiks.

Yet, the idea that six political personas (SNP, Labour, Reform, Greens, LibDem, Tory) can represent the interests of five millions of people in a country as geographically diverse as Scotland is utter madness. The fact that we distribute 129 votes among them doesn’t change that in the slightest bit; every single one of those six parties pursues some policies I disdain.

Again, I think this now applies to most of us in Scotland; we will, necessarily and naturally, agree and disagree over different things (and that is perfectly normal), but I doubt there are many of us who can find a party among the six who doesn’t have at least a single policy we strongly disagree with.

The only real solution to the large scale disenfranchisement is a radical decentralisation of politics, and it is not that difficult to imagine different ways of doing things.

Now, I am under no illusion that it is possible to create a perfect political system. I am one of the few people in Scotland who have a first hand experience of both capitalism and communism, and the most important lesson I learnt from the 1989 Velvet Revolution is that virtually over night the biggest communists became the biggest capitalists, something that is still negatively shaping the political realities of the ex-Warsaw Pact countries nearly four decades later.

But better systems are undoubtedly possible by simply redistributing power more widely and thinly, and by eliminating career politics.

But political systems are invariably self-serving, and the bigger they are the greater the self-interest to protect. The Scottish Parliament is no exception, and it has become too much of a gravy train as any other to self-reform in the interests of the nation (the simple litmus test is in the pay structures, there are no other unskilled jobs in Scotland that would pay £78k, be guaranteed for five years and don’t even insist you turn up for work, except being an MP, of course; I think this merits more scrutiny).