Letter to the Editor: Your Right Field columnist (A cynical ploy to secure a permanent Labour Government?  Cambrian News, 29 January) is onto something.

Since May of last year I have been convinced that the carefully crafted system of ‘Proportional Representation’ which Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru are proposing for Senedd elections, starting in 2026, is nothing less than a mechanism designed to create a permanent duopoly of power in Wales for the two “co-operation” parties.

The proposed new system will be based on PR procedures coarsened and perverted to such an extent that the outcome will be the exact opposite of what PR is supposed to deliver. By which I mean that the new system will bolster the prospects of the existing major parties and will act as a barrier to minority parties seeking greater electoral success.

The moment of clarity for me came on 15 May last year during BBC TV’s Politics Wales programme, when an illustrative example of how the new system would work was provided by a politics lecturer from Cardiff University. Using historic voting figures, he demonstrated that in a six-member constituency Labour might win four seats with a 40 per cent vote share, the Conservatives might win a single seat with an 18 per cent share, Plaid one seat with 16 per cent, the Lib Dems would get no seats for 9 per cent and the Greens nothing for per cent.

A glance at the figures in the illustration showed that twice as many votes were needed to elect a Tory as to elect a Labour MS; that Labour would gain two thirds of the seats from two fifths of the votes; and that 26 per cent of the votes cast in the constituency would not contribute to the election of an MS, i.e those votes would be “wasted”. Crucially, the minimum vote share needed to elect an MS would be around 14 per cent , as against 7 per cent  in the existing AMS PR system.

This worked example took up only a couple of minutes within the programme, and I have never seen it referred to since. Nevertheless it is the only example of this kind of numerical analysis that I have seen in the whole debate. Certainly the report of the Committee on Senedd Reform, which obviously should have conducted some kind of numerical assessment of the degree of proportionality that might be expected from the new system, did no such thing.

I expressed my concerns about all this in letters to the Western Mail/Echo, four in all, in May and June, as the decision to adopt the new system unfolded. These detailed letters, published in full, drew no response whatsoever as far as I am aware. No attempt was made to rebut my arguments. Maybe the Welsh Government thought it best to draw no attention to the issue.

I contacted Prof John Curtice, the doyen of UK pollsters, at Strathclyde University, to ask for his views and analysis, but despite three reminders I got no response. Most people, it seemed, did not want to talk about this, even those well qualified to do so. You might have expected the Welsh Lib Dems and the Greens to be up in arms about the proposals, since they would be big losers, but they were strangely subdued. I wonder why.

And so, to recycle my final letter to the Western Mail: “Two of the three major parties in the Senedd are conspiring to modify its electoral rules so they will stay in power forever. Can they really get away with it? Are the public really that indifferent?”

Dave Bradney,

Llanrhystud