Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers! I hope these columns over the past year or so have served to communicate and spotlight key issues.

Over the next few weeks, we shall be doing some surveying across North Dorset. If the proposed boundary changes come into effect, North Dorset will stretch from Alderholt to Sydling St Nicholas on one axis and from Bourton to Verwood on the other.
Ensuring we get to listen to every part of the area is a significant logistical challenge. Offers of help are always welcome!
It is so important that we do listen and that we do shape policies accordingly. We are looking to understand today’s major worries and concerns but also to find out what people want from a future Dorset.

The party in charge seems to be focusing its policy choices on the one-third of the nation it relies on while the party of the other part is relatively weak in the South-West and still appears mired in its own dogma.
Other single issue parties, of course, cover the spectrum from very right to ultra left, passing through environmental on the way. Elsewhere, we see the unwelcome spectre of Scexit. It is interesting to reflect that if you believe we should still be in the EU and want to rejoin, you now have no national political home.
The Liberal Democrats are still the party closest to that perspective but were so badly burned by it in 2019 that now there is a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to closer proximity with the rest of Europe.

As a nation, we see-saw, we veer this way and that, and we seem to be set for another such pivoting change at some point over the next two years. However, the point of balance, the centreline, the thought-leadership, the one nation, one humanity, one world outlook comes from the Liberal Democrats.
Yes, third in votes cast last time round but second in a great swathe of constituencies across the land and the first alternative of most electors. I repeat, the first alternative of most electors in three of the four nations in the kingdom.
Just as, at a local authority level, where we have demonstrated time and again the effectiveness of policies rooted in our principles of opportunity and fairness, we have a great deal to contribute nationally.

With a properly representative and democratic system we will do so. Every proposed change to the House of Lords, every new piece of devolution recognises the essentially undemocratic nature of first past the post voting.
Still, if you don’t carry photo-ID, none of this will matter because you won’t be able to turn up at a polling station and vote under whatever system, courtesy our present government.