I SAT ‘telling’ outside a couple of polling stations most of the day on that by-election day of days now two weeks past. Well done Sarah Dyke and team. Well done, indeed.

It was good to see and hear the warmth so many people showed towards Sarah.

If such sensible, capable, open and honest people stand and win, then there is hope for politics. If tribalism, excess religiosity, nationalism, oligarchism – and we do have our own oligarchies – the old school tie is still going strong – or any other ism, starts to hold sway then we end up with the mess they have in Israel or the criminal pseudo-democracy of a Russia.

Couldn’t happen here? I give you the rise of Corbyn. I give you Johnson and Truss and their various crews, to say nothing of Brexit. I give you the Rwandist response to immigration and the tin-eared response to an NHS so short of funds and so bizarrely organised that it cannot motivate and keep its people.

We also have to contend with the absence of rural public transport and a rail network that is the rolling stock, sorry, laughing stock, of the industrialised world.

Oh, and an under-resourced planning system that is wide open to political and commercial influence.

The present plan seems to be to minimise tax and provide minimum services or, in the case of global warming, minimise ‘green crap’ costs in the hope the big polluters elsewhere can deliver.

It is a simple truth, though, that you cannot save your way to prosperity. You cannot deliver excellence if you are scrimping and saving. You cannot create housing without building houses. You cannot control mass migration unless you tackle it at source, and you cannot save the planet by assertion alone.

We seem to be constitutionally averse to coming together as a nation to set a long-term path but there is now, more than ever, a strong case for proportional representation – the proper representation in the government of this land of all the people in this land.

There is no case to be made for the present system. Please don’t give me the ‘strong government’ argument. This present government is in thrall to its right wing and is abusing its huge majority obtained on the back of Johnson’s economies with the truth.

It has become grotesque. Governing for the minority that put you there is not the solution.

Harnessing the astonishing talent of all the people of this country is the right solution.

Such an ‘I’m-cross-but-essentially-optimistic’ sentiment came through from the many who stopped to chat outside the polling station.

I had to keep glancing skyward, though. Not for comfort nor inspiration but because, like this nation of ours, I had nowhere to shelter if it rained…

MIKE CHAPMAN
On behalf of Liberal Democrats across the Blackmore Vale