Tews your leader with care

The defection of Denis Tew from the local Tory party to Plaid has raised a few eyebrows, heckles and laughs. Defections happen, of course, but what are more interesting are the comments made by those whose grasp of the UK constitutional election  process, not to say reality itself, is a little slender.

This is a typical comment:

How anyone can justify being elected for one party and then simply switch to another without the benefit of an election is beyond me.
Whats more it discredits the election process. "

There is so much the poster either fails to grasp or chooses not to it's hard to know where to start.  However, we'll try.

In the UK, we don't elect parties.  Yes - a lot of people think we do, and the media would have you believe that the two party system is a huge strength of the UK, despite the fact that it's about as far from true democracy as it's possible to get.

In fact, we elect individuals. Now, it's true that - more often than not - these individuals get selected to represent a political party but that doesn't mean that the individual has to be a member of any political party. Unfortunately, because of years of indoctrination, people believe that we have to have parties, but we don't.

Parties are formed simply to ensure laws are passed easily. Without them, we'd have 635 individuals.  But would that be a bad thing?  Those individuals would have to represent the people who elected them.  At the  moment, once they're in, they simply go along with the party line, and constituencies often suffer.  It's also worth bearing in mind that most governments in the UK are elected by the minority. So all is not as it seems.