PR exercise works

There is a simple remedy for the drawback involved in the way we vote for MEPs identified by Willis Pickard (Letters, 20 May).

We should use the same voting system as our cousins in Northern Ireland. There, instead of having a closed-list party-list voting system as we do, they use the single transferable vote system of proportional representation (STV-PR).

That way voters can express their preferences both for their favoured parties and for individual candidates.

We in Scotland already use STV-PR to elect our local councillors. There is no good reason why we should not also use it to elect our members of the European Parliament.

James Gilmour

East Parkside

Edinburgh