Letter: Redwood's passion

Sir: John Redwood ("Politics in proportion kills passion", 8 December) is wrong to say that, prior to the general election, there was "no shared agenda" between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats on constitutional reform. The Cook/Maclennan agreement was in the public arena for all to inspect.

Nor is it true that electoral reform would "abolish opposition". It would, however, facilitate honest politics. In particular, it would then be possible for the Conservative Party to split into its two ideological components of English Nationalism on the one hand and Progressive/Christian Democracy on the other.

And Mr Redwood knows that the majority of Conservative-inclined voters, offered a choice between these two types of Conservatism, would no more vote isolationist Tory than the majority of Labour-inclined voters would vote Old Labour. And he fears that never again would the extremes of right and left exercise the disproportionate power which a first-past-the-post electoral system has granted them.

PHILIP GOLDENBERG

Woking Surrey