The current system means mainly relatively small wards and increased contact between electors and elected. It means that when you go out to get your newspaper, go shopping, visit a local sports club, or walk down the street, you interact with voters. STV is an electoral system promoted by many in favour of a form of proportional representation. It's used for Scottish council elections and elections to the Irish Parliament, the Dáil. When electing more than one candidate, the STV system becomes complicated, whereas only one candidate is being elected in the alternative vote system. The greatest weakness of STV for political parties is you have to guess how many seats you can win when nominating candidates.

The last choice a voter makes, if all their higher preferences are removed, has the same value as another voter's first choice. Does it work as a proportional system? Well, in the Irish general election of 2020, Sinn Féin, despite receiving the most first-preference votes nationwide, did not win the most seats. Despite beating Fianna Fáil by 535,995 to 484,320, they ended up one seat behind. It took 12,745 votes to elect each Fianna Fáil Member, but 14,476 to elect a Member of Sinn Féin. The Irish journalist John Drennan described it as 11 seats that Sinn Féin left behind because they didn't have enough candidates. They guessed wrong on the number of seats they might win, but if they had guessed wrong the other way, they could have ended up with fewer seats.

So, STV is less a proportional system and more a skilled guessing game, where getting it wrong can mean fewer seats than you should proportionally get. Is it any surprise that Scotland use it for council elections but have decided not to use it for the Scottish Parliament? If you visit Scottish council websites, you can see how large council seats are in area and in population. Of the 21 wards in the Highland Council area, Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh is the example par excellence of the size of council wards needed in rural areas under STV. Not only is this the largest electoral ward in the UK, it is also by itself larger in area than 27 of Scotland's 32 councils. It accounts for almost a fifth of the Highland Council's entire area, and is approximately the same size as Trinidad and Tobago.

For the highlands of Scotland, think Powys, think Ceredigion, think Gwynedd. Just think of some of these areas—and Pembrokeshire—where the population is spread out, then of the population needed for these wards to allow STV to operate effectively. Glasgow ward 1, Linn, has a population of 30,000, which is about two thirds of the population of the Aberconwy Senedd constituency. In Glasgow Govan, four candidates were elected, with Labour topping the poll quite comfortably with 1,520 votes and the SNP coming second and third with 1,110 and 1,096 votes each. The Green candidate edged out the second Labour candidate who had 572 first-preference votes to win the fourth seat. While the SNP efficiently got the first preference for both candidates very close together, Labour did not, and thus, despite easily topping the poll, ended up with only one of the four seats.

The system involves members of the same party fighting against each other, or parties just accepting one seat each in three-member wards. That's not democracy. This is true of council elections across Scotland. 'Where can we win one or two seats?' has to be decided, but if you go for two or three, you may end up with one or none, unless your voters vote efficiently, as happened with the SNP in Govan.

To summarise, STV needs to cover a large geographical area, needs a large population, involves guessing the number of seats you're going to win, voters efficiently voting for the party, and makes it much more difficult for constituents to know the candidates. In terms of small wards, I represented a county ward of just over 4,000 electors and I probably knew a quarter of them. When you end up with wards of 30,000, then no-one is going to get up to that level. You've got a seat in Scotland, which is not the one I mentioned—it's another one—where it takes three hours to get from the furthest polling station to the place where the count takes place, albeit it involves one boat trip as well. I think it's ridiculous. We want a system that works, and works for us. Making it more difficult for constituencies to have no candidates is very important—candidates are important. They're not just the party bag carrier.

Finally, as Ireland has shown, it's not proportional to the vote. Just following on from what Sam Rowlands said, remember when we had a big drop in turnout? It was for the European elections where we went from constituencies to an all-Wales system. In my area, people knew Dai Morris. It reached a stage where, before it ended, I don't think anybody could have named all four of the Welsh representatives unless they were highly politically active.