Sir – Since both are minority MPs, not surprisingly both Andrew Smith and Nicola Blackwood are unenthusiastic about the Alternative Vote.

Smith was elected in 2010 with 42.5 per cent of the votes cast in Oxford East, Blackwood with 42.3 per cent in Oxford West. The second-choice votes of Tories in Oxford East and Labour in Oxford West might have unseated both of them.

This could, though, have been a better result for democracy, and the different electoral arithmetic in 2010 under AV might have produced a left-of-centre Lab-LD coalition, rather than the current right-of-centre Tory-LD government. A majority of the electorate in both constituencies would have preferred that.

I understand AV: in the 1966 General Election I failed to get elected to the House of Commons by 588 votes, running for Labour led by Harold Wilson. A year later the Liberal candidate who had run against me and gotten around 3,500 votes wrote to me out of the blue.

He and I agreed about most things, he wrote, and he regretted that by splitting the left-of-centre vote he had enabled the election of the Tory candidate.

Let us not, in the coming referendum, take too much notice of the prejudices and myths circulated by professional politicians. If defeated next time, Blackwood would be offered a safe Tory seat, and Smith would go to the Lords or into well-funded retirement (MPs have the best pension arrangements in the country).

It is for ‘We, the people’ to make the choice of the voting system we want for the election of MPs, who are our servants, remember.

Professor Gerald Elliott, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Oxford