The silence from Dorset’s Tory politicians has been deafening! (Silence in the ranks- 27 May Dorset Echo.)

Getting a straight and honest response from them on Boris Johnson’s determination to keep Dominic Cummings as his aide is as unlikely as a Bigfoot being found behind a fir tree in Scotland!

Cummings is essential to Johnson’s narrative on Brexit, so he’s hardly likely to be ditched at this stage! If there’s any controversy involved, damage limitation is the order of the day for the Tories every time.

The most recent example is Spencer Flower’s (leader of Dorset Council’s Tory controlling group) self apparent refusal to answer specific questions about the lack of internal democracy within the council.

Some of the excuses not to pass comment were ridiculous.

I know the Tories well having fought them hard in three general elections, in three safe Tory seats. In each case they refused to share a platform with all rival candidates and even refused to do shared local radio interviews. Inevitably, given our rotten First Past the Post pretence of an electoral system, they won in every constituency!

To me the Tories represent everything that’s wrong in Britain. Class, inequality, privilege and desperately refusing any significant changes to the way that we run a ‘name only’ democracy. What really makes me mad are all the thousands of voters who appear to religiously vote Tory whatever the bad outcomes their governments produce for people. In Dorset I’m sure some of that is outright feudalism – you know ‘Voting for the Master’, mixed in with misplaced snobbery!

The other feature of our politics that makes me very angry, is the factionalism that is all too obvious within other political parties and between them. Such often badly informed, tribal arguments merely make it so much easier for ‘the main enemy Tories’ to win at both national and local levels.

They should stop arguing about political history and marginal differences about climate change policy and unite in a radical push for proper electoral reform, not the thin, woefully weak change we were offered in the 2011 Electoral Reform Referendum.

Richard Denton-White

Mill Lane

Charminster