Is UK really a democracy with unelected advisers and alleged MI5 activity? – Helen Martin

WHAT do ordinary people like us know about politics? The simple process of democracy, elections in which voters decide who they want to represent them, and the winners ­take over government, is how many still believe politics works.

It sounds very democratic and as sound and reasonable as a fair, ­sporting challenge or competition... who scores the most goals, who first races across the finishing line – or wins most votes. It can be confusing and complicated by differing voting systems. The UK has the basic first-past-the-post one. Whoever scores the most votes gets a seat, even if their majority was only a few votes.

Scotland has the Additional Member System (AMS) of proportional representation (PR). In a nutshell, a party which hasn’t returned constituency MSPs in a region can get ‘list’ seats so they have some representation. Ireland, we’ve learned, has PR-STV (Single Transferable Vote) hence it takes a long time to calculate the end result when the main vote is flanked by a back-up vote which can eliminate or support a member’s election or transfer to other candidates. Any of these systems, even if we don’t really understand them, might work if each party tells the truth and doesn’t lie about another party, something we perhaps naively believed decades ago.

Now we know parties do criticise and lie about each other. Sometimes they promise things to voters they know they can’t and won’t deliver. There is no democratic rule that forces them to be honest and truthful to the electorate. Their goal is to beat their opposition by persuading us punters, by whatever means, to vote for them.

It is like a rather twisted game, all based on the pretence of the public having the power to decide.

That’s fairly obvious to us today, but more goes on behind the scenes, one astonishing example being the power of Dominic Cummings, an unelected advisor who calls for ‘weirdos’ to be recruited in the political governing and civil service process. What are we to make of that, as voters who think we live in a democracy?

Although regular readers know I support the SNP, today I’m thinking about democracy and its purpose to follow the public will. So what follows is not trying to slag off Tories, Lib Dems or Labour and wave a Saltire, but to log what has been, and still could be, happening behind the scenes.

The SNP has been recorded as ­gaining more and more support, for independence or for their party. Those who voted to stay in the EU (the majority of the Scottish population) might once have been Labourites or even Tories but for the EU, Remainers no longer have an option. Suddenly, rumours are afoot about lower polls, and some SNP supporters are alleged to want to ‘oust’ Nicola ­Sturgeon. How odd. In 2007, Scotland on Sunday uncovered and revealed Government documents proving that MI5 and Special Branch agents had infiltrated the SNP throughout the 1950s, attending party meetings and rallies, to undermine any support for independence.

Even in 2013, the late Margo MacDonald believed MI5 were again undercover in the SNP with a mission to keep Scotland in the UK. Could that be happening again? Is it always happening? No matter which party (SNP or any other) was, or is, subject to government agents, what does that say about a fair, just, people’s election process in the UK, run by the Mother of Parliaments, claimed by some as the global founder of democracy, where the public are in charge of appointing their ruling party and the leader as Prime Minister?