Tom Walker responds to a letter that said first past the post is the lesser of two evils for voters. Plus letters from Susanna Dammann and Steve Smart

It is common in the argument against proportional representation (PR) to reach for Italy as a cautionary tale, as Gian Lorenzo Spisso does in his letter (A proportional representation voting system could spell disaster for Labour, 30 September). The irony is that Italy does not actually have a proportional system: it has a mixed system. If we want to assess PR, we should look at countries that actually use it – Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark – hardly synonymous with political instability.

Also, small parties or weak local representation are not unique to PR. The tiny Democratic Unionist party held the balance of power at Westminster less than a decade ago under first past the post (FPTP), while the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru wield influence disproportionate to their UK-wide vote because their support is geographically concentrated.

Martyn Thomas wonders how any rational person can argue that independent oversight and regulation will be sufficient

Once again a frontier AI model has been withdrawn because it fails safety tests (OpenAI scraps release of new model over safety concerns in internal testing, 28 September). There is the usual call for “independent oversight and regulation”, though never any explanation of how this would work or, most importantly, what evidence should persuade a regulator that an AI system is adequately safe.

There is a long engineering tradition of regulating safety-critical software systems, such as those controlling aircraft or nuclear power stations; international standards require “safety cases” – rigorous analyses that show that the possible hazards have been identified and controlled and that the probability of an accident is extremely low.

John Fisher recalls meeting a Casualty actor offering medical assistance to a passenger on a plane

Re Adrian Chiles’s article on TV medical dramas (I have a new favourite medical drama – and now I want to have a nasty accident in Pittsburgh, 30 September), my wife (a nurse) and I were on a flight back from Malta when the pilot called for any doctor or nurse on board to assist the cabin crew. My wife went to the back of the plane and found a hysterical woman freaking out on one of the seats. Standing over her were a cabin crew member and another woman, “attending” her. My wife said: “Oh, are you a doctor or a nurse?” She said: “No, I’m an actress, but I’ve been in several episodes of Casualty.”

The cabin crew member told her to clear off, and my wife looked after the hysterical woman. Some of these actors really get lost in their parts.
John Fisher
Eastleigh, Hampshire

John Plowright reflects on how unemployment was viewed by Germans and the fear the KPD sparked

Philipp Ruch believes that the impact of the 1929 Wall Street crash cannot explain the Nazi breakthrough at the 1930 Reichstag election, as the full effects of Black Thursday “didn’t fully arrive in Germany until July 1931” (‘Hitler was a lazy criminal who slept in until noon’: why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong, 1 October). But unemployment more than doubled between 1928 and the 1930 election, and that fact alone might be thought sufficient to explain the change in Nazi fortunes. Not so, says Ruch, for “in regions where unemployment was high, the Nazi party performed relatively poorly. If anything, unemployment was a factor contributing to anti-fascist resilience.”

This, however, marks a failure to appreciate how rising unemployment was seen by most Germans at the time. Not only did they see it as signifying one aspect of the failure of the coalition parties in government to manage the economy competently, but they also rightly regarded it as fuelling the rise of the Communist party of Germany (KPD) – with it being the other great political beneficiary of the Wall Street crash along with the National Socialist German Workers’ party. As the KPD grew, so the Nazi party grew – as it was perceived as the only party with the resolve and the numbers (thanks to the brownshirts) to stop the communists seizing power on the streets.

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