so it's dodgy dave then

I know politics is boring, but it looks like we finally have a government.

I can't claim to be happy about the result, but it's actually been quite fascinating watching it all unfold over the last week or so.

I think the most important thing that's come out of the hung parliament and the wrangling is that finally more people are starting to realise that our current system does not produce results that are fair on the people doing the voting.

There's actually an interesting summary of the different electoral options on the BBC news site. The system they're going to have the referendum on is the Alternative Vote System.

While this is a very mild version of PR, it would certainly address one of the biggest problems of the current system. If you look at last Thursdays vote, nearly a quarter (23%) of all the people that voted voted for the Liberal Democrats. And yet they ended up with just 57 seats, which is only 9%.

How can that possibly reflect the true feelings of the electorate?

I know there are lots of arguments for the 'strong' governments that tend to be formed under 1st past the post, but lets face it - giving total power to one party just gives them a mandate to ride rough-shod across the feelings of the majority of the UK population. How can that possibly be considered fair?

And isn't the whole point of democracy that it's fair - that it reflects the balance of opinion of the entire population?

I mean look at the Lib-Con coalition. The Lib Dems are, generally speaking, a centre-left party. The current incarnation of the Labour party is also broadly centre-left. A total of 52% of the electorate voted for these centre-left parties, and yet even combined they fell a long way short of %0% of the MPs.

It gets even worse if you look at the other party votes - many of these other parties are also either leftist or centre-left, so when you start adding their votes in, the proportion of left-leaning votes gets close to 60% and yet we've end up with a right wing government!

If you look at AV then while it still wouldn't even things up properly, it would likely have gone some way to redressing the balance. And yes this still would have produced a coalition government, but at least that represents the balance of the electorates feelings.

And at the very least it would stop this tendency we have to veer from one set of extreme policies to the complete opposite, which in my opinion can be more damaging than what the actual policies are.

I've actually felt this way for a long time, but I think finally people are starting to really get the point that the current electoral system does not produce results that truly representative of the British electorate.

Of course the irony is that, even with all the complaining people have done, given the innate conservative-ness of the British people the referendum will probably fail and we'll end up with the same old first past the post bollocks we've always had.

I mean look at al those opinion polls that said the Lib Dems were doing to do better than ever and what actually happened? People voted for the Tories :/. I actually remember the same thing happening in 1992 - all the opinion polls said labour would win, but people lied to the pollsters because they were embarrassed about voting Tory. Bizarre.