A government excluding the Conservatives would only need to survive a few months to deliver PR for the next election

Nick Clegg is deciding whether to back a Conservative minority government or one of Labour and the smaller parties - he would get a better deal from the latter

The Conservative party are not offering the Lib Dems any solid pledge on a referendum on Proportional Representation. Cameron offering an all party commission on electoral reform does not specify who would appoint the members, nor give any guarantee that commission would recommend a referendum on PR, nor any guarantee that Cameron would accept it’s recommendations if it did

A minority government or coalition of all parties other than the Conservatives would represent around the same percentage of the electorate – at over 60%, that a Liberal-Conservative one would at 59.1%. The Conservatives got just 36.1% of the vote, merely the largest minority, so they have no unique right to form a government.

First past the post results in the votes of millions being binned unrepresented if they don't vote for the party that got the majority (or more often the largest minority) of the votes in that constituency. It also distorts how people vote as a result by encouraging them to vote for a party they see as bad in order to keep out one they see as worse. It results in 'safe' seats which result in big parties looking after the interests of big donors to party funds rather than those of voters.

P.R on the single transferrable vote or the additional member systems systems (the latter being the one used in Scottish Parliament elections) would allow people to vote positively for the candidate or party they agreed with most and would ensure that everyone's vote counted equally and was represented.

We need to scrap the backwards, undemocratic and archaic first past the post system now - and replace it with PR (STV) or PR (AMS).

A coalition or minority government of all parties except the Tories might well be unstable and find it difficult to agree on anything except a bill on PR and not making big public spending cuts until the economy recovers, but those two issues would be plenty – and they would disagree on them far less than Liberals and Conservatives would be likely to. Labour, with less seats, are also more likely to offer a solid pledge on a referendum on P.R than the Conservatives are.

Brown may need to pledge to step down as Labour leader within the next few months to get that deal. By doing so he would be remembered as a Prime Minister who put democracy and the good of both his party and the country before his own career. He might well even be made a Minister in the new government.

Clegg only needs a coalition or minority government which includes a pledge on a referendum on PR within months. It doesn’t need to survive long to do that – and then the next election would be under P.R. - with very different results, whether thye next election is months or years away.

If Clegg accepted a deal that does not deliver full PR (which excludes the 'Alternative Vote'), whether from the Conservatives or Labour, his party will split and most Lib Dem voters will abandon his party entirely.

Even if propping up the Conservatives or Labour lost the Lib Dems half the votes they got in the last election at the next one, they would still increase their number of seats under PR. Currently they have under 10% of the seats in parliament (57 seats) from 23% of the vote. Even if their vote halved in a future PR election (and it would be unlikely to as under PR more people would feel they could vote Lib Dem without letting Labour or the Conservatives in) they would get 12.5% of the seats, or 81 seats - a big increase.

Supporting any government without pledges on PR and delaying spending cuts would put the Lib Dems in the same position they were in in the Scottish Parliament in the past - as the junior partner in a coalition with little influence on most of government policy, but being held responsible for all government policy by the voters - and losing seats in future as a result.

Whether it's Labour or Conservatives we need to avoid big public sector job losses leading to another recession - and we need P.R

Well - in complete contradiction to my own guesses before the election Labour increased it's majority in my constituency due to fear of a Conservative government (full result here) After spending a week organising my campaign, election communication and website and three weeks knocking on doors and ringing doorbells I got well and truly gubbed with 670 votes, 1.4% of the total number cast. It is a 48% increase on my vote last time but still irrelevant to the result as a whole.

(Thanks very much though to everyone who voted for me and everyone who campaigned for me and all the people who were polite or friendly on the doorstep when i interrupted their tea or their TV programmes or their baths and showers, or getting the kids to bed.)

(I’m still considering standing on the second vote on the Scottish parliament’s regional list for the South of Scotland next year, but not decided yet. The additional member system is as favourable to small parties and independents as the first past the post system for Westminster elections is unfavourable, but the list has 500,000 voters on it across a vast area – and many voters don’t realise that voting for a big party twice in Scottish Parliament elections will usually result in no additional seats for that party.)

I can’t blame people here for being scared of a Conservative government and voting Labour out of fear of it as bad rather than much worse.

On top of that the Conservatives (pretty much the UK equivalent of the Republicans) have won the largest number of seats in parliament - and whether they or Labour win they've both said they'll make cuts in public spending bigger than Thatcher did - as Labour Chancellor Alastair Darling said before the election. They won't touch military spending, or private finance initiatives, or public subsidies to arms firms, or public subsidies to privatised rail firms - nor raise taxes on the highest earners, nor close down tax havens.

So that means lots of public sector workers sacked (the local councils have already started by sacking the lollipop ladies and men (road safety wardens) for road crossings at primary schools.

More people made unemployed would mean reduced demand in the economy, which will result in knock on job losses in the private sector. This would likely lead to a "double dip recession" like the one Japan suffered in the 1990s, with the job losses killing the recovery of the economy.

All in all it looks pretty grim unless the big parties’ leaders step back from the brink or the smaller parties and some back-bench Labour MPs on the left of the party can prevent it – which I hope they can.

We certainly will have to cut public spending and/or increase taxes to avoid the risk of ending up a bit like Greece (though our public spending and debt as percentages of GDP are lower than Greece’s and we can vary the interest rate as we have our own currency, so we’ll hopefully avoid that fate). The question is who to tax and what cuts to make. We can’t afford to make large numbers of public sector employees unemployed any more than we can afford to continue without any cuts our tax rises. The most important thing is not that we eliminate the debt rapidly but that we rebuild an economy that can pay off that debt rather than slash and burn into a vicious circle of rising unemployment.

I'm still hopeful that we might get proportional representation for future elections if the Lib Dems stick to their guns on demanding PR in return for any kind of support for a minority government. That would mean that in future elections people could vote for the candidate or party they agree with most instead of mostly voting negatively against the party they dislike most and for one they only see as slightly less bad.

Nick Clegg would be a fool to accept David Cameron's vague promises of an all party electoral commission to discuss reform - he needs to hold out for a solid commitment to bring in proportional representation - and would be more likely to get that from Labour, who have less seats and so are more desperate to make a deal - and who at least believe that public services should exist and be well funded, unlike most Conservatives, even if both parties (and the Lib Dems) have gone for the over-charging and service cuts resulting from PFI and PPP deals.

Why we need PR and not the Alternative Vote, which is just modified first-past-the-post

Why AV would make little difference

The Alternative Vote system which is proposed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown would make little difference to election results. It would reduce the average proportion of votes thrown away unrepresented in each constituency from 60% to 49%. Is binning every second person’s vote unrepresented democracy? Or is it just a sticking plaster to avoid real treatment that would represent the full variety of views in the electorate and end the dominance of the big parties and their leaders? It would not provide representation proportional to the number of votes cast for each party or candidate, just a slightly improved form of First-Past-the-Post which would continue to over-represent the big parties and under-represent votes for smaller parties and independent candidates. As a result it would discredit electoral reform, as people would soon see AV didn’t reduce the power of the established party’s leadership’s one bit.

Multi-member Proportional Representation – e.g STV

A referendum should give an option to vote for real proportional representation, which is only possible by having multi-member constituencies, as in systems like the Single Transferable Vote. The larger the number of MPs elected for each mulit-member constituency the more representative the parliament would be of the views and interests of the whole electorate. For instance with say 6 or 7 one hundred member constituencies the candidates elected would be in direct proportion to the percentage of the vote they got (whether for a party or an independent candidate). This would involve very big constituencies, making it hard to campaign across the entire constituency – but since only 1% of the vote would be required for a candidate to get elected candidates wouldn’t have to campaign across the entire constituency - and since constituents could go to the nearest MP’s constituency office when seeking help on problems or campaigning on issues it wouldn’t make things difficult for them either. In most existing STV systems the multi-member constituencies elect 3 to 5 MPs rather than 100.

This would also allow constituents to choose which MP they wanted to go to - and if they weren’t happy with the response from one then they could go to another. This is unpopular with some MPs, mostly those with seats which are ‘safe’ under ‘first past the post’ because they have an in-built majority for that MP’s party. That doesn’t mean that having the choice of who to go to depending on whose constituency office was nearest to them and who they trusted most would be unpopular with voters.

There are many arguments made against proportional representation systems, none of which hold up to any real examination.

Why PR isn’t the cause of the rise of fascism – unemployment and poverty caused by deregulation of the economy are

First there’s the argument that it allows disproportionate power to small extremist parties. At it’s most hyperbolic this argument’s proponents talk about how the ‘Nazis would march again’ under PR, or claim that it was PR which ‘let the mafia in’ in Italy and claim it would let the BNP into power in the UK.

In fact the Nazis did not get into power due to PR. They got into power because the Treaty of Versailles treated World War One, a clash between rival empires, as though it had been entirely the fault of Germany and placed the entire cost of the war for all countries involved onto Germany – a cost no single country could ever bear. As a result many Germans were left searching through rubbish for food and filled with resentment at the French government for imposing this on them. This combined with the Great Depression (caused by a lack of regulation of big banks and firms in the US spilling across the entire world due to unregulated free trade) to cause mass unemployment and poverty – leading to a rise in support for anyone offering jobs rather than ‘sound money’. As only the Stalinists and Nazis seemed to offer this option, support for both increased massively. Conservative politicians and businessmen decided the Nazis were the lesser of two evils for them and a ‘bulwark against Communism’ and formed a coalition government under Hitler as Chancellor (equivalent to the British Prime Minister in the German system). They believed they could control him – they were wrong.

There has never been a resurgence of fascism or communism in the same scale in Germany since, despite it’s proportional representation system for elections, because after World War Two the Marshall Plan (of massive US aid to create markets for American goods in Europe and reduce support for Communism) created the opposite result from the one the Versailles Treaty had. With rapidly falling levels of unemployment and poverty in Western Europe there was little support for fascist or communist parties. The worrying increase in support for neo-fascists in the last couple of decades has been due to economic crises caused by deregulation – smaller versions of the Great Depression, like the current Credit Crisis (which is now ending due to government intervention that was anathema at the time of the Depression). The fact that Germany has remained stable without any significant fascist or Stalinist element in any government since 1945 shows PR does not “let the fascists march”, deregulation causing unemployment and poverty does.

In Italy the mafia were formed in the nineteenth century, long before there were any elections by proportional representation – and became a criminal organisation by the early twentieth century. They have infiltrated Italian society so completely that repeated changes in the electoral system have made no difference to mafia influence. So the problem there is not PR – it’s that foreign occupation allowed the development of underground nationalist secret societies that became organised crime networks.

What’s more much of the BNP vote in the UK is motivated by a protest vote against the Labour party abandoning working class voters in 'New Labour''s attempt to occupy Conservative party policy positions rather than provide alternatives to them in some of it's policies. The only thing that can provide a viable non-fascist alternative to the BNP is PR, which would make voting for independent candidates or democratic small parties like socialists and greens a viable option rather than a wasted vote.

Does PR lead to ‘shoddy deals’?

Another argument is that PR results in politicians deciding election results by ‘shoddy deals’ rather than the ‘principled government’ created by first-past-the-post elections. Let’s be honest though, no single party or candidate can possibly represent the full variety of viewpoints and interests in any country. There are simply too many of them and they conflict too much. The only way to represent ‘the people’ who have a wide range of views – not just one – is to end the childish system of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and have coalition governments that represent all viewpoints. It’s arrogance for any party or politician to claim that they alone represent the whole population. PR can represent a wide range of viewpoints through coalitions. First past the post cant. Nor are big political parties free of ‘shoddy deals’ or compromises among different factions of the party.

Does PR create ‘weak’ government?

Then there’s the argument that PR gives ‘weak’ coalition governments while first-past-the-post gives strong ones. In fact big parties are as prone to factional infighting as coalition governments – look at the Blairites versus the Brownites in New Labour or the Eurosceptics versus the Europhiles in the Conservative party. What’s more ‘strong’ government in practice means undemocratic government that doesn’t represent the views of the majority and runs roughshod over the views of the opposition – even when the government was elected on the votes of a minority of the electorate. Margaret Thatcher’s bloody minded destruction of Britain’s manufacturing industry in order to weaken the trade unions and the Labour party is one good example. Tony Blair’s Iraq war is another.

Does PR ensure party leaders and officials dominate politics?

Finally there’s the claim that PR gives power to party officials and leaders to control which candidates are nearest the top of the party’s electoral lists and so ensures the dominance of “the political class”, “party hacks” etc. However this is not down to the electoral system – it’s caused by a lack of any law or constitutional article forcing parties to be internally democratic in candidate selection. Under first-past-the-post party leaders and officials constantly replace candidates chosen by constituency parties or party members with their own choices. They even suspend entire constituency parties if they choose a candidate the party leadership don’t like. The only way to solve the problem is to have a law or a codified written constitution making it a legal requirement for parties to allow either constituency parties to choose their own candidates by a majority vote or, in PR elections, to have a requirement that party members decide by majority vote which candidates are where on the electoral list.

Independent candidates of course have no problem with electoral lists or party leaders. Small parties also tend to be more democratic internally. The problem for both of them is getting enough people to believe that a vote for them is not a ‘wasted vote’ under the electoral system. Under first past the post or Alternative Vote this is almost impossible as they’d need at least a third of the vote in the first case and half of it in one constituency in the second in order to get elected. Under PR though votes for small parties and independents count – which encourages more people to vote for them.

So the systems which give power to the party hacks and political class from the big established parties are actually First Past the Post – and it’s variant the Alternative Vote. Proportional representation systems like the Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies give far more influence to the electorate.