Seems quite simple to me…

For the longest time, I’ve been a supporter of the Green Party. Sometimes I’ve paid my subs, and sometimes not. Sometimes I’ve been active, and sometimes (usually, if I’m honest), I’ve been supine. But for the last lord knows how long, I have been, by and large and on the whole, a Green.

This means, among other things, I’ve been advocating electoral reform for years. ‘I’m all in favour of electoral reform,’ I say to people. And now there is a chance we might get it, I’ve been forced to look at what the hell I mean. It can be, after all, ferociously complex. And after talking to several young friends who have politics A level, and also some Australians, I think that if I was pinned to the Saloon Bar, and forced to plump for a particular system of electoral reform, I think I’d go for the Australian System. This has a Lower House elected by the Alternative Vote (which is what Broon is advocating), and an Upper House elected by Proportional Representation. It’s all terribly simple, as you can see by reading this Wikipedia entry.

While you read it, you might want to listen to some pop music to stop you going mad….

such as Little Feat….

or John Holt….

or Sir Douglas Quintet.

So… finished? Nothing to it, is there? And whilst I admit that it is the teensiest bit more complicated than our current antiquated system, to me it seems incomparably fairer. It keeps the link between constituencies and their MP’s, whilst at the same time introducing a high degree of proportionality. And to those critics of PR who point out that it would allow the BNP into Westminster, I say that it would mean that we would have to campaign harder against the fascist scumbags, and that those parties which claim to represent the ‘working class’ (New Labour; that used to be you) would have to up their game considerably to see that the institutional poverty and lack of social cohesion which give Griffin’s boys a bit of breathing space can be confronted.