Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that.  Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Only class war to offer voters

No such slacking over at Sky News, where clearly the fact that the company doesn’t get a £3.5bn windfall from the government every year means that journos have to be in over the New Year period.

It doesn’t seem to have made them any less subservient to the PM though as they dutifully report his pitiful whingeing about what he thinks the country would look like under the Conservatives. I’m happy to quote:

“The Prime Minister says he was resolved to delivering “radical” public service reform, “a new, cleaned-up politics” and tackling terrorism as priorities in the new year. Mr Brown also promises to publish the first part of a “prosperity plan for a successful, fairer and more responsible Britain” later in the week. The proposals include investment in high-speed rail, aerospace, the digital economy, clean energy and other “industries and jobs of the future”.”

Radical public service reform went out of the window with Frank Field in 1998, his talk about cleaning up politics would be more believable if it were backed up with action and, er, I thought that we’d been tackling terrorism since about 1969. And we know that Labour tackling terrorism is code for taking away more civil liberty.

As for his prosperity plan, we’ve had stories about high-speed rail before, aerospace is anyone’s guess, clean energy is nothing new and the “other” stuff is just bluster. Investing in all of these things is easy to announce – far more difficult to deliver on time, to specification and to budget. Government, particularly during the Labour tenure, has a dreadful record on overspend and delayed capital projects from the MoD to IT systems across all government departments.

And where is all this investment going to come from by the way? It’s just nonsense. Labour has nothing new to offer apart from class war and divisive rhetoric. I hope the public votes for an alternative  – and frankly that includes the Lib Dems in northern inner-city seats where the Conservatives won’t win – to deliver a strong verdict against this shambles of a government that has led Britain to the brink of bankruptcy and hastened our decline.