Alternative

Neither with First Past The Post (FPTP) or the Alternative Vote (AV), will the incumbent MP in my constituency be under any threat. Despite the poor national result for the Labour party, his share of the vote went up to a little over 50% in the last election. This could be because he is a splendid MP - though that is hard to discern as he hardly ever speaks in the House. In reality, the social makeup of a constituency decides how it votes. Living in my end of Ealing, you might initially be surprised to discover that all the candidates have South Asian names. But this is logical because the constituency includes Southall; and control of that very unique area is sufficient to control the constituency.

This situation is repeated all around the country where one cohesive group is in the majority; sometimes it's townies over villagers, farm workers over shop workers, urbanites over suburbanites. And of course most minority groups rarely get the chance to have their own MP. Under FTPT, your vote may make no material difference to the result if you don't live in a swing seat or you aren't voting with the target group. The biggest recent political victims were the SDP during the 80's. Even with 25% of the national vote, they only won a handful of seats. They were popular all over the country, but not in concentrations centered around vulnerable seats.

While Proportional Representation (PR) is designed to solve this problem, AV at least stops the wasted vote syndrome, while keeping the constituency link. The plebiscite in the UK this coming May is between keeping the current system and the "compromise candidate" of AV that the coalition agreed to let the public choose between.

But the question is, how good does democracy have to be before anyone feels fairly represented even if their choice isn't in office? Do we need to improve the democracy we have? If most people are willing to follow the law, society is stable - everyone benefits. But beyond this, Britain uses very little democracy in practice.

Most of the leaders in the last 30 years have been self-detached from their parties, preferring a presidential model. This helps to mitigate against the fact that their parties may only have minority national support. Of course, the Tory-Liberal coalition wasn't even an option at any poll. Additionally, fewer policies are actually put into manifestos. You can't vote for or against a policy that is only revealed after an election.

A few weeks ago, David Cameron agreed to send in jets to bring about regime change in Libya. This was on the back of a very legitimate humanitarian intervention, which has now become mired in problems. When he helped to urge this action in the UN, very few people knew he had any interest in foreign intervention at all. Given that Libya does not threaten the UK, and that Colonel Qaddafi was treated as a trade partner not an enemy, it is unfortunate that no part of this decision has in any way been democratically tested. As more questions about how this is supposed to work get asked, it is hard to see how this type of action can remain legitimate.

We don't have so much democracy in this country that we can afford to reject any reasonable chances to extend it. For this reason, I would hope Britain votes yes to AV.