Free the Chiltern Hundreds! Nick - Nick - I have to go.

Luft Wellen von Kraftwerk Hören

Don't they all look so professional up there and so they should. Can't help feeling a little buoyed-up simply because of the newness of all this sudden change in the way things are done. It will do us all good to be little less cynical than normal and to just give 'em a chance. Having said that they seem to have the ground running with the cancellation of the third runway for Heathrow though (breaking my own rule from a few seconds ago) it does seem that that might mean the creation of a small airport out in sensitive estuary areas which cannot be good.

Politics has not been this exciting since my Economics and Public Affairs O-Level class was dragged along a leafy, green country road to a single-room village school to see how voting actually worked. At that time I could probably name the entire cabinet and reel off the various stages that a bill passes through in the correct order and I can't help feeling that at least some small subset of this knowledge should be part of the compulsory curriculum. I feel this because of my wife telling me how many times she has had to explain a hung parliament over the last week. This lack of understanding together with an obvious ignorance of the procedure at change of Governments seems to have resulted in some quite nasty comments regarding the outgoing PM. It's not only the notoriously vicious message boards of The Daily Mail but also those of Comment is Free over at the Guardian which seem to have sparked a large-scale resurrection of the dripping corpses of political extremism. It seems that a Government which is by default leaning from both sides towards the centre, is destined to provoke anger and bile from those prepared to shout and scream for what they believe in, all of which probably tags me as a middle wet of the highest order.

I return to an analogy which serves well in a lot of cases, that of the driver seething in a traffic jam and blaming it all on the presence on the road of the other drivers around him. You can carry out integral calculus on an election, so the result is the result and no amount of analysis changes it or shed any useful light on how you should behave afterwards. In our current system, the contact with the voters is once every few years and the only parameters are those that are made public by the party in their manifestos in one direction and the wishes of the voters to vote in a single member. Short of holding referendums on all important policies there is no other way for it to be done. We can only suggest trying to make the election process as fair as possible so that as many possible views are taken into account. For any voting system, including a mythical "fairest of them all" one, there will be flaws and no way for everyone to be satisfied all of them time. The current coalition is a perfectly legitimate end-result for the current process within the parameters of our constitution and anyone who shouts "I didn't vote for this!", although technically correct should understand that "we" did vote for it. If you do not accept it - go out and campaign for reform. But remember, the only way to keep the possibility of one of the two big parties getting an absolute majority and therefore the supposed "strong government" that so many seem to want is to keep the current system. It just happens that this time it produced a country-wide "No Overall Control". Make the best of it.

Personally I feel that as in general the Western World has become more centrist over the years, that we are more likely to get such parliaments more often in the future even without electoral reform. I also feel it will do us good. The fact that it did come out as it did shows, despite the outrageous bile about Gordon Brown which poured out, that a good number of people didn't think that. Politics should be about policies and not personalities - which is probably for the best bearing in mind that huge numbers of politicians haven't got any - personalities I mean. Though I'm not sure about policies either.