Alternatively

Rumour abounds that Gordon Brown, valuing the MP's constituency link, wants to introduce the Alternative Vote. That system is neither proportional nor representative even according to the terms used by advocates of "Proportional" "Representation", which cannot be made attractive even by the fact that it would kill off the Lib Dems overnight. Among many other problems, here in rural areas it would make both MPs' and Councillors' jobs impossible.

As for AV, the only beneficiaries would be the Tories, who would recive most Lib Dem second preferences, with the rest, in a very few seats indeed, going to the Greens or to the sectarian Left; those latter voters would be unlikely to identify a third preference (except from Green to Trot or from Trot to Green), and so would be eliminated, if not in the third, then certainly in the fourth round.

But in much of the West Country, Labour might as well be from another planet. It's not even hostility: giving any preference to Labour would simply never occur to them. In rural Scotland, Labour is the party of urban Scotland. In Mid-Wales, Labour is the party of South Wales. And here in the North of England, Lib Dem voters see Labour and the unions as the hated local Establishment. So all of these would put 2 next to the Tory candidate and leave all the other boxes blank.

Furthermore, the largely upper-middle-class SNP and the mostly agrarian Plaid Cymru are both viscerally and viciously anti-Labour above all else. Preferences could go all over the place, though not least to the Tories for the reasons stated. The one place to which they would never go, however, is to Labour.

Brown understands all of this. So what is playing at? Seriously, what?