For what it’s worth I’ll be voting for a change to the alternative vote in the referendum tomorrow.

Not that I think it’s a perfect system, there isn’t one – and there’s not a snowball’s chance that anyone but Labour will win in my parliamentary constituency, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, anyway, under any system – but simply that it’s a (tiny) bit fairer than the so-called first past the post method which I have blogged about before.

[To see just how perverse the FPTP system can be see doctorvee’s excellent post on the subject here.]

I also see AV as an essential first step towards a more fully proportional election procedure. Consider: the coming of universal suffrage in the UK took nearly 100 years from the Great Reform Act of 1832 till women finally got the vote on the same terms as men – and one person one vote was not achieved (with the abolition of university seats) till after the Second World War!

If the AV referendum posts a no vote it will be taken to mean that, or represented as, there is not a wide desire to see a fairer system in place and the chances of any sort of PR system for UK parliamentary elections will thereby be lost for perhaps a generation, maybe even for my lifetime. Anyone who votes against it on the grounds that it isn’t the PR system they prefer is letting the worst (FPTP) take the place of the acceptable-for-now.

And guess what?

We have an unelected Prime Minister.

(Well, I didn’t vote for him.

Only 33,973 people actually did.)

There has been an extremely unpleasant sub-text to the criticism Gordon Brown has suffered ever since taking over at No 10 – and even before that. He has been subjected to torrents of intolerant abuse; mainly, perhaps, because he is Scottish. We shall need to see what the future holds but at least until England has some sort of constitutional arrangement similar to those holding in the rest of the UK it may be that no Scot nor Welshman may ever be PM again.

I thought nothing became Gordon Brown so much as his leave-taking of office which was dignified, restrained and a rebuke to those who have characterised him so badly, but did play a bit too much on sentimentality.

And so we have a coalition government. I can only hope that the Lib Dems will be able to restrain the excesses the Tories would undoubtedly have inflicted had they governed alone.

But this is what government should be like. It hasn’t done Germany any harm. With coalitions we would almost certainly have had neither the Iraq War nor the Poll Tax. I also don’t think electoral reform would be in the offing without it.

The posturing of some Labour MPs unwilling to countenance a deal with the Lib Dems or, still less, PR was purely for party advantage reasons. They reckon Labour would some day be back in power on its own and to hell with the country and the depredations a Tory government might inflict on it in the meantime. (A similar consideration applies to those Tories opposed, but in the reverse sense.)

P R – even the minimum requirement of the Alternative Vote – is still not here, though. I wouldn’t put it past the Tories to find some way of sabotaging the proposed referendum. There will still be Labour MPs voting against it too.