Wiretwister, for the purpose of this argument, I am ignoring the Lib-Dems, as they, together with all the other parties you mentioned (Scottish/Welsh Nationalists and the Northern Ireland parties) will IMHO never hold the balance of power in this country. You may disagree, but this is a subject close to my heart and I’ve spent many years studying the British political system.
The so-called “First-past-the-post” system of democracy that we have in this country is by no means perfect, but as far as all the systems of government available it is probably the least-worst option, it is very difficult for small parties like bigsidney’s “Truckers party” to get established under FPTP, but the alternatives aren’t without their faults either.
Proportional Representation has a number of flaws, for a start, the fact that a sizeable chunk of MP’s in a PR system are taken off a party list breaks the constituency link and makes them unaccountable to the public.
PR also allows the smaller parties to hold the balance of power and therefore all the policies will have to be “middle ground” and unexciting, this is called “consensus politics”, for consensus read boring.
And I have been…
Dazza