My slightly different take on Thursday's elections, now that I have had a bit of time to separate my own defeat and local party's odd targeting strategy from cold hard results, is that the second biggest winners were....nobody. Of the councils up for election, 66 have returned councils with no overall control - where no party group is large enough to take control of the council; six more than previously.

So probably up to about a third of us live in an area that has minority or coalition government. This sort of result is usually one of the main arguments against Proportional Representation - that it leads to "weak" government. But, you know, I believe "weak" government is exactly what we want and need. Government is too big, too strong, too interfering as it is, and under the winner takes all voting system we have this leads to absolute power in the hands of a minority of voters.

Next year, Scotland will have "all up" council elections, using the Single Transferable Vote system to return multi-member wards (which local government is already used to anyway). So if Scotland can cope with it, why can't the rest of us?

Take Oxford for a minute again. Apart from one lady who disappeared without a word half way through her term of office, the Tories have now not had a single councillor for ten years. Yet with a "paper" candidate in my ward they still achieved 350 or so votes (17.5% of the vote and in the process kept Labour's candidate safe from my attack!). Across the city they have 12% of the vote, pretty well without trying at all (I reckon they only targeted, and not very enthusiastically at that, four wards out of twenty four). The Greens, through judicious targeting in their core areas, achieve 20% of the vote and get some 17% of the seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Independent Working Class Association are over-represented for their vote.

If Oxford wants to be a unitary authority (and on its present performance I agree with the Conservative leader of the county council that that would be a bad thing unless the city can prove it can run what services it has already efficiently) then it is only fair that all political opinion amongst its citizens be represented proportionately. Yes, there is a "democratic deficit" in the two tier situation at present where a political party completely unrepresented in the city (at borough or county council level) has complete control over some very big aspects of local government for Oxford's citizens - such as schools, roads and social services, but let's not replace that with another democratic deficit. If we want to have change, start with creating something closer to a democracy first. For the current system is anything but.

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