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We are always told that the Olympics should not be political. Our government refused to mandate a boycott of Beijing because they have no control over the British Olympic Association. The Iraqi team last I saw was waiting to hear whether they could go because the Iraqi government recently sacked the entire national Olympic committee. We're not supposed to score political points over this "greatest show on earth" of "amateur" sporting prowess.

So why are so many politicians spending fortunes of our money falling over themselves to be in Beijing? Troughs...pigs...hmmm, spare ribs!

Whilst I am sure that petty threats from a minor blogger well beyond the outskirts of the Westminster village who only leaves Headington Hill once a month to buy toiletries in Crabtree and Evelyn will cut little ice with Lib Dem party apparatchiks either in Cowley Street or the West Midlands region, I hereby pledge my support for Cllr Gavin Webb, the "Stoke One". Gavin has been suspended from the party pending a full hearing for, ostensibly at least, voicing personal opinions on liberal and libertarian issues which we both largely share.

If he is out of the party for that, then it is likely that I would be too if it weren't for the fact that I get on seemingly much better with my local party.

I am aware that Gavin has taken the decision not to be in the official Lib Dem council group at Stoke for some time, and that to some he has been a bit of a thorn in the side, but that in itself is no good reason to expel him from the party, nor, he says, has he actually been given details yet (six weeks or so after the event now) of the "charges" against him, so we can only really assume it is for the temerity of holding an opinion.

A number of fellow party members with libertarian leanings have started up a web site to support Gavin at "Save the Stoke One". Having spent my best years at school very near Stoke, I never thought I'd find anything amongst the former smoke stacks and bottle kilns to want to save! Though I distinctly remember some older school friends raving on about seeing The Clash at Victoria Hall in the early eighties!

There used to be a rather insulting saying about PR systems that "if the Irish could understand it why shouldn't we". The Times' leader article today proves they still can't:

Vote of No Confidence -Times Online:

This is the nub of the issue. The current electoral system has the drawback of giving the largest single minority at Westminster an extremely large share of political power. Yet proportional representation would mean that much smaller minorities would wield undue influence, as without them it would not be possible to form a stable administration. Would this constitute progress?

It is not surprising, therefore, that the official Review of Voting Systems could not work up any enthusiasm for overhauling the current system. What is more intriguing is why the 110-page report has not seen the light of day until this morning. There has to be the suspicion that Labour, aware that at some point it might need the assistance of the Liberal Democrats to survive in office, is unwilling to offend its potential partners by publishing a document which is so damning of their pet project. Sustaining a dubious deal at a later date is surely the worst argument for PR.

Drawback? Drawback? It's a fecking democratic outrage, that's what it is! How can anyone vest so much power in an individual like a Blair, a Brown, a Cameron or, one day again, a Campbell on the mandate, at the last count, of just a quarter of the voting age population? It's almost as repugnant as that other scenario that sees a Chavez, Mugabe or Hussein elected on huge rigged votes. Come to think about it, even Mugabe is more sophisticated than that, allowing his opposition to win seats in parliament but reserving a presidential right to appoint as many more as will give him a decent majority (but then Blair had his peers I suppose, just to make sure). No, I take it back, Mugabe would just love the British system.

As to whether any particular form of PR would produce a situation in which "much smaller minorities would wield undue influence" that's so much tommy rot too. They cite Scotland's teething problems with PR, but it hasn't prevented a minority government being formed at Holyrood, and looking abroad, is Germany some unstable state? The Netherlands? Or that economic powerhouse of the EU, Ireland? Or any of the other big democracies that use fairer voting systems? Italy is corrupt from top to bottom it seems and Israel's very birth as a state almost made sure that certain minorities would hold undue influence.

Let's not forget that when "we" had the opportunity to sit down and draw up constitutions and electoral systems for two effectively new countries after the war, Japan and Germany, we didn't choose to foist our decrepit system on them, and look at how they have by and large shone since then.

But for me, the irony of this sort of whining from organs like the Times is that surely they would normally be crying out for less government. If PR delivers a legislature in which little can be done wouldn't that be a good thing, especially for lovers of the status quo? No more far reaching change wreaked by a minority party with a huge majority in the legislature and total control of the executive. A situation where all parties would need to agree in order to do anything significant - that's real democracy, surely.

For me, there is the tantalizing prospect, most of all, that we would see the bigger parties dissolve into their constituent parts - Cameron Tories and the Libertarian Right, Old and New Labour, Orange Liberals and Social Democrats and we would all get a chance to prioritize the traits we want in individual candidates. Of course I simply loathe Westminster and the overbearing presence it has in our lives, but for me, second only to dissolving Westminster and Whitehall altogether would be a system that makes it as hamstrung and impotent as possible, only able to do something when all our various persuasions of politicians actually agree on it.

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)

Hit tip to Jonathan Calder for his heads up about Mark Oaten's article in The Times publicizing his new book, Coalition, which suggests that we must not be afraid to contemplate a coalition with whoever gets the most seats in a hung parliament, even if that means doing a deal with the Tories. He expands on the Times article over at Lib Dem Voice .

I'm afraid I don't share Mark's own suggestion that because the Tories have joined us in the lobbies against many of Tony Blair's civil liberties erosions it necessarily gives us common ground to work on. What with some of Cameron and Davis's pronouncements since the Rhys Jones murder and the Learco deportation debacle in particular, but over a much longer period in the background, over things like repealing the Human Rights Act, I don't believe personally that their commitment to civil liberties is anything other than opportunistic parliamentary oppositionalism. I don't believe the Tory core vote is any less authoritarian on civil liberties than this Labour government' and recent murmerings suggest that a shift to the right, whether that be called a lurch, which it isn't, yet, or a gentle drift to try to please their core vote, would be popular within the party come election time.

However, we are also Democrats. And we support proportional representation. And whilst we will not have the latter formally any time soon still it seems, we can stick to our democratic principles and try to gauge what signs might come out of any General Election as to the intention of the British electorate. I don't believe we can simplistically say that we would try to deal with whoever had the greatest number of seats. I think we can be more sophisticated than that and I think we could lay down certain guidelines that the public can understand when they vote for us:

We will not, out of "centre left loyalty" automatically gravitate toward shoring up a minority Labour administration whose vote is on the wane. If the people cannot give Labour the mandate they have had for the past decade we should recognize that they are drifting away from the public's affection, even if not by enough to give any other party the lead, and to perpetuate such a government automatically would be wrong.

That we should look at votes cast as more important than seats won. If either of the two behemoths could form a government with our support it ought to be the one for whom more of the population have voted, rather than the one who has benefitted the most from our broken electoral system. We have too long now suffered from government by a minority of the popular vote.

That we should use the "West Lothian Question" and not shore up a Labour government that's going to have to rely on votes from MPs from devolved administrative areas on matters that don't affect them. That doesn't mean discounting completely Scottish and Welsh MPs and the popular vote in those areas, but "weighting" our decision to try to negate any decisive influence they might have on votes on English only parliamentary decisions.

Policy is as important as the size of each party's parliamentary cohort. We should look to a period of no overall majority government to achieve more devolution from Westminster and a greater restriction on the power of the Westminster-Whitehall leviathan. So that next time there is an overall majority, especially if still with our broken electoral system, they can affect less of our lives than they do now.

And finally, that we do not automatically assume that we have to form a coalition government with either party. In this era of "ideology-free" politics, at least as far as the two bigger parties are concerned, we should not relegate ourselves to playing piggy in the middle. We have long said that both Labour and the Tories are increasingly occupying a grey area of vying for administrative and managerial competence rather than true political ideology-driven vision. I do not see why, therefore, a coalition combination shouldn't ought to be Tory-Labour, rather than Lib-Tory or Lib-Lab.

If we want to be the third force in British politics we should certainly aspire to be one of the players, not merely the ball, possession of which gives one or other of the bigger parties the advantage. Even if this is an unlikely proposition because of the inbuilt yah-boo politics between the bigger parties, seen as they are, albeit wrongly, as somehow polar opposites, we ought to make the case that if Labour and Tories have more in common with each other than either Labour and us or the Tories and us, it ought to be that combination of grey suits that should step up to the plate and take responsibility, with us offering a real opposition. We should go into the election promoting both Cameron and Brown as increasingly similar heirs to Blair and Thatcher and us as the genuinely liberal alternative.