PR after the English polls

Well, we've had a lot of local elections and a man's thoughts turn to electoral reform. Well, mine do when I see the proportion of the votes and think how badly they are represented in the national arena. And these local elections produce plenty of evidence of the distortions first past the post systems produce.
* Wrong winners. In Kingston, the Liberal Democrats retained overall control of the Council despite coming second to the Conservatives in share of the vote;
* Electoral deserts. There are whole councils where a party wins many votes but not a single seat (eg Conservatives in Cambridge, Haringey and Manchester);
* Distorted results. Parties can hold all the seats in a ward even when they are far from having a majority of votes, for example in Hodge Hill in Birmingham where Labour now have all three seats with the support of only 34.5% of voters;
* Turbulent councils. The make-up of many councils can change fundamentally on just a small vote swing. In Richmond, a 5% swing from Conservative to Liberal Democrat changed a 2:1 Tory majority into a 2:1 Lib Dem majority.
[From Electoral Reform site]

One objection to PR is the way that we would have to have a coalition with our voting figures and coalitions are a bad thing, aren't they? At last, I've found someone who answers that question the same way as I do...

Under first-past-the-post, parties are coalitions, simply formed before, rather than after, the election. The risk of letting full-blown ideological opponents in by insisting on sharp distinction between you and your fellow-travellers is too great to make it worth standing up for specific, rather than relatively general, policy programmes. Think of the spectrum of opinion across all three of the main parties in Britain: it is hardly as many of those who voted for them, were they to form a government, would have their views perfectly represented, even allowing for the effects of events, over the course of that government. Worse than that, the coalitions under first-past-the-post are even less accountable than those under a more proportional system. If voters disapprove of the way a particular group within a coalition has behaved, under a proportional system they can punish it directly at the polls the next time an election comes around

Consider Phlebas: PR And Collective Action Problems:
Filed in: PR, voting, coalitions