Coalition government? Everyone has one.

We have always had them: the major parties have always been coalitions. The Conservatives have most recently been a coalition between one-nation Tories and NeoCons. The Labour governments have been split between various kinds of democratic socialists, co-operativists and social democrats. These pre-electoral coalitions are put together because the first-past-the-post system encourages it. We need a system that allows more nuance to be more accurately voted for, but we haven't got it and that will give very unfair results in a fptp system. We need a proportional system.

What that will do will probably make the coalitions more transparent. The coalitions won't be pre-electoral but post-electoral. People can vote for the things they most value and their elected representatives will then do their best to get those concerns into law or to modify law and policy by arguing and debating and discussing with others.

However, some worry that this may give 'weak' government and the worst case scenarios of coalition-building figure large in some imaginations. So let's recall that many countries do fine with 4 or more main parties. For example:

"a country that operates a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy very much like our own. New Zealand consistently rates at or near the top in international assessments of the effectiveness of its democracy, yet no New Zealand government has enjoyed an overall parliamentary majority since 1996."

Hung parliaments can be effective, too | Bryan Gould | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The article goes on to point out some further advantages of explicitly coalition government:

The real significance of non-majority government is the change that it brings to the process of government. The New Zealand experience has been that government ministers are constantly engaged in a process of negotiation; each piece of legislation, each major policy decision, has to be preceded by discussions to ensure that a parliamentary majority exists to support that particular measure. Curiously, this does not seem to have meant that the government's programme is hopelessly delayed or frustrated. It has meant, at times of course, that legislation cannot be introduced until the necessary deals have been done, but the corollary is that the passage of more thoroughly prepared and carefully drafted legislation – once introduced – is smoother and takes less time. An even bigger plus is that the legislation – appealing as it must to a wider constituency than that represented by just one party – is often more soundly based and widely supported, with more of its contentious rough edges rounded off,

You see the difference and the similarity to Westminster at the moment? At the moment whips do all that work of trading off concerns and strongarming support. And we don't necessarily know or like what we get as a result (remember Iraq? ID cards? ...). In an explicitly coalition situation, that happens more often ahead of time and consensus building is more important than bullying and wheeler-dealing by whips.

If you keep on being disappointed that you vote for, let's say, socialism and only get insipid reform, its because the electoral labelling is shoe-horned into a leftish coalition party: you've been kidded about the brand you're voting for. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that with parties now noting that only 200,000 voters actually 'matter', they're encouraged to seek 'power' rather than a programme and so head more and more towards a middle-England mish mash of policy. The rest of us can go hang. Well, I reckon it'd be better if they went 'hang' -a hung parliament looks like our best bet for important matters of reform to be on the agenda for the next five years: be sure that neither of the normal majority parties is offering anything more than cosmetic and faint response. If you want change, use your vote to get a hung parliament if at all possible; it's our only chance.

Perhaps I've not been as clear about that as I'd like, so how about reading a professional writer saying what I pretty much think.

electoral reform is British politics' most fundamental issue. The politics to which millions of Britons take exception is directly traceable to FPTP, a system that inflates the importance of mere thousands of voters who happen to be resident in a relative handful of (mostly) English constituencies, and tend to hold contradictory opinions that the main parties contortedly try to accommodate. Better public services and less tax? They'll try. All the benefits of mass immigration with none of the pain? Why, of course. Meanwhile, the huge share of Britons whose opinions sit somewhere else are given a few crumbs, but essentially ignored.