If we don't hang together...

Hung parliament - good or bad? Our only experience in recent years was in the 70s and that certainly was a mess, and not a good advertisement for the idea. David Cameron has been lambasting Nick Clegg for his (Clegg's) insistence that electoral reform will be his price for working with either of the other two parties should neither have a clear majority following the election. This, said Cameron, would lead to a permanent series of hung parliaments with the LibDems holding the balance of power. Readers of this blog will know that I am not in favour of a "tail wagging the dog" situation, but I've been thinking about this. And I think there's a difference between a hung parliament under the first-past-the-post system, where each party has their eye on the next election, and positioning themselves for best advantage when that happens, and a situation where - as it would be under PR - they know the next election will produce another hung parliament, and therefore there's no point in trying to score political points off the other parties, because they're going to have to continue to work together for the foreseeable. So if we really have moved into an era of three-party politics (and I'm not yet convinced that we have) then I think that PR will be essential to make it work properly.