Let 6,500 Members Bloom

Britain is to be subjected to a carnival of statistical idiocy for the next two months as the PR nerds make their case in a pointless referendum nobody wants. Whether to move to a form of proportional representation which Nick Clegg is proposing but thinks is garbage. Leaving aside the obvious 1984 doublethink, how is a system which encourages, even demands, more than one half-hearted vote supposed to nurture political awareness and participation? If you can't even choose one, why is not choosing two or three any more democratic? It's all bollox. A total PR exercise by the Libs to try and keep the memory of Gladstone and Lloyd-George from decaying completely to dust.
Apparently, AV is a good system if you want to vote against someone - you can vote for all the other candidates in order of preference. This is even better than I thought. It's a purely negative transaction. And the politics it creates will be the one which gives least offence, a gutless compromise with no conviction or purpose other than to get itself elected by default, not choice. And if that wasn't enough, The Motion Picture Academy now uses AV for Best Picture. Fantastic. Job done. While we're about it why not hand over the entire business to Simon Cowell and Max Clifford? Or am I behind the times?
I know all PR Nerds have to be mathematical whizzkids, they keep proving it by inventing ever more exotic and impenetrable Quantum explanations for why their form of PR will make everything better. And I would grant them their toy with pleasure, were it not for the planned cull that goes with it.
None of the PR boffins can explain how fewer MP's with bigger constituencies can deliver more representation per voter, not less. How 92% of MPs can deliver a 100% service. The cull has been bundled in with the PR bill, for some daft or toxic reason, but when did God or the laws of Nature say we have to have a this purge of MPs at all? The anti-democratic gutter press want fewer MPs, but not the average constituent trying to get an audience at their MP's surgery. Rather than fewer representatives in parliament and less representation per constituent, there should be ten times more MPs. 6,500 Members is a nice round figure, but negotiable. The object is to vastly broaden the range of people able to do the job. Being an MP should be a profession within the skills and sympathetic to the lifestyle of the average person. Not an ego-crazed scramble for status and domination, vulnerable to corruption and poisonous to family life.
In an age of mass information, there is no excuse for an elite which has to make up for the mass ignorance of a C19th workforce based on back-breaking and mind-numbing toil.
A quote from 1984 I've been dying to use for ages.

"From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. ...They could only become dangerous if the advances of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly."               - (my italics)

"The advances of industrial technique" have educated people more highly, whether by necessity or not, and in ways which are in direct conflict with the mentality required by the current political dogma. So more people are becoming part of the political process all the time. So surely the only sane way to accommodate this growing aspiration for power is to share it out, increase the membership of parliament and decrease the workload until the average, intelligent, concerned  adult could do the job. As well as putting MPs back on the beat, it will also have the result of fragmenting the traditional C19th Steam alliances into their modern constituent parts. More parties, more choice. No need for PR bunkum.

And on a bigger stage, people are taking power for themselves, if the old elites refuse to face reality. And not through any centrally designed cunning plan, but in response to the moment, the politics of improvisation and creativity. Jazz politics. But mostly by simply refusing to play ball. Mubarak was not ousted by the occupation of Tahrir Square, vital though that was, but by the fact that millions of Egyptians were no longer a working part of the society he ruled. They had left the boy who made up the rules playing by himself. And that is no power at all.