Those figures, McG, are even more telling. First-past-the-post may somehow work in practice, but there is no escaping the fact that it is a hopeless basis for representative democracy, to the point of being almost a fraud.

Ringer, perhaps you are not able to understand context. I was talking about the constitution. The expenses fiddling recently exposed is a trivial sideshow by comparison, and was capped at £24k in most cases.

As I argued in another thread, the main failure of the Commons was in not having the bottle to implement recommended pay awards to themselves. Instead they found a backdoor solution through the expenses racket, and it has blown up in their faces. If you add £40k to their £64k salaries (£40k taxed at 40 per cent is equivalent to £24k tax free) you finish up with a package which is comparable with secondary-school headteachers and getting nearer to the average for GPs - these being the widely accepted comparators for determining MP pay.

What many MPs did was wrong-headed, but it was a drop in the bucket against the obscene levels at which, say, company directors etc have been rewarding themselves for many years. And the scale of the press-led reaction has been wildly disproportionate.

So I am happy with what I said, Ringer. On top of various other constitutional issues, we now face a real prospect of no party securing an overall majority in the next election. In that case the UK will certainly move to some form of proportional representation - a system which, especially during a climate of hostility to the major political parties, will greatly strengthen the crackpot UK Independence Party and the racist British National Party among others.
That, alas, is the downside of democracy.