"If you exempt the appeal of strictly local nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly. The duopoly is reinforced by the apportionment of seats in Parliament, which fails to reflect the number of votes cast for each party and instead bases itself on a winner-take-all regime. About once every generation this breaks down. In the mid-1970s, Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party suddenly won 6 million votes and upset the re-election plans of Edward Heath’s Tories. Those Liberal ballots were votes cast, in part, as an oblique demand for proportional representation. On that occasion, though Heath had not exactly been defeated, as the incumbent he could be said to have lost much more than he had won, and he had to go. The same harsh logic will face Gordon Brown later this week if his party is anything but convincingly ahead: The Clegg forces will not wish to bond with Labor in such a way as to prolong a discredited status quo. That would be change nobody could believe in. Even David Cameron’s Tories look fresh and uncorrupted by comparison."