Earlier on today, my Twitter feed went utterly mental after I joined in a conversation on MP’s salaries between @patently and @measured relating to patently’s blog post which followed up on Mark and Jennie’s comments during the last House of Comments podcast. Alix Mortimer leapt into the fray and began ‘hullo-hullo-whats-all-this-then’ing, leading to a fairly wide ranging debate with what seemed to be the whole of the Lib Dem Blogosphere (Well, Alix and Mat and Richard and Will and Mark and Joe and Charlotte) about that pet topic of the Liberal Democrat with too much time on his/her hands, reformation of our political system.

In fact, so many people asked me my opinion (including the obligatory ‘well alright, if you’re so smart how would you solve the problem’ demands) that I nearly wrote a blog post about it.

Thankfully, I came to my senses just in time, remembered that it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt (cheers, Abe), and you can be spared my ignorant ramblings about how everything wrong with our lives can be solved with just one minor change to our political system. You know, because the world really is that simple, and politics has so much effect on our lives, and in the history of this country there has never been anyone quite as smart as I am, who has already thought of my idea. And there absolutely couldn’t be anything I hadn’t thought of which would really screw it up…

So, be thankful for the small mercies.

To me, you see, politics is the ultimate meta activity. Politics is pretty much never about making the world a better place, but instead is about talking – no, arguing – about what the best way to make the world a better place might possibly be. Actually, even more accurately, politics is arguing about why the other team’s ideas are the wrong way to do it. It’s no coincidence that we’ve created the term ‘office politics’ to mean ‘everything that happens at work which doesn’t involve, you know, working‘

Really, can you think of anything more pointless than talking about politics?

Oh yeah, OK, yep, you got it in one. There is one thing more pointless than talking about politics. Talking about reforming politics. Deciding on the best way to decide how to argue over who’s got the worst idea for making the world a better place. First-Past-The-Posts, Proportional Representations, Single Transferable Votes, Open Primaries, Recall Elections, Multi-Member Constituencies, Direct Elections, Alternative Votes and all those kind of things.

Seriously. Can anyone talk about that stuff without dropping into a trance? Even just the words have a soporific quality to them. My eyelids are drooping just typing them out. I nearly didn’t make it through the end of that last paragraph, if I’m honest. Two more words and my wife would have found me tomorrow morning still laid out across the laptop drooling slightly on the keyboard.

Derren Brown needn’t use mind tricks or misdirection to freeze people to their chairs – he could just announce that he’s going to give a lecture on the benefits of the AV+ system and 90% of the country would be out like a light.

The problem is that reforming an electoral system is much like sorting the recycling from the rubbish. No, better analogy, it’s like re-organising a record collection into chronological order (sub-categorised by record label) – or perhaps (for the hip modern kids like myself) rating every song in an iTunes library out of five stars.

Getting it done would probably make my life easier. It would probably be more efficient. I could probably use those smart playlists to give me really fine-grained control of how much awesome I listen to at any one moment. It’d probably help me when I want to listen to Mowtown vinyls from the 60’s and I can find them all in one place! But I’m a busy guy, and you know what? I’d really rather spend my time listening to the damn music.

And the last thing politics needs is more people who get a kick out of organising their record collections. So on that note, here’s a really nice song. Do enjoy it.