I’m an advocate of proportional representation. My belief is that parliament should broadly mirror the votes made by the public, rather than being hugely imbalanced. I’m also keen on the idea of electoral pacts, in the event that parties outside of the conservative sphere have little other chance of making headway.

Polling suggests in the upcoming general election, a pact might not be enough to stop a Conservative majority anyway. But with a fully strategic approach, it’s possible many of 2015’s Liberal Democrat losses could be flipped (not least due to the party’s pro-EU stance), the Greens could make minor gains, and Labour could benefit in key seats through being backed by a majority of Liberal Democrat and Green voters.

The tiny snag is political parties and the voting public in the UK often won’t have any truck with this. The country en masse reverts to tribalism, and I just don’t understand it. Earlier today, I on Twitter spoke of a fantasy idea where the broadly progressive parties sat down and mapped out a way forward. A response I received was as follows:

Would this result in people being denied a chance to vote for policies they believe in, due to the party candidate tactically not standing?

I think this is the wrong way to look at things, but it’s also commonplace. The British have been trained to take an ‘all or nothing’ approach to politics. Compromise, concession and collaboration are all dirty words in the minds of a great many people across the entire political spectrum.

To illustrate this point, I for a while was a member of a Green Party group on Facebook, largely to try and get across to its members my thoughts on the party’s approach to copyright (which I considered deeply flawed) prior to the 2015 general election. There were people there fuming at the prospect of any cooperation with parties that supported nuclear power. When asked what their plan was, they responded they would wait until the time there was a Green Party majority government that could implement its policies in full.

The reality is that there will almost certainly never be a Green Party majority government in the UK, and nor will there be a Liberal Democrat one. There cannot be Plaid Cymru or SNP majorities, and it also seems vanishingly unlikely Labour will be able to get a majority either. And so we again come down to tribalism versus compromise.

My position is that I’d rather have most of what I want than nothing at all. Under a Lab/Lib/SNP coalition, the resulting policy will be more authoritarian than I’d like, with – due to Labour – more overt compromises on Europe. Similarly for those anti-nuclear Greens, imagine a coalition where Caroline Lucas is in government with the energy brief. She wouldn’t be able to shut down all the nuclear power stations, but she would be able to begin transforming the UK’s energy situation, rapidly increasing renewable power.

In other words, the compromise position will always likely be better than what you get in deciding on all or nothing. But, as ever, despite the most urgent need for electoral cooperation in modern British history, the chances of that happening at the party level are almost nil. In part, the voting system is to blame – with a proportional representation (or even a run-off) system, you’d be able to vote with your heart and provide subsequent pragmatic ‘support’ options for other parties. But mostly the lack of political will among fairly like-minded parties (most notably right now Labour and the Liberal Democrats) and among voters will stop millions getting anything close to what they want, and will leave them with nothing.