With the BBC reporting that Nick Clegg is considering David Cameron’s offer to more or less implement Tory policy for no benefits, it’s depressing that some people in the UK still don’t fully understand what’s going on (typical response: “The Tories won so why aren’t they in power?”), why we need electoral reform, and why the Tories are so utterly desperate to retain our broken first-past-the-post system.

The reason is shown in the above image, available on my Flickr page, with this version being in big-o-vision. Because the UK’s 650 Commons seats are all ‘winner takes all’, bigger parties have more seats than they would under a proportional system. In fact, in an election where the Tories got 34% of every seat’s vote and Labour and the Lib-Dems got 33%, the Tories would have every single seat in the Commons, meaning 66% of votes would be entirely wasted.

That might sound crazy, but the election in 2005 wasn’t a million miles away from this, giving Labour a working majority with barely over a third of the vote. Today, we have a hung parliament, with the Tories narrowly missing out on a majority, despite only getting 36.1% of the vote. They claim this gives them a mandate to govern, due to being the biggest party. That entirely ignores the fact that 63.9% of voters clearly don’t want them in power, and that a majority of the UK would in theory accept a Lab/Lib coalition, since that takes into account 52% of the vote.

If we had a proportional system, the Tories would have as few as 235 seats, and Labour would be down 70. The Lib-Dems would jump from 57 to the 140s, and the SNP and Greens would also benefit. This would be a fairer system, since the Commons would represent the votes cast. However, this is also why the Tories won’t budge: they know they’d have almost no chance in the short-term of ever returning a majority.

The downside to the system? UKIP would grab 20 seats and the BNP 12. However, in a democracy should we deny representation to those we don’t consider desirable (or, for that matter, the likes of the BNP a chance to show how truly awful they are, meaning they’d likely get no seats next time round)? If so, why not stop beating around the bush and ban every British political party apart from the Conservatives and Labour?

Ah, Telegraph, you loveable bunch of xenophobic racists, you’ve outdone yourselves with your latest ‘evil foreigns’ rant. In ‘What has Iceland done for Britain?‘, Georgia Graham spits on suitability from a great height (along with accuracy and an ability to write something that’s actually funny, instead preferring ‘bitchy’), slagging off a nation suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano.

In case you missed it, I’ll mention that last bit again: Iceland is suffering from a natural disaster, where the wellbeing of thousands of people is threatened by a volcano. You might not have noticed this, because, clearly, the fact our planes can’t fly anywhere is far more important than the wellfare of people who actually live near an active (and currently very angry) volcano.

I fully admit to not reading the Telegraph often, but I’m pretty certain that after the earthquake in Haiti you didn’t decide to spew out 700 words of garbage, insults and inaccuracies about the country. Nor, as I recall, did you follow up any atrocities in Ireland by ripping into the Irish by rattling off ‘What have the Irish done for Britain?’ and making stupid jokes about potatoes. To that end, the fact you’ve seen fit to do this regarding Iceland is insulting and inappropriate, but, hey, at least I now know where your editorial standards lie: face-down in the gutter, throwing up last night’s Pimm’s.

If ever there was any doubt that the British electoral system is broken, a new set of figures from the BBC in its article Election 2010: Gordon Brown to claim race ‘wide open’ proves the point. Because the electoral system is a first-past-the-post ‘all or nothing’ affair, smaller parties often have no representation at all in the House of Commons, but larger parties get far more seats than the popular vote suggests they should.

With Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg faring well in the first Prime ministerial debate, his party has shot up in snap polls, overtaking Labour. It’s pretty unlikely that this will be the case come election day, but the YouGov poll from the aforementioned BBC article makes for fascinating reading when the percentages are applied to seats in the House of Commons:

1. Convervatives: 33% vote share, 245 seats (38%)

2. Liberal Democrats: 30% vote share, 100 seats (15%)

3. Labour: 28% vote share, 276 seats (42%)

It’s absurd that the party third in the popular vote would not only be the biggest party in the Commons, but that it could have almost three times as many seats as a party that came in second.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch is how close it is to perfection. Apple’s ecosystem is excellent, providing a low barrier to entry for developers, which encourages crazy, innovative ideas full of fun and novelty. For the consumer, dozens of great games arrive on the App Store every day, and are often priced at a third of 8-bit budget titles for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64—from 1985.

However, there’s a fly in the ointment that continues to defecate everywhere—Apple’s lack of providing any means of backing up game save/progress data. In Apple’s world, deleting an app means pretending you’ve never used it. Spent ten hours battling through Peggle or GTA? Accidentally deleted a game, or removed a huge app on purpose, to get something else on your device? Too bad: next time you boot the game, it’ll start from scratch.

In the modern era, this simply isn’t acceptable at the best of times. For Apple, it’s an embarrassment, since it aligns this aspect of its gaming alongside the cheapest and nastiest Nintendo DS carts, which don’t offer any kind of battery back-up. With news that iPhone OS 4 would scrap the equally dreadful ‘rate on delete’ dialog box, I was hoping it would be replaced with a dialog that would enable you to save your progress for the app being removed. iTunes would then offer to restore your app’s data the next time you installed it.

With iPad gaming, this issue’s only going to get worse. Looking at the App Store, it’s clear apps in general are going to hugely increase in size—interactive book The Elements: A Visual Exploration clocks in at a whopping 1.74GB (US iTunes Store link). With the iPad screen being much larger than the iPhone’s, games will of course follow suit, due to the huge increase in asset size.

In the long run, iPad users will be faced with a stark choice: delete a game and all the progress they’ve made, in order to buy something new, or just avoid buying anything further. Already I hear from people with iPhones doing the latter, and that will eventually impact on Apple’s sales—unless it has the common sense to provide some way of saving progress for later restoration. Perhaps Game Center, Apple’s gaming social network in iPhone OS 4, will include such functionality. If not, it’ll remain clear that while Apple’s continuing to aggressively target gamers, it certainly doesn’t understand them.