While I disagree with their stance, this interesting blog has some coherent criticism of the party system, particularly where it overlaps with the personalities of their current leaders. The system has been degraded over the past century, but there was never a golden age and the rise of the political parties has solidified the situation to the extent that David Cameron and Gordon Brown have been allowed to happen. The calcification of the political system has been down to personality, not policy or procedure.

Personally political parties are necessary in a modern democracy to maintain some coherency of purpose and government; many "non-party" systems (such as Kenya under Arap Moi) are or were unstable and puppets of the president who maintained a show parliament. Any system where independents congregate is bound to splinter into factionalism; conversely, parties who maintained a solid bloc in opposition to a dictatorship, such as Solidarity in Poland, are almost bound to break up on entry to a democratic system, since the aims of a mass movement in totalitarian societies differ from the need for government in a new democracy. In fact, in most of Eastern Europe parties which proliferated after the end of communism re-amalgamated into larger blocs. The old communist parties in Poland and elsewhere also re-established themselves as democratic movements - in Poland from 1997 to 2005 Leszek Miller and Aleksandr Kwasniewski, both activists in the old PZPR (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnikow, or the Polish United Workers' Party), ruled in conjunction with the new Social and Liberal Democrat Party, or SLD. I don't believe there is any system in the world which is truly democratic where political parties are not a feature of the landscape.

If we are disillusioned and angry at the people currently in charge - as most of us are, my father having some choice epithets to throw at David Cameron's government-by-SMS plans last night - then the people in charge deserve prosecution and jailing, rather than the system redesigned to change the face of politics. The problem is Nadine Dorries and Julie Kirkbride, Margaret Moran, Alistair Darling and Shahid Malik, not FPTP, AV+, STV or the party system. Until this is acknowledged by all three party leaders then no justice will be done.

We do not need text messages to tell us who voted for what - we're not stupid. We just need honest people, probably a codified constitution, and most certainly an election held on our terms. Owlperson's idea is just to give us martial law and a hand-cast ballot paper: Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, and SNP/Plaid Cymru in their own areas. No names, no symbols, no manifestos, no independents with an ego the size of Luton, no nothing. A new parliament elected on current boundaries would be established Put the current parties into the hands of people who would act as caretakers through a constitutional convention and series of fraud trials, with 20 years' parliamentary service and Cabinet-level experience a must (peerages may have to be revoked but that would be a small price to pay). Then we'd see what the people really felt.

If you think that is harsh for a few duck islands and a house full of dry rot in Southampton, I think it would help sort out this country's political system once and for all and take it out of the hands of the current people who want to twist it into their own shapes for their own gain.