These symptoms – apathy, disillusionment, tactical voting, negative campaigning, policy homogenisation and an unaccountable and unrepresentative government – garnered unprecedented press coverage as voters battled with the hardest electoral decision many of them have ever had to make. Talk of ‘giving Blair a bloody nose’ was rife as the anti-war protestors sought to achieve via the ballot box what a million-strong march through the capital had failed to do – gain governmental recognition.

However, once again they were fighting a losing battle. Labour could have finished third on the popular vote and still have been returned with a commons majority, so bizarre is our voting system. This is a shocking statistic of a system that fails to properly represent the country’s electorate to the extent that for the majority of people voting is merely academic.

The politicians know this. We, the people, know this. The politicians know that we know. And they simply don’t care.

Unless you have the fortune of both living in a marginal constituency and being labelled a ‘school gate mum’ by the marketing men, the most you can hope for from the parties vying for your vote is a cursory leaflet or two complete with electioneering slogans that rival each other more in vacuity than in ideology. And why should you vote for a specific party? Simple, the other one is worse. But democracy based on cynicism is hardly a democracy at all. It all has the makings of an Orwellian nightmare: the illusion of equality punctured by the political will of the ruling castes; some votes are much more equal than others.

Under first-past-the-post only votes for the winning candidate count. You consequently have a choice of just two parties, if you have a choice at all. Successfully smearing the other side is, therefore, an effective way to win. With the vast majority of seats deemed ‘safe’ and able to be called well in advance, the point in voting for a lot of people disappears, as does their motivation to go to the polls.

The declivity of electoral turnout is especially marked among the young, who are less inclined to vote for the sake of it, preferring to go to the pub or sit in front of the TV instead.

This particular aspect of the disease did meet with a partially successful remedy. The introduction of postal voting looked like it could be, if not a silver bullet than a least a very shiny one. Last year’s postal voting trials successfully mobilised the slacker vote, resulting in a satisfying leap in turnout. Sadly, success proved to be no more than the high of a short-term drug: a cover as opposed to a cure. And this one came with potentially disastrous side-effects. The scheme was found to be “wide open to fraud” and was more indicative, said Judge Mawrey, when presiding over the trial of misconduct in the Birmingham council elections, of a “banana republic” than a civilised democracy.

There is another way.

The two great pillars of low turnouts – apathy and disillusionment – could both be addressed by changing the voting system. Increased representation and with it the advancement of a subtler kind of politics, taken away from the marginals and given back to the masses, would increase engagement with the electorate – note to politicians: care about the people and they’ll care about you.

The problem of an unrepresentative voting system doesn’t just mean policies that don’t accurately reflect public opinion, it also means power is so skewed that the power of government often strays beyond ‘strong’ and ends up at ‘unaccountable’. Using this exaggerated authority to push through controversial policies increases the perception of remoteness that the populace feels towards the government, in turn fuelling the problem of disillusionment and further harming the democratic process.

Luckily there is a positive spin attached to all this that even Alastair Campbell would be proud of. Key voters are now as narrowly defined and promises are now as innocuous as one would believe possible. The problem of turnout has more prominence and the legitimacy of government has been called into question more than ever before. The surreptitious duo of tactical voting and negative campaigning have also reached a nefarious nirvana.

As all the symptoms of the system reach their zenith together, the need for a change is highlighted from many angles simultaneously. This may prove enough to drag talk of proportional representation out of the realm of political anoraks and place it into the mainstream agenda. A public well apprised of the situation, a democracy observably in tatters and a willing and supportive media can create enough noise around the issue that 2005 will be remembered as the last unfair general election in this country.

Changing the way that votes are translated into seats in the commons would make government more representative of the will of the nation, viz. more democratic. It would dramatically lessen disillusionment and mean an end to disreputable electioneering and de facto dictatorships.

Scrapping first-past-the-post and replacing it with a more proportional system would revive the failing heart of British democracy, pumping life back into veins which spread to every corner of the country.

The wisdom is there to rejuvenate the body politic and defeat the folly of first-past-the-post: change the voting system and cure our democracy.