A VERITABLE Niagara of crocodile tears flows from our politicians as they bemoan the likely low turnout in tomorrow’s general election. For we know from Tom Baldwin’s reporting in The Times that they do not give a stuff whether most people vote. Their efforts are targeted solely on some 800,000 marginal voters in the marginal seats where the election battle will be lost or won.

It gets worse. Individual parties do not even want all 800,000 to vote. They want the votes of those who can be persuaded to back their party, while stirring up apathy among those who would support another party.

It gets even worse. Low turnout has manifold causes, but one is the voting system. It would be hard to design an electoral system better served to minimise turnout than Britain’s first-past-the-post, since the system means that only a few votes affect the result. The international evidence is that more proportional systems, which mean that more votes count more, clearly raise turnout.

And yet where do we hear that argument from politicians in this election? Labour, to be fair, commits itself in its manifesto to a review of electoral systems, but it dares not trumpet this pledge for fear of exacerbating party divisions on the matter. The Tories — against whom, incidentally, the present system is so biased that they could plausibly win more votes than Labour while still leaving Mr Blair with a big overall majority — choose to ignore the fact that they are climbing the north face of the Eiger in bare feet. And even the Lib Dems choose not to campaign on electoral reform. Charles Kennedy apparently thinks whingeing about it would put voters off, although this reasoning does not stop the Lib Dems whingeing about everything else.

If we are to get change, it is no use waiting for the politicians. The Jenkins Committee — of which I was a member — proposed a system which put voters in charge. In constituencies they would be able to record a second preference candidate as well as a first. That would multiply the number of marginals. They would also have a second vote for candidates at a regional level, divided proportionally among the parties. Every vote would count and every vote would be campaigned for. Ask your candidates if they back that — and if the answer is “no”, ask them why then you should bother to vote for them.