LOOKING out of the window, the sun’s shining, the market’s in full swing and the people are generally going about their daily business. Just as it was before the election. Plus ça change.

But change is what a lot of people are calling for, something that’s hardly surprising. Not when one party can attract an eighth of the votes cast but only 0.15% of the MPs, whereas another is proudly proclaiming the return of their candidates to 56 of the 650 seats with less than five per cent of the overall vote. Perhaps that’s why only two thirds of those who are eligible to vote actually did so.

Our current system of first past the post is flawed and could result in the situation where one party has a significantly higher number of seats than the next despite having far fewer votes. That, plus the examples above, hardly makes a great case for our current democratic process.

But what’s the alternative? If we stuck all the votes into one big heap and doled them all out, according to the votes a party received then we’d be in a right old muddle and would end up with all sorts of disparate groupings. Then again, if that’s the will of the people, perhaps we need to go along with that, whatever the consequences. On the other hand, that would create problems of its own. Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists would argue that they won a very significant proportion of the seats they fought so why should their gains be, in effect, diluted? And what about independents?

There are other considerations too. I believe the rise of the Greens in this election to be nothing more than a temporary blip. They attracted a lot of the old left who feel that Labour has lost its way and they have a brilliantly-chosen party name that, just like the Devizes Guardians, has given some people the impression that they alone occupy the moral high ground. Should they really have 25 representatives? You might say they should. And what about UKIP? In pure percentage terms, they’re entitled to 82 MPs. Yet they’re not much more than a single issue group. The government has promised a referendum on our membership of the EU. After that vote UKIP will be largely an irrelevance, whatever the outcome. Would we want that many members wandering around with no real purpose? Some say there are more than that as it is, but that’s a different debate.

It would take someone with much better skills of persuasion than me to argue that our current system is fair. But in the absence of anything better, I’d like to see us keep things as they are. For now.

The call for some form of electoral reform is nothing new. Many, especially the Liberals (in their various guises) have been advocating PR for years. I suppose I’ve just noticed it more this time because of the amount of times it’s been brought up on social media, especially Facebook. It was the same during the campaign. To judge from the posts I saw, Labour was marching to a massive majority and the Greens were going to get dozens of seats as the people swept austerity aside and ushered in a new golden age.

As the opinion pollsters found, though, people often keep their cards close to their chest. It’s one thing to court popularity by saying “I support increased benefits for all and the doubling of spending on this, that and the other” on Facebook but it’s all a bit different when you’re in the privacy of the voting booth thinking of what’s best for you and those you love.

Maybe we will get a new and fairer way of deciding who governs us at some point. Let’s just hope we don’t just go for the number of ‘likes’ a person gets.