For those people who want to see a more comprehensive approach to electoral reform, the timing of the story could not have been better.

Just days after Professor David Farrell said the Progressive Labour Party was right to take up electoral reform, but could have gone further, the world's newspapers ran a story yesterday saying that several Caribbean nations are looking at moving away from the first past the post Westminster system because of its inherent problems.

At the risk of repetition, the problem with single seat constituencies and a first past the post system is that it can result in the party which wins a majority of the vote receiving a minority of the seats (remember the 2000 US Presidential election). Conversely, it can - and does - disproportionately reward the winner at the expense of the loser or losers.

These flaws tend to be exacerbated when the legislature has a small number of seats.

“One problem is that we have legislatures which are so small you don't have an effective back bench, so the Cabinet really runs the country and the prime minister is the dominant person,” the Prime Minister of St. Vincent, Ralph Gonsalves, told the Associated Press in yesterday's story.

Since the 1968 Constitution came into effect, this has been a criticism of the Island's system. Various Premiers, including the late Sir John Sharpe, Sir John Swan and Jennifer Smith have been criticised for concentrating power, ignoring the Opposition and the Government backbench.

With a reduced House of Assembly, those problems are exacerbated. No back bench, or a tiny Opposition makes effective opposition impossible. Supporters of the proposed changes may say “so what?”, Governments, after all, are elected to govern. But even the best intentioned government needs the checks and balances which effective oppositions provide and the public deserves choice.

Yet the Government seems to be determined to install a system which these Caribbean countries - and the United Kingdom itself - has found wanting.

What is worse is that the Government still refuses to say what it thinks is the ideal number of seats or what the ideal constituency size is. All the public knows is that it will be less than 40 and more than 20.

It is not too late for Government to rethink its approach. The Boundaries Commission can have its terms of reference adjusted to look at more than one system as it has hardly begun its work. Not doing so will probably mean that the next Boundaries Commission will be asked to tinker with the system again when it has been proven to be better than the current system, but still far from perfect.