TO AV or not to AV, that is the question of the week as today I am chairing a debate at Polam Hall School, Darlington, on whether we should vote for a new form of voting on May 5.

The panel includes three local MPs, an MEP and a councillor who will all know their minds, and then me.

The Government is split on the issue, as is the Labour Party – on my panel, I think Labour’s Jenny Chapman will say no while her colleague Helen Goodman says yes.

The Conservatives are united in saying no, even though they use the Alternative Vote (AV) to select their leaders, and the Lib Dems all say yes even though they don’t want AV but see it as a stepping stone towards something more proportional in the future.

I am most decidedly undecided, most definitely in two minds.

First Past the Post has worked okay over the centuries. It has allowed the electorate to express its gut feelings – anti-Tory in 1997 and tired of Labour in 2010. It has created stable governments able to make decisions. It allows a local link to national politics.

Yet it is clearly unfair. In 2005, Tony Blair won just 35 per cent of the vote – slightly more than a third – but gained a large enough majority to carry on governing until the man next door undemocratically decapitated him.

In vast swathes of the North-East, from Conservative Richmond to Labour Easington, votes don’t count. You know who will win irrespective of how you vote. This contributes to people’s alienation from politics.

Yet AV is “a miserable little compromise …a baby step in the right direction”, according to Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister who has caused this referendum.

Under AV, people rank the candidates in order of preference. The least popular drops out and his second choices are counted until one candidate receives 50 per cent and wins.

The winner will have slightly more support, but the votes of the losers will be counted more often. So it is more fair in an unfair sort of way.

In 1931, Winston Churchill was more succinct.

He described it as “the stupidest, the least scientific, the most unreal (system)…to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates”.

Which is a little harsh. The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) has worked out that if the last election had been counted using AV, the Conservatives would have dropped from 307 seats to 281, Labour would have risen from 258 to 262 and the Lib Dems would be up from 57 to 79. In the North-East, the Lib Dems would have gained Durham City, Newcastle North and Harrogate, and Labour would have gained Stockton South.

The ERS said it was a “modest reform”.

And yet it would have had a profound effect.

The stronger Lib Dems could have formed a government with Labour, and Britain’s history (and public services) would have been very different.

Baroness Warsi, Conservative Party chairwoman, claims that AV will benefit the BNP because candidates will have to conduct inflammatory campaigns to win the support of BNP voters. The BNP, though, is campaigning for a no vote, and others in the opposition camp say that AV causes politics to become wishy-washy as candidates try to appeal to everyone to gain second choice votes.

So this modest but profound reform will elect bland extremists.

No wonder I can’t make my mind up. Hopefully my panel today will help me see the wood from the AVs.