After careful consideration, I've decided not to vote for the Jenga Party.

You can have a pile of fun with Jenga. If you're not familiar with the game, the idea is to build a tower of rectangular blocks and then make it taller by taking a block from lower down and placing it on top. The loser is the one who removes the block that topples the tower.

The Jenga Party has the same idea about running the country. So you remove bits of the public economy - the civil service, local government and so on - in the hope that the private sector will put in the building blocks that make the whole thing bigger.

You take away bits of social support - welfare, grants for community groups, support for voluntary sector networks - and hope that in its place will grow a citizen-led network that not only transforms society but raises funds for its own running costs at the same time.

You abolish quangos responsible for creating better places or regulating housing and hope that a new edifice will emerge with hundreds of new organisations doing their own thing.

The Jenga Party likes to talk about society and the environment and compassion. But its priority is to get rid of as many of those expensive building blocks as quickly as possible. What it won't countenance is changing the rules of the game.

Jenga looks like a way of doing more with less. But it always ends up with the same result.

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So what will I be voting for? More than a year ago I suggested we needed 'a hung parliament, with a majority of members who are serious about addressing climate change and reinvigorating democracy, devolving influence and investment down to community level wherever possible'.

In the last few weeks that's suddenly risen up the agenda in a way nobody predicted. Most of the talk is about reinvigorating democracy; some is about devolving influence and investment; and hardly any is about climate change.

Whoever forms a government, these will be pressing issues long after the immediate economic and financial challenges have been addressed.

It might be tempting to put them off to another day while we deal with the deficit. I think that would be a mistake. If we're heading for even more difficult times, as Mervyn King suggests, then we desperately need governments with legitimacy as well as vision.

A first-past-the-post system that consistently puts governments in the hands of parties backed by a minority of voters is a recipe for disaffection. If we want a united country we have to do it by bringing together different interests.

Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, has lived with coalition and compromise with few ill effects. Scotland hasn't descended into a state of chaos since the election of a minority administration. Numerous local authorities have no overall control, but for the most part the bins still get emptied, the streets cleaned and planning applications approved. Life has an astonishing way of going on.

So I'll be voting for a hung parliament, not because I'm a convert to a single party, but because I think Westminster needs to relearn politics, starting with the noble science of compromise.

The first priority has got to be electoral reform, so all our votes count in future. The next has to be a serious effort to balance the short-term objective of financial stability with the long-term need to create an economy resilient enough to cope with the challenges global changes will fling at us. And the third has got to be a move towards genuine devolution of power and resources to the citizen, supported by strong and effective public services.

No party on its own can deliver this. Force them to work together and we stand a chance.