But it doesn't stop with the Lib Dems. British democracy is graced with several more parties scrapping for seats in the House of Commons. As former Governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten put it, everyone is represented — even the jerks.

All parties would like to appeal to as broad a base as possible, but it helps to find a niche. The crux of the Green Party, which doesn't have any seats in Westminster but is scattered around on local councils throughout the country, is holding big business accountable for the environment's health by replacing the value-added tax with an "eco-tax". Green candidates are dedicated to their cause: while other parties have election buses and — more heinously — helicopters to transport them from campaign battleground to battleground, they turn up on bicycles.

Another sticking point is British involvement in Iraq and the War on Terror. Respect — The Unity Coalition aims to tap into disaffection for Blair ignoring public opinion and allying Britain with the United States. Its conference noted: "That the defeat of the US-led occupation of Iraq is critical if the global economic and political offensive begun by the US state and its allies at the time of the first Gulf War is to be defeated."

Heavy stuff. Respect's highest-profile candidate, George Galloway, was kicked out of the Labour Party for opposing the war in Iraq too vociferously. He later won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph — the paper had claimed that documents found during the fall of Baghdad proved he was on the payroll of Saddam Hussein.

A gaggle of parties are putting up candidates for the interests of the provinces. Plaid Cymru (that's pronounced Cum-ree), the "Party of Wales," is committed to "nothing less than the transformation of Wales." It currently has four MPs in the House of Commons. The Scottish National Party is one better off with five, who according to their party's manifesto are aiming to Make Scotland Matter. (Boundary changes and the recent opening of the Scottish parliament mean the country will be over-represented at Westminster after this election, so they might find their job a bit easier.)

The Northern Ireland Assembly is still suspended, but there are 18 MPs from the region who hold seats in Westminster, from the Ulster Unionist Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Social Democratic Labour Party ("Judean People's Front? Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea!") and Sinn Fein — although Sinn Fein candidates who win seats never take them up, because that means swearing allegiance to the Queen.

While provincial parties press on with reclaiming their national identities back from "Great Britain" or "the United Kingdom", a handful of other parties look to reclaim that identity from an overpowering Europe they feel is subsuming British nationalism. Of these, the British National Party is the most unsavoury — its leader Nick Griffin was recently charged with racial hate crimes. The UK Independence Party, which would like the country to secede from Europe, performed quite well in elections to the European parliament, thanks to proportional representation. Then its most high-profile member of the European Parliament, Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former Labour politician, TV chatshow host and newspaper columnist who was disgraced for saying the West owes nothing to Arabs because "they're limb-amputators," quit the party and set up a new one: Veritas.

"It's the Latin for truth," he explained, saying it would be the honest-speaking party in a world of spin.

UKIP and Veritas are two pigeons pecking for the same crumb. The former says: "We want our country back." The latter says that multi-culturalism has been imposed upon the country by "liberal fascists in London" and that the whole concept is nonsense.

One party committed to nonsense of a different kind is the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which has nothing to do with Canada. Instead it exists purely to mock the political process and is consequently viewed with great affection throughout the country. Much of this was reserved for its founder, Screaming Lord Sutch. When he died in 1999, national newspapers ran obituaries and crowds paid tribute to his funeral cortege.

The party battles on under the guidance of Alan "Howling Laud" Hope, and its appeal is best described as, er, "populist": Policies from its "manicfesto" include issuing a 99p coin to save change, a "total bastard tax," painting the white cliffs of Dover blue "to camoflague our Isles" and reducing class sizes by making children sit nearer to each other and giving them smaller desks.

The end product of a healthy model of political pluralism ... They might moan that the mainstream choices are increasingly bland, but British voters should count their blessings that they're not faced with a dichotomy where they're forced to choose the lesser of two evils.

E-mail Louis Cooke at louis at mintcake dot com.

— graphic by Harsho Mohan Chattoraj (harshomohan at yahoo dot com)