Edinburgh's first big political issue - university tuition fees - shows both the weakness and the potential strength of proportional representation and the coalitions that will inevitably ensue. The weakness, and it is one that derives from the tiresomely confrontational nature of conventional British politics, is that parties are tempted more than ever to play to the populist gallery, carrying the sloganeering of an election campaign into coalition negotiations. The potential strength is that conflicts and compromises, normally hidden behind a spurious facade of party unity, are openly acknowledged.

Let us be clear at once that the demand to scrap tuition fees - put up by every non-Labour party in Scotland, including the Tories - is the opposite of the "progressive" politics that northern British romantics billed as a consequence of devolution. Since September 1998, all UK students have had to pay a maximum of £1,025 a year towards the cost of their tuition. The operative word is "maximum". Only a third actually pay that amount: those who come from families that have an income above £26,000 (after permissible deductions). Another third (40 per cent in Scotland) - from families with incomes of less than £16,000 - pay nothing at all. Further, fee-payers receive loans which are, in effect, interest free and need only be repaid when graduate income passes a certain level.

As a description of a progressive policy, this would be hard to beat. Since it has long been clear that the middle classes benefit disproportionately from higher education (as from most public goods), the arrangement seems both equitable and egalitarian. The only reasonable criticism is that it doesn't go far enough, since the fees charged amount to no more than a sixth of the actual cost of a university course. But the middle-class appetite for tax subsidies is voracious (witness the outcry when Gordon Brown tried to limit holdings of tax-free share and savings accounts) and their sense of grievance, allied to saloon bar rhetoric about "mountains of debt", creates a constituency ready to applaud attempts to scrap the fees.

So that is British politics at its worst, with opposition parties forever demanding the restoration or extension of some subsidy or service without explaining how they would finance it: by taxation, by cuts in other services or by borrowing. The danger is that the parties treat coalition negotiations as trophy-hunting exercises, seeking "concessions" from their potential partners, rather than working towards agreement on a proper agenda for government. If we can't have free higher education back, they say, give us PR in local government. Nothing doing? Well, please let's have something, anything, on the Skye Bridge tolls. But that is no basis for government - not, at least, for more than a few weeks. A government has to survive unexpected crises, swings in economic fortune, unpredicted demands for this or that to be done. The British habit is to fudge it all: Labour or Tory governments subsist on the very broadest agreement on general principles, while it is left largely to the prime minister of the day to interpret them as he (or she) pleases. If other ministers have influence, it has more to do with the strength of their political positions than with the strength of their arguments. Apart from manifesto commitments - and they, too, prove open to wondrously wide interpretation - a prime minister faces almost no formal constraints.

Thus the great shifts in politics occur almost without anybody noticing, and certainly not with public approval. Thatcherism just grew like a slow cancer until it infected the entire body politic; at some stage in the 1980s, everybody realised that Britain had changed and could think of no way to change it back. Likewise, hardly anybody doubts that we are now governed, not by Labour but by something called new Labour (the NS never uses the capital "n" but others do), even though no such party has ever appeared on a ballot paper.

Coalition is a chance to get away from all that, to set down comprehensively and in some detail a government's aims and objectives and the procedures by which it intends to resolve conflict. There will be many compromises, to be sure, but all governments (even Lady Thatcher's) have involved compromise and, far from being a bad thing, the willingness to compromise is what distinguishes a democratic regime from a totalitarian one. Open compromise, between distinct groups that can claim measurable electoral support, is an extension of democracy. That is the promise of proportional representation, and developments in Scotland and Wales will show whether it can be realised.

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