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The General Election is now officially a vote for who is to be the UK Prime Minister, apparently. That’s strange, because my ballot paper doesn’t include Messrs Cameron, Brown or Clegg.

It has been one of the great criticisms of New Labour that they have distorted the UK system into an increasingly Presidential style – this series of pre-election debates would seem to confirm that is indeed the case.

The UK General Election is not about electing a Prime Minister. If it were, we would still have Tony Blair in charge – because one thing for certain is that nobody in the UK voted for Gordon Brown to be PM.

It is about electing your local representative in Parliament; not some pseudo-dictatorial validation of a cult of personality. For MPs to suggest that it is about voting for the PM is gross hypocrisy; in my lifetime alone, MPs themselves have ousted a sitting PM and have made numerous attempts to oust others, including none other than Gordon Brown!

This whole issue has of course been sparked off by the SNP and Plaid Cymru and their complaints about being excluded from the leaders’ TV debates. Apparently they are not relevant because they have no chance of holding office or forming government.

And this argument is coming from the Liberal Democrats; without a hint of irony from a party whose own leader also has no chance of being PM, a post a Liberal has not held since Lloyd-George.

It will also be interesting to see when the 2011 Holyrood elections come around and they have similar debates, if the Tories and Lib Dems will sit it out and let the SNP and Labour have the floor, as they are the only parties with a chance of providing the First Minister?

And what will happen when the leaders make a statement that does not apply in the devolved nations? After all, we wouldn’t want to directly elect our PM on policies over which he really has no control.

Every time one of them vows to protect numbers of police, nurses or teachers, or to promise new nuclear power, they will be talking about issues over which they have absolutely no mandate; surely this can only lead to misrepresentation of policies, issues and party positions? Will this be made clear to viewers?

This whole affair goes to show the Constitutional mess that the UK now finds itself in. We have an unelected PM claiming that a General Election is actually a referendum on two leaders; we have a leaders’ debate that will be shown in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which will discuss issues which are completely irrelevant to the residents.

We have a complete mish-mash of electoral systems where parties will deliberately blur the lines between devolved and reserved issues if it suits their case; both MPs and MSPs will be campaigning on issues over which they have no power or mandate.

Surely the need for some proper UK constitutional reform is now compelling, and this whole mess highlights that. We still have a UK system that is based on hundreds of years of direct Westminster rule. That is simply not the reality anymore, and to pretend that a system based on a reality that no longer exists is satisfactory is deluded.

We are increasingly becoming a federal Union, and while that word is not liked by most in London, the reality is there for all to see. Perhaps we need our leaders to recognise these realities, as opposed to making them up as they go along.

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