IN the run up to the first transmission of the comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey, Channel 4 got cold feet and abandoned the show’s original title – Drop the Dead Belgian. I’m glad they made the change. The original wheeze exposed a thread of racism that lurks at the heart of English public life. The idea smacked of a Brexiteer’s contempt for Belgians and a wilful ignorance of a small nation’s substantial achievements. This week I want to pay tribute to the Belgians, from the symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck to the jazz-guitarist Django Reinhardt and from Eden Hazard to Adolphe Sax, the master craftsman of 19th century classical instruments, who invented the saxophone and blew life into jazz and urban funk.

When it comes to football, the Belgians are modern masters. They currently sit on top of the Fifa World Rankings, higher than France, Brazil and yes even ­England. One of their finest players, Kevin de Bruyne, who was born in the shadows of Drongen Abbey in the Flemish region of Belgium, is arguably the world’s top ­player. His intricate and angular passing has driven Manchester City to the final of the Champions League.

This week millions of Scots have ­wrestled with a voting system that has held sway over our public life one that is admired and despised in equal measure. So step forward Victor Joseph Auguste D’Hondt, the Belgian lawyer and mathematician whose highest-averages method of proportional representation has gifted the Scottish Parliament its arcane voting system.

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It all began in 1878, when D’Hondt sat down at his desk to formulate a fair ­distribution of the seats among ­Belgian Catholics and liberals, from different ­linguistic communities. He had ­never heard of the Greens let alone Alex ­Salmond’s Alba Party, but his mission was driven by democratic objectivity, and how the votes cast at a ballot can convert into fairer representation.

The National: Joseph Auguste D’HondtJoseph Auguste D’Hondt

Although there is now a settled myth within Scotland that the D’Hondt ­system was chosen to prevent any party, and in particular the SNP, gaining an ­outright majority, that is not strictly true. The D’Hondt system is among the most ­favoured systems of proportional ­representation around the globe. It ­determines who will be elected to the Spanish ­Government, to the legislatures of ­Albania and Nicaragua and to more than 50 independent nations around the world. When football fans congregate around their television screens during the forthcoming Euros, the vast majority will have voted via the D’Hondt system at either ­national or local elections. Scotland’s group consists of England, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. Of those only ­England is still tethered to the first-past-the-post system, the other three are all ­national devotees of D’Hondt.

As we edge closer to independence it is worth looking at our other neighbours. The D’Hondt method dominates ­northern waters and is the electoral system that pertains in that arch of small nations so often cited in our politics including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greenland and Iceland.

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But here is a wheeze worth considering? What if we were to exhume Victor D’Hondt from his final resting place in the St Denis Western Cemetery in Ghent and pose him a final mathematical ­challenge – to devise a mathematical calculation whereby Scotland can win the Euros?

If that is beyond his formidable and calibrating mind then he could turn to the domestic game and devise a system that brings fairness to Scotland’s Premier League, which has been dominated by Celtic and Rangers for much of my adult life.

Although it might seem a fanciful idea, using a mathematical system to bring fairness to football is not entirely mad. Many sports have a built-in systems of competitive fairness. The handicap system in golf has its equivalent in 10 pin bowling and in archery which allows top players to compete with fresh starters. Most obvious all, horse-racing, a sport which is literally decided on who is first past the post, has pioneered handicap races to enable horses of varied ability to race competitively against each other via the allocation of weight.

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The NBA draft system in American basketball is another way of bringing a form of democracy into play. The draft is an annual event where the teams who did not make the playoffs in the previous year participate in a lottery style process to determine the first three picks. The team with the worst record receives the best odds of receiving the first pick, thus bringing the top players to less successful teams. It does not eliminate the power of wealth or mitigate against injury nor did it prevent the Chicago Bulls dominating for years, led by their 1984 draft pick Michael Jordan, but it does bring an element of proportionality into the game.

THE big question for fans of fairness is how might a D’Hondt system work in Scottish football? It would be tricky, mathematically complex, and almost certainly opposed by the major clubs who are so accustomed to their own duopoly they do not want change.

But not everyone would be against the idea. One of the stark factors that holds our game back is the lack of competition in the top league. One possibility would be to incentivise newly promoted clubs by giving them a promotion premium of 10 starting points, a reversal of an existing criteria that deducts points for financial failures or playing wrongly registered players. In this scenario, next season would begin with everyone playing catch-up with Hearts. It would be a further enhancement of the pyramid system that would incentivise change.

Another concept that a mathematical genius like D’Hondt might alight on is to borrow a concept from the NBA draft and prioritise the bottom six clubs giving them a balancing advantage, by ­allocating all the bottom ranking clubs a five-point start, the following season. Another might be a more complex piece of mathematics that would extrapolate both the size and the turnover of the playing squads and come up with formulae that gives a lift to clubs with lesser resources.

Celtic and Rangers fans will squeal at this suggestion, they love financial chasms on the home front but rage against them in Europe, when they come unstuck against teams from the big leagues. Gathering data should not be impossible, all players are required to be registered with the SFA, so squad size is relatively simple thing to calculate. What if every player over a starting squad of 18, led to a penalty point for extra players?

Turnover, financial assets and wage ratios may prove trickier but with Fifa insisting on a Financial Fair Play (FFP) policy and Uefa now requiring clubs to meet financial transparency standards, it is no longer impossible. A D’ Hondt calculation that helps lower paid sectors of the football society would surely be welcomed by all fair-minded fans? It is the peoples’ game after all.

I dream of a season where at the traditional split in Scottish League Football Celtic and Rangers are tied in fourth place with a handful of gameas left to try to prevent St Mirren winning the title.

I admit that applying the D’Hondt method to the SPL may sound like a new kind of fantasy football, but in the interest of fairness it is surely worthy of a pilot season. My slogan is simple – sack Neil Doncaster and bring on the dead Belgian.