The ever-whimsical shortlist for the Nationwide Mercury Music Prize for best British or Irish album was announced yesterday and it looks, in case you didn't know, like this:

1. Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare
2. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
3. Fionn Regan - The End of History
4. Maps - We Can Create
5. The View - Hats Off to the Buskers
6. Jamie T - Panic Prevention
7. Bat For Lashes - Fur and Gold
8. Basquiat Strings & Seb Rochford - Basquiat Strings
9. Dizzee Rascal - Maths and English
10. New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom
11. The Young Knives - Voices of Animals and Men
12. Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future

Amy Winehouse has immediately been installed as favourite, with public, critics and bookies, and certainly, her Back to Black is a great, zeitgeist-nabbing album whose popularity, refreshingly, is largely based on the fact that it's beautifully written and performed. A thought-provoking piece on the Guardian's comment pages today makes a persuasive case for it as part of a British soul tradition reaching back to dear Dusty Springfield (an argument which even withstands the author's championing of Simply Red) and a record that stands counter to the current indie rock mainstream, which is rather nicely summed up as "Edith Bowman Britain". Winehouse also comes from Enfield, as I do ("London's Top Borough", not only geographically) which is good enough reason for her to win in my eyes.

However, I fear that the judges of the Mercury Prize, although they make a point of being unpredictable, are quite at home in Edith Bowman Britain - in which "once niche music (Arctic Monkeys, the View and their ilk) has been elevated high above its deserved level due to no more unfair advantage than being made by white boys with guitars", as the Graun has it.

The list is certainly more lively than last year's, and younger, too: Bat For Lashes, NYPC, Klaxons and the presence again of Seb Rochford are all great plus points. Then again, the fact that the NME's edoteur Conor McNicholas is now on the panel is hardly encouraging; remember him announcing 2005's "difficult" winners Antony and the Johnsons were not for his readers? We can probably thank McNicholas for the inclusion of the piss-boring The View among this year's nominations.

Without wishing to come over all PC, I wonder how many women there are on the panel - who might ensure a bit of pop gets a look in once in a while? How many black judges - who might allow for a slightly more than a token spattering of urban music? Of course, the Mercury has rewarded the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Roni Size in the past, but recently it has been far too aligned with the mainstream. Two of the last three years have resulted in wins for the indie-rock hegemony (Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys), while the head of the judges has before now revealed that Antony's win with the Johnsons was a compromise: the angry men on the panel were actually torn between Bloc Party and Kaiser Chiefs, but third choice Antony didn't really offend anyone. (The winner is decided on the night of the awards ceremony itself explain the rather odd array of past winners).

Why do I moan so much? Why, in fact, does the Mercury produce more moaning than just about any other award?

I think it's because the Mercury has the potential to do so much more good than it actually does. It must be the only such award that can genuinely make a career, plucking artists from obscurity - such as Seth Lakeman, Zoe Rahman or Katherine Williams a while back - and allowing them to rub shoulders with the establishment. It hasn't done nearly enough of this in recent years. I suppose I'm at a (dis)advantage given my job, but I am rather disappointed to have heard every single artist on the list this year; even the "token" jazz album, The Basquiat Strings and Seb Rochford, excellent though it is, is not such a curveball for those with a passing interest in jazz, Rochford being the most feted young player in the country. The fact that it costs £1000 and 50 CDs even to have one's album considered for the shortlist is no help, intrinsically favouring major labels and potentially ruining a lot of smaller hopefuls (one independent label owner who had rather optimistically punted four of his charges confessed as much to me recently).

So who would I like to see on the shortlist? Oddly enough if it were a list of  non-British albums it would be far easier to dream up a dozen excellent candidates - perhaps an unpalatable truth. But surveying our homegrown talent such as it is... Lethal Bizzle probably. Acoustic Ladyland definitely, as well as fellow jazzers Led Bib - or the more refined Tom Cawley's Curios, if more than one entry from this frightening genre were permitted. Certainly Simian Mobile Disco and maybe Electrelane's latest. But then again what I really want to see on the list is people I have never heard of.

I still reckon Amy should win, though - not simply because she isn't an indie rock band, but because she has made the most durable album on the list, and she simply puts the most emotion on the line. But given the unamity of this hope, don't bet against the, ahem, dead white males of the panel perversely plumping for oooh, Jamie T.