Poor list, don't you think? The Mercury dozen, I mean. To recap:

Adele - 19
British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
Burial - Untrue
Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid
Estelle - Shine
The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement
Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim
Neon Neon - Stainless Style
Portico Quartet - Knee-Deep in the North Sea
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns

Poor list, and yet in many ways, you have to say the much-maligned judges got it more or less right. Oh, of course, they should have found room for Paul Weller's 22 Dreams and for MIA's Kala. PJ Harvey's White Chalk I enjoyed far more than her past winner Stories From the City, too. And they should probably have overlooked the plodding indie of British Sea Power, who are on paper a fascinating band and on record duller than Shed 7 - and as for Adele, well, I don't like to be unkind...

But these are quibbles. Overall, you have to admit they've covered the ground pretty well. Interesting side-project (Last Shadows) - check! Resurgent veteran (Robert Plant) - check! Underheard but accessible jazz act (Portico Quartet) - yeah yeah, check one-two. They've covered all bases, done a good job.

So why do I call it a poor list? Simple, really. British music simply isn't very good. The judges diligently picked out some worthy toilers - but really, this time they're the best of a bad bunch. No longer can does Britain compete at the top musical table. And I'm not just saying this for the sacrilicious joy of unpatriotic. I just think, surveying the current field, we - and this "we" is part of the problem - just aren't what we were.

By way of slightly unfair comparison here's a Rest of the World XII, right of the top of my head. If some fall slightly out of the time frame forgive me, if I've forgotten some or it's not as varied as you'd like, fine, but put it this way - it would have taken me considerably longer to scrape together a British list before Tuesday's announcement, and looking at this one, I know which set I'll be returning to most.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Erykah Badu - New Amerykah
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
Justice - †
Sebastien Tellier - Sexuality

I can't think of an British album that has given me as much pleasure as any of these recently. In comparison with these riches, our scene looks like a garden fete, bizarrely fragmented, parochial, over-pleased with its own Britishness in many cases, yet somehow lacking in identity. Perhaps it's time to accept that we are a Sweden, or an Australia, or a France in pop terms these days.

You can identify a few different maladies. The British indie scene has long been a source of mirth to clued-up Americans, who view our conveyor belt of hyped up tykes much as we might the Eurovision song contest - as a conservative, musically irrelevant, if occasionally amusing spectacle. Our mainstream now is mainly a parade of momentarily fashionable nobodies of no great concern to posterity (the Mercury judges did better than previous years in largely ignoring them, the Pigeon Detectives and their ilk, I mean). The lack of a genuinely popular innovater means that one of the central pieces of pop magic - bringing an avant-garde idea into people's living rooms - is no longer of great concern. The once mighty Radiohead, from their straight-to-fans marketing strategy and musically dull In Rainbows, have all but given up on doing this.

As for the unpopular innovaters - the proponents of niche movements such as dubstep, trip-hop or drum'n'bass, whom the Mercury Prize is capable of delivering to a wider audience - the major proponents, Burial being a case in point, actively shrink from recognition. All such British scenes of the last 10 years or so have imploded as soon as they are noticed by the mainstream and the record companies soon give up engaging with them. Estelle is someone who does have ambitions to reach a wide audience, but she was forced to drop most of her British quirks to do so. She went to America to record Shine, her second album, as the British record industry had lost interest in the urban scene that made her name and her label dropped her. Shine has guest appearances from Kanye West, John Legend, Cee-Lo and will.i.am. Is this a triumph for British music? For Estelle yes - and no one could begrudge her - but in fact, her case is a damning indictment.

The net result of all this is there is little more than a token nod to the cross-fertilisation that the Mercury judges are apparently so keen on in British music, and little more than the first stutterings of a native scene. In truth, while the choice we now have is dizzyingly wide, people are less wont to leave the comfort of their chosen genre than ever before.

What to prescribe? Answers on a postcard. I would venture that we need to stop treating music like sport and thinking of it in terms of "British music" for a start. Opening up the Mercury Prize and the Brit awards would help. I would also say that a spirit of adventure, of trying to reach as wide an audience as possible with something as interesting as possible, as epitomised by the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and the quirky things the public has occasionally elected to our number one spot, what I consider one of the golden aims of pop, is something that we're in danger of losing. That would be a national tragedy.