last day of the year (in the still of the night)

today horsemouth will not be using a pro forma - he will be typing free. 

horsemouth has been thinking about the government mandated rearranging of constituency boundaries to equalise the size of the constituencies to within (+or - 5% of the registered electorate) excluding 5 predominantly island constituencies where that cannot be made to work. this will (strangely some might say) give the governing party an additional 5 seats or so. 

horsemouth (as you know) is a great fan of the gallagher index - a measure of how unrepresentative an election has been based on the difference between the percentage of people voting for a particular party and the percentage of seats it receives in parliament after people's votes have been through britain's bizarre first past the post system and given 3rd party effects (where the 3rd party splits the vote). 

it should come as no surprise that the unrepresentativeness of UK elections derives in the main from the first past the post system and third party effects rather than the differing size of the constituencies. and yet the differing size of the constituencies is the cause that the government are going after - this is because it enables them to dismantle some advantages to the other parties (causing a small over representation of the labour, scots nats, northern irish and welsh parties). 

we will not discuss the representation afforded by the unelected house of lords. 

of course it could be argued that those over-representations should be there to afford 'the nations' (scotland, wales, northern ireland) a voice in national life - but the conservative and unionist party are not taking this view (perhaps at the peril of their unionist convictions - if they have any left). 

but this is not the only factor leading to unrepresentative election results. 

around 17% of eligible voters in great britain are not correctly registered at their current address, representing as many as 9.4 million people in total. in northern ireland, 1 in 4 eligible voters – as many as 430,000 people – are not correctly registered. or so said sir john holmes, chair of the electoral commission back in sunny 2019. this disproportionately affects young people, minority ethnic people and people in rented accommodation. 

and this is from the people who are allowed to vote (the eligible voters) it excludes EU residents (who can no longer opt to vote in general elections but only in local elections), non-EU residents, citizens in jail or mental institutions. it includes residents from the republic of ireland. in wales foreign born residents are allowed to vote (which is an interesting anomaly). 

now horsemouth (as you know) is less interested in the system working properly than in pointing out that the system does not work. he is not even convinced by parliament as governing body - he tends to think of it as a (notionally) democratic puppet show stuck on the front of an undemocratic deep state. it is less for horsemouth about electing MPs to a talking shop than electing the government. horsemouth is not of the 'don't vote it only encourages them' persuasion - he thinks we have far too few tools for registering our displeasure with this society and we should make use of all of them.

it is the last day of the year - in the still of the night it will become 2021 in the gregorian calendar. horsemouth offers you surveillance footage of john fahey practicing for his album city of refuge. horsemouth believes this to be a track by fred parris and the satins.