a busy flurry of social media activity and democracy (signifying nothing)

'the war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences - as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information....' 

- h.p. lovecraft, the shadow out of time.

good morning. good morning.

horsemouth is up early. he has a meeting he wants to go to. he's going to check if he actually needs to go to it or if he should waylay ian on the stairs and borrow his laptop. 

last night a busy flurry of social media activity (signifying nothing). 

first off, in honour of the resignation of gavin williamson, triple negative live from the apocalypse (well cafe OTO during the pandemic). there was the publication of the proposed boundary changes for the next election (less representation at westminster for the welsh and the scots but not, curiously, the northern irish) and some moaning in the torygraph about how inflation is being caused by the early retirees (like horsemouth). 

the big electoral scandal of under-representation is not the people trapped in over-large constituencies with an above average number of voters (the target of these reforms) whose vote, it is argued, does not count as much as the vote of someone in a smaller constituency with less voters, it is the vagaries of first past the post and the failure of a large proportion of the population to be either registered or to vote - it is a feedback loop of marginalisation and disenfranchisement. 

however seeing as it is the poorest and least politically involved who are disenfranchised like this there is little political will within the major political parties to engage with this problem. they are simply not the voters of the conservatives (and they are not the voters they would lie to have for labour). 

instead there is a moral panic around voter fraud (but incidences of this are statistically negligible).  voter fraud is card mainly played when neither of the two major parties win (e.g. in tower hamlets). 

the fetish here is for a strictly vote counting democracy (ignoring the way that first past the post and the two party system effectively stifles all the people who vote for the candidate who doesn't win in a particular constituency. there is no proportional representation here). plus there are the recent shenanigans where sitting prime ministers have been elected first by the conservative party membership (liz truss) and then when that was a disaster by conservative party MPs (rishi sunak) without the tory party feeling in any way obliged to go to the wider electorate.

and don't get horsemouth started on the house of lords, the judiciary etc.  the army, the police, the secret service, the aristocracy, the public school system, the economy (strangely not under democratic control), the whole vast edifice of inequality and privilege known as the british state. 

ah well fuck it. horsemouth has retired from it. it is not that his retirement is driving inflation it is that his failure to participate in the labour market means he can't be used (as a reserve army of labour) to drive down workers wages and so ensure that they pay for the current crisis (er. rather than the rich, horsemouth's preferred target for the bill). 

anyway it signifies nothing. as someone once remarked to horsemouth during a political debate 'no-one cares what you think' and horsemouth had to admit they were correct. 

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today horsemouth goes to plot the decarbonisation of social housing (on terms the tenants are unlikely to be able accept). tomorrow he goes to tell youngsters who are interested in self-build that their dream is not futile (even though secretly he believes that it is).