it's sunday afternoon when he types this. he plans to be off into the wilds monday morning.
horsemouth has missed his opportunity to go for a wander up the park while the sun shone. he did get out for a book-box wander this morning (nothing nothing nothing). (and later he did get in a wander over the marshes).
he has listened to the news. (oh look now it is actually raining).
he is pondering the election results more
but not to the extent of calculating the gallagher index for it himself you understand.
the gallagher index is a measure of how unrepresentative elections are. it compares the percentage of seats a party received with the percentage of the voters voting for it, i.e. how well expressed the wishes of the electorate at the ballot box are expressed in the parliament. it counts over-representation and under-representation as the same thing.
ok the gallagher index is in for the 2024 election. it is 23.67. this is a high figure and so we are in the top five in the world for unrepresentativeness of recent elections. it is large even for uk parliamentary elections.
in fact (by this measure) it is the most unrepresentative uk election result in 79 years.
election year gallagher index
1945 11.62
1950 6.91
1951 2.61
1955 4.13
1959 7.30
1964 8.88
1966 8.44
1970 6.59
1974 feb 15.47
1974 oct 14.96
1979 11.58
1983 17.45
1987 14.95
1992 13.55
1997 16.51
2001 17.76
2005 16.73
2010 15.13
2015 15.02
2017 6.47
2019 11.80
2024 23.67
(based on gallagher, michael, 2024. election indices dataset at http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/about/people/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/index.php, accessed 07/07/24).
low turnout is the story of the election (though this doesn't affect the gallagher index). .
the conservatives lost nearly half their voters. reform is the story of the election. their 14.3% of the vote (up from 2%) sunk the tories (but it gave them only five seats) and these two factors together allowed other parties to edge past the tories.
labour won fewer votes than at the last election, at 9.7 million in 2024 compared to 10.3 million in 2019. nonetheless, labour won 412 seats with this, an increase of 211 from 2019 (such is the magic of first passed the post).
the fact that labour was on course for victory (and that it has been thoroughly crap in opposition) emboldened people to vote for parties to the 'left' of it - notably the greens (four seats) and pro-palestine campaigners (five seats if you include corbyn). there are an awful lot of labour candidates who survived this by the skin of their teeth (wes streeting survived, jonathan ashworth did not).
despite this support for reform in the country is much bigger (14.3% of the vote) than support for the greens (6.8% of the vote) or for the liberal democrats (12.2% of the vote).
next time the conservatives have the choice of uniting with reform or destroying them or inviting them into coalition government (the better to destroy them). the remaining tory MPs are much more of that brexiteer persuasion than their predecessors (even as there are less of them).
all of this stores up problems for the next election (which we will all have to face in due course).
horsemouth heads off into the wilds having failed to do many of the things he said he'd do (ah well). he voted (his main intention) and he saw a few people (but not all the people he wanted to see). he got in a wander with TG, and a visit to the pub with minty, max and antknee, and two rehearsals with howard.
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