The UK General Election

 So, the UK Election.

As we now know the UK Labour party has won a massive majority on the back of an anti Tory protest vote. Under scrutiny, the figures do not look quite so good, roughly 40% of the registered voters didn’t vote, and of the non Labour vote, if you lump together the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform party, you would have seen quite a few seats that turned Labour stay Tory - basically if they had preferential voting as we do in Australia, Labour would still have won, but not by nearly so many.

However, I’m not going to indulge in political commentary. I left England for good over twenty years ago and have no intention of returning there to live. All I’ll say is that having gone back for a family visit last year, the first since well before the pandemic, Britain was noticeably poorer than previously.

While there’s no real reason to do so, I’ve kept my British passport as well as my Australian one, as I thought it might simplify the application process when I became due for my UK aged pension - as I’d accumulated around two thirds of the National Insurance contributions for a full UK pension it was worth claiming

When I first moved to Australia, while you could register as a UK elector, the process was purposely cumbersome to discourage you from doing so. Then, with a change of policy, they made it simpler and encouraged you to register, with the proviso that you would lose the right to vote after fifteen years overseas residence, something  that made perfect sense as if you’d lived overseas for fifteen years you probably no longer had any real connection.

And then this year, another policy change and they got rid of the fifteen year rule, probably to allow the members of the Alicante Golf Club to vote, so being a good little vegemite I registered with no intention of actually voting.

Now, when we lived in York, the last place we lived in was a commuter village outside of the city which wasn’t in any of the city electoral districts, but was attached to a sprawling predominately agricultural electorate, where quite frankly a baboon in Union Jack underpants could get elected if it was the Tory candidate. (I used to vote Green as one person protest against environmentally destructive farming practices.)

Not even preferential voting would , in a normal election, allow the election of a non Tory MP.

But the times were not normal, and amazingly, it looked as if there was a chance of Labour unseating the Tories.

So, despite having said I wouldn’t vote, when my postal vote finally arrived I filled in the ballot and sent it back - this was only just over a week before the vote, so I’ve no idea if it got there in time.

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered, the rural voters of Goole and Pocklington elected a Tory, albeit by a reduced margin, and my postal vote wouldn’t have made any difference.

Will I vote next time?

Probably not. I’ve no close connection to the area and it’s only an accident of electoral geography that I have a vote in a rural electorate, and frankly, if they didn’t elect a non Tory candidate this time they probably never will ...