The Indy produced this rather striking graphic today, along with an accompanying article telling us – once again – why we are in desperate need of electoral reform. They repeat once again the Mail claim which may well haunt Labour’s third term:

The Tories gained 50,000 more votes than Labour in England but got 92 fewer English seats.

As much as it’s talked up over the next few weeks, I highly doubt any major reforms of the electoral system will happen in this Parliament, not least because such reforms would seriously damage Labour’s chances of a fourth term. Or am I being too cynical?

The problem of electoral reform is a particularly tricky one, because I’m not aware of any suggestions that produce a truly fair and democratic electoral system. Having said that, I’m obviously not an expert in the field, and I may be missing something fairly obivous. But there’s no easy solution screaming out at me, like there is with so much other stuff that needs changing.

There was somewhere in particular that I intended to take this post, but it’s several hours since I started writing it (it’s been very much a bitty affair), and I’ve fogotten where that place was. I’m now faced with the decision of just giving up, or publishing this little bit. So I might as well just publish what I’ve written, even though there seems to be little point to it, and it doesn’t read very well. If you’ll forgive those points, I’ll consider writing something more sane tomorrow. But now I’m tired and have a killer headache.