Over here in the lovely Kingdom of Northumbria, there's an air of expectancy and excitement. You can feel and see it wherever human beings gather – whether in the streets, the markets, the inns, the fields or their workshops. They're so excited about the forthcoming local elections and – most especially - the Great Referendum on the new Alternative Voting System; there's a definite festive air to the seaside town of Streonaeshalch; bunting flutters in the Spring sunshine; acrobats and mountebanks are performing their routines in the streets, musicians are playing, singers are baring their tonsils and their brown teeth, the mead and ale is flowing down gullets, and everyone is ecstatically happy.
Well – perhaps I'm exaggerating. Just a tiny bit… but I did see a seagull deliver a monstrous payload out of sheer joy – it settled on the al fresco fish supper of the local Alderman. Happy days.
Blaeck Clegge – the Dear and Revered Leader of the Liberationist Faction is very excited about the Great Referendum; he's been harping on about it for about a year, but Liberationists are always intoning about voting reform, since they've never had the opportunity to win a Great Count in their own right. The idea of some hare-brained new complicated voting methodology is their only potential ticket to success, since the outright winners of such elections are seldom those who by a majority of preferential votes achieve the overall mandate.
Having dealt with one set of serial losers, I now turn to the fly agaric-led, chandelier-swinging Redistributionists. Unlike their Liberationist brethren, for whom Alternative Voting is an article of holy dogma, these are divided on the issue. Some are foaming at the mouth in delirious anticipation at the prospect – others are not so wild-eyed and enthusiastic. Edweird the Milliner – the deluded Beloved Chief of the faction has publicly declared that he doesn't personally see the need for the new proposed Voting System, since the existing one has amply served their purposes for seventeen thousand years. And since the Redistributionists have already brought the fine art of vote-rigging to a state of near-perfection, why make the process more intellectually demanding for aspiring cheats? I see the logic.
The Trees – and their Chief Cock and Bluebottle-Washer Caedmeron – have also been ambivalent on the issue. For the most part they've said that they're against the idea, since they purport to be intellectually resistant to change. But they've been perfectly happy in previous times to make radical alterations to the running of the Kingdom by selling it over wholesale to the Holy Roman Empire (which is neither holy, Roman nor an empire) so that Northumbria is now no more than a mere vassal state or province at the behest of the megalomaniac Emperor Jose Borracho and his sandwich-short-of-a-picnic assistant Hermit.
As for the public - who are being relentlessly force-fed the idea that the Alternative Voting System is a Good And Desirable Thing by Beeby See and other delusional soothsayers – they're simply confused.
As for me – I suddenly feel very tired and my eyelids are getting heavy. I'm going for a nap. Wake me up when it's over. And don't bother telling me the result…
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