The elect

God only knows how many UK gen­eral elec­tions I sat through with my fa­ther, who loved them, even though he had spent most of his life vot­ing Labour in a mainly Con­ser­v­a­tive con­stituency and had there­fore – thanks to the British first-past-the-post sys­tem (as idio­syn­cratic in Eu­rope as three pin plugs and the pound) – had his life's votes thrown in the bin for decades. Be that as it may, elec­tion nights cer­tainly were fun back in the mid-20th cen­tury, as the lack of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion meant that every­thing was im­pro­vised. For ex­am­ple, there was the mo­ment – in the 1974 elec­tions, I think - when the cam­era switched back to the stu­dio from an out­side broad­cast and caught the pre­sen­ter swig­ging a pint of bit­ter, which he hastily slipped out of sight while try­ing to put his pro­fes­sional ex­pres­sion back on. And then there was a Cana­dian 'elec­tion ex­pert' who was for­ever parked in a cor­ner of the stu­dio where he would make oc­ca­sional pre­dic­tions – which were only slightly less in­ter­est­ing than tele­vised snooker - of what the night would hold, using a hand-op­er­ated dial called a Swingome­ter, which he some­times pointed to­wards Labour, and some­times to­wards the To­ries: no­body, back then, ever thought out­side the two party box. There was, it is true, some­thing called the Lib­eral Party, which seemed to have been put there on pur­pose to prove that Britain was a real democ­racy, but which mainly served to pro­vide un­ex­pected en­ter­tain­ment, such as when its then leader, Je­remy Thorpe, hired a hit man to shoot his lover's dog. How­ever, the 2015 UK elec­tions last month trans­formed British pol­i­tics – for the first time ever - into a gen­uine three-party sys­tem, the third being the Scot­tish Na­tional Party, who ob­tained 50 more seats to add to the six they al­ready had. The morn­ing after, the on­line edi­tions of the Lon­don-based media barely men­tioned this sea change, as if their minds were still locked in the two-party past. It was only then I re­alised that hav­ing lived for 30 years in Cat­alo­nia, I gave only a rel­a­tive damn about who won or lost the elec­tions in Eng­land, a coun­try which has long ceased to feel like home. But with the Scot­tish, I felt a sud­den flare-up of em­pa­thy, now that Cat­alo­nia and Scot­land re­ally do have some­thing in com­mon: we have both be­come the ele­phants in the rooms of the re­spec­tive states we still find our­selves liv­ing in.