What is wrong with these people

The chief honcho at the Returning Wallah's Federation has warned that a large number of Brits might find they've inadvertently been disenfranchised if the PM should call an early election for this autumn.

The electoral rolls are not maintained on an, er, um rolling basis. The local Return Wallah sends or oversees or directs the sending out to all addresses of a registration card annually. Householders are required to return the card identifying eligible voters resident at the address.

Failure to comply is a heinous offence punishable by slow death involving suspension by the thumbs, racking, attaching of electrodes to delicate parts etc, etc. This is useful as it provides a civilian occupation for defrocked soldiers returning to civilian life.

And if that fails then the Returning Wallah will write to the delinquent householder again ... and again and again and again... Eventually one of two things happens : either the householder relents and replies or the householder drowns under this tidal wave of little white cards that identify wholly accurately everyone living under the roof who is eligible to vote as already entered on the roll, with no omissions and no erroneous extraneous additions.

The capacity of the British to over-engineer anything is both bewildering and fascinating. How simple it all could be. You turn 18, you register to vote, you remain registered to vote for the rest of your life.

Financial services organisations rely heavily if not wholly on the electoral rolls for the purpose of establishing identity, and the British population depend on such organisations for their limitless consumer credit. So it seems to me that it is now absolutely in the interests of The Great Unwashed to maintain their voting registration. It follows that there is no longer any need for the annual survey of households for the purpose of updating the voting registers. Furthermore any new law-based compulsion must be superfluous when access to that next store card is already under threat.

The kind of people who don't crave store cards tend to be the sort of people who take the trouble to interest themselves in and inform themselves about matters of public policy and therefore would take the trouble to register (and vote) anyway.

And guess what? That million and a half disenfranchised voters (who probably won't vote anyway) would vanish if it simply became a matter of 'keeping yourself registered'.

Ah, but it might put a few over paid local government functionaries with the poncy job title of Electoral Wallah out of a job. Oh dear. And it was such a good idea.