The English idiom ‘Cat and Mouse ‘ dates from 1675 and means a repeated action where someone/something is pursued, captured and re-released. Obviously, the idiom derives from feline hunting tactics; cats love to play with their prey, wearing the poor mouse down until the final deadly paw stroke is inflicted. It’s immortalised in those ‘Tom and Gerry’ cartoons which are often starkly violent. Here is our beloved Napoleone, who passed away shortly before Christmas last year, acting out the metaphor in 2008:

The idiom is also infamously applied to the 1913 ‘Prisoners, Temporary Discharge for Health Act’, otherwise known as the ‘cat and mouse’ act. Suffragettes, this year commemorating the hundredth anniversary of their first obtaining votes for women, were arrested for civil disobedience and imprisoned. The likes of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst would resort to a hunger strike and the prison authorities would force-feed them, much to the embarrassment of the government, since suffragettes were well- educated and sometimes with aristocratic backgrounds. When sufficiently weakened by their hunger strike the suffragettes were released to be re-arrested the next time they committed a breach of the peace. The imprisonment, hunger-strike, force feeding and release cycle was repeated ad infinitum.

August 1914 signalled the start of the Great War; the suffragettes halted their activities for the duration and contributed to the war effort. As recognition the government passed the ‘Representation of the People Act’ in 1918 which gave the vote to all men over twenty-one and all women over thirty who held (or whose husbands held)  over £5 worth of property. This extended the franchise by 5.6 million men and 8.4 women.

Unfortunately the act, otherwise so admirable, introduced two further innovations which adversely affect the British voting system. One was the institutionalization of first-past-the-post election  rejecting proportional representation. The other was making residency in a constituency the basis of the right to vote.

The first-past-the post system has been particularly unfair to the Liberal Democrats. In the present parliament, for example, the Lib-dems have 7.4% of votes but are represented by less than 2% of seats. The residency system has mean that British citizens living abroad have no voting rights if they have lived away from their nation for over fifteen years.

The fact that the Lib-dems, and the Scottish Nationals, are the only parties to fully commit themselves to staying within the European community is thus particularly unfortunate in view of the UK’s absence of proportional representation, to say nothing about the 1.3 million of vote-deprived brits outside the UK resident in the EU.

Ironically it’s the proportional representation system that creates the persistent state of short-lived and volatile Italian governments.

In Bagni di Lucca the eyesore, blocking  views of the Lima river, of poster hoardings for the many parties Italy is saddled with have gone up, all quite, quite useless as a colleague told me yesterday since, in today’s era of digital  media, a majority of electors make their minds up by reading newsfeeds and blogs. Anyway, the Italian elections are due to be held on March 4^th. I wonder if this time the country will get the government its long-suffering people truly deserve?

(The election poster hoardings erected at Ponte a Seraglio. Behind them is the river Lima)