THE increasing amount of litter being chucked out into the Forest is disgusting and a danger to livestock. For example, just look at the verges as you approach and exit Burley, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the McDonald’s staff who work the verges south of the A31.

The cans, fag packets, stub ends, fast food boxes, crisp and sweet wrappers can be safely assumed to have come from passing cars. All the high energy drink bottles, water bottles, and increasingly sophisticated muscle gel pads etc. are more likely to have come from Lycra clad cyclists (rarely does one see runners there).

These litter bugs are just too idle to give a moment’s thought to the consequences of what they are doing. On the other hand however, the fellow who dumped his sofa at Picket Post a fortnight or so ago, clearly went to a great deal of effort. It is a pity he didn’t have the intelligence to spot that, in all probability, it would have taken less effort to dispose of it lawfully at the municipal facility on the way to Verwood.

What really gets to me are those people who assiduously bag up their dog poo and then leave the sealed bag on the ground or hanging from a bush for somebody else to deal with. Do they imagine that there is a collection service?

Are they worried that, were they to dispose of it properly, then they would be denying some Forestry Commission employee a livelihood?

I doubt it, I suspect they too are just idle and thoughtless.

  • LABOUR have taken their election defeat manfully and have launched a soul-searching examination of reasons for their drubbing at the polls. The collective whinge by the minor parties however, is in stark contrast. They prefer to blame our electoral system, which, they claim, is ‘broken’.

It isn’t. On the contrary, it appears to be working properly again having malfunctioned in 2010.

The Anglo-Saxon voting system, now copied and used in the majority of the world’s democracies, has a beautiful and well understood simplicity: the candidate who gets the most votes wins.

The purpose of the system is to identify, and to reward the winner. It isn’t its purpose to try and be fair to losers; on the contrary, it disproportionately rewards winners. For example, last month the Conservatives came first with 38 per cent of the votes cast, but were rewarded with over 50 per cent of the parliamentary seats.

The advantage of this disproportionate winner’s reward is that the successful party gets a clear majority with which it can deliver legislation and govern decisively. This is in contrast to continental electoral systems which deliver indecisive results and leave the winner scrabbling to find coalition partners and to put together a compromise programme that nobody actually voted for. They have a tendency to put parties which command broad support, at the mercy of demands for concessions from small parties with comparatively little support.

Nothing of human design is ever perfect, and our own electoral system failed to deliver decisive results in 1973 and 2010. It is a matter of some satisfaction that last month it appears to have started delivering properly once again.

There is nothing new about the disproportionate winner’s reward delivered by our voting system. This feature is at the heart of why so many of us approve of it, and some disapprove of it. What the critics appear to have forgotten is that we rehearsed all these arguments and came to a decisive conclusion to stick with our Anglo-Saxon system in a referendum only 4 years ago in 2011. The winning margin was a whopping 70 per cent to 30 per cent, enough to settle the question for a generation.

UK politics is not a promising place for parties who want to occupy a niche. It may be tough on the minor parties, but the only way to do better, is to try and win.