VOTE RIGGING

As the furore of the impending rigged election continues, one aspect which many are prepared to ignore is the racial factor. Like it or not, the ethnic minorities are responsible for far more than their fair share of election fraud.

Ann Cryer MP has spoken of whole communities being pressured to vote in a particular way in her own constituency of Keighley. To her credit, she has been one of the strongest critics of postal voting, although she has admitted that she has kept quiet about the extent of what is going on for fear of being called a racist.

In June last year, she told of men with carrier bags of ballot papers and that ballot papers were rewritten if the vote had been cast the wrong way. She said: ‘People are going to homes, demanding that the voters there give up their ballot papers. The Asian community tend to stick together. If one of their elders comes to the door and asks them to do something, they by and large do it’.

Now it is revealed that the unions are getting involved. They are sending out postal ballot application forms to their members and have opened an office in Newcastle to process the forms en masse. Once again the distance between government and the ruling party is being blurred. The forms tell the recipients that unless they tick a box, their details will be passed on to Labour. For third parties to be handling such forms, when the postal ballot forms do not need to be sent to the applicant’s address, is wholly wrong.

This is all continuing despite the criticisms of Richard Mawrey QC, who sacked 6 Birmingham councillors due to the ‘massive, systematic and organised’ corruption by the local Labour party. He described the postal ballot system as ‘hopelessly insecure’ and that ‘the system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that it is wide open to fraud’.

Tony Blair has responded to the judge’s comments by saying: ‘I think it is important to point out the postal voting system is no more prone to fraud than any other’. That is the comment of a fool or a liar.

The role of the Electoral Commission is a disgrace. The commission has only been set up quite recently and is stuffed with Labour cronies. The commission has always been in favour of postal ballots, which presumably is why it has not roundly condemned the move to circumvent the ballot box. Yet even the commission had to recommend a halt in postal voting following the June elections last year.

It now emerges that a Cabinet committee, chaired by Peter Hain, decided that new safeguards were needed, but the plans for those safeguards were dropped when a survey revealed that Labour would lose votes if they were introduced.

This really is unacceptable. The government has introduced and is actively promoting widespread postal voting, in full knowledge that the election will be seriously affected by election fraud, and is prepared to tolerate that for their own political advantage.

The basis of our political system is that we are prepared to abide by the decisions made by government because that government has been democratically elected. If the government has been elected as a result of fraud, then the political stability of this country has been gravely undermined.

To his credit, John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Birmingham Yardley, has had the guts to call for the general election to be postponed. He has said that the election is ‘wide open to fraud’ and has made an application to the High Court for a judicial review.

We can only hope that he is successful. If not, then we will have a government which has been ‘elected’ as a result of a fraudulent postal ballot.