The latest crop of opinion polls are nothing short of disastrous for New Labour, just ahead of the European elections. I don’t think I have linked before to UK Polling Report, which is an excellent site.
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/
Postal balloting has already started. This has been thve vehicle for massive fraud in recent elections, after New Labour deliberately brought in a system wide open to vote harvesting amongst patriarchal immigrant communities where they have firm support. All parties have abused the system, but New Labour on a much vaster scale.
As an independent candidate I witnessed Jack Straw’s electoral fraud in Blackburn in 2005, where a monumental 29% of all votes were cast by postal ballot.
A key element of New Labour’s postal ballot fraud operation is that, by law, the postal ballots are mixed in with other ballots, out of view of the candidates and their agents, before the ballots are counted. That renders the fraud unprovable.
I have tried very hard to think of any valid reason for this provision of mixing in the postal ballots before counting, and other than facilitating fraud, no other reason occurs to me. I am quite simply stunned that we allow this fraud to happen.
An official who was present when the postal ballots were opened in Blackburn told me privately that they had the impression that 90% went to Jack Straw. Several of my canvassers had personally witnessed New Labour enforcers collecting up ssheaves of postal ballots door to door and taking them to local council community centres where New Labour were collating them. Whether the ballots were filled in before New Labour collected them, I know not.
New “safeguards” introduced since. chiefly regarding signatures, will make no difference at all in a situation where, rather than posting it yourself, you are intimidated into handing over your ballot unsealed to a New Labour man.
Lord Patel got his nose into the House of Peers’ trough solely for enforcing the New Labour vote among the Muslim community of Blackburn. I expect that is basically what the thief Baroness Udders was ennobled for, too.
The ennoblements in fact only symbolise an entire system whereby Muslim communities in the UK are kept dependent upon great streams of public money. Lord Patel’s own companies have benefited from a bewildering variety of government and EU grants and subsidies. Blackburn is soaked in EU regional funds and urban regeneration grants. It bristles with community centres, cultural organisations and community workers. The council is the biggest employer. I could go on and on.
Charles Moore is a fool. He is yet another Conservative who accepts the inane rubbish of Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove as expertise on British Muslims, who they never meet. (I was friends with Charles’ mum and dad, Richard and Anne, so I am really sorry the had an idiot).
It is in fact completely untrue that the Muslim Council of Britain supports attacks on British soldiers, as Moore claimed. The real disgrace is that, in return for vast flows of public funds and extremely lax visa regimes for relatives, orchestrated by Lord Ahmed, Lord Patel, Baroness Udders and others, British Muslims turned their backs on their co-religionists in Iraq and kept supporting New Labour for cash.
If their religion is true, they are nearly all going to Hell.
In a 2005 general election which New Labour would probably have won without fraud, all this did not seem to worry too many people very much. As the New Labour vote dwindles radically, these great batches of postal votes are going to stick out like a sore thumb.
The Returning Officer in Blackburn refused to show me the actual law he claimed said that postal ballots must be mixed in before counting, but I understand it still happens in all elections. It may be worth taking this to the European Court of Human Rights, in relation to the conduct of the European Elections, as a provision which plainly encourages electoral fraud in the UK and thus affects the balance of the entire European Parliament,
If someone is voting “on behalf” of a whole family or even a whole street by postal voting, I can’t see e-voting preventing that happening, no matter how secure it is.
HappyClappy, could one possible reason be that those with money and power in the state are in cahoots with those with money and power in the feudal patriarchal set-up of some minority ethnic communities as a means of social control?
I must re-emphasise here that it’s not just Muslims and that it does not refer for example to, for instance, Near and Middle Eastern Muslims, just some groups of South Asian peoples where, partly because of the demographics of migration – rural poor coming to advanced cities, etc. – and because of chain migration and serious initial and in some cases persisting racism, they banded together as they would in the village set-up and have applied the village societal framework to an urban society – which of course has its benefits but which also in the long run is a serious mismatch. The ‘fundo’ thing is relatively more recent in this context, I mean in terms of its effect on the mainstream of these groups, but it’s been a rather toxic ingredient, though somewhat overplayed in the media.
And another reason could be that when anyone else from these communities shouts out about it, or writes about it, or tries to raise money for alternative structures – as many do, in the minority ethnic media, for example, – their voices tend not to be foregrounded in the mainstream media and they tend not to get funded. They don’t fit the paradigm, you see, of ‘bad beardies, waving burning books’, nor of ‘authenticity’ which has bedevilled such interactions for so long and they also threaten to upset the apple-cart of the ‘cosy curry’ relationship b/w two sets of nepotistical power elites.
What lost Labour the 1992 election was Poll Tax. Something like one and a half million voters didn’t figure on the electoral register in order to avoid paying it. If you look at the polls before the election, which predicted a labour win, and the result, you’ll see the difference is roughly the same as that number.
You asked why postal votes are mixed with ballot-box votes. It’s because when that rule was invented we didn’t have postal voting on demand; you could only get a postal vote if you were either physically incapable of going to the polling station (and you generally needed a doctor to certify that) or if you were going to be away from home for a good reason (generally on business or a student studying away from home – holidays were specifically excluded).
Back then, the number of postal votes was so low that if you could see who the postal votes were for it might well be possible to work out who a particular voter had voted for. In the simplest case, local council wards that didn’t have an old folks’ home in might well have just one postal voter – and that one voter would then not have a secret ballot.
When the Labour Government allowed anyone to cast a postal vote, they didn’t change rules that were designed to cope with a few dozen postal votes to deal with a few thousand.
Given just how administratively incompetent this government has been, I doubt it was deliberately introduced to be easier to fix an election – but I’m equally sure that it was deliberately not changed in order to keep fixing elections.
JimmyGiro,
All my concerns were based on problems that can be introduced by governments, not by random hackers as such. This means that encryption will be useless to stop govt spying as obviously they will have the keys to decrypt all the data (a lifetime worth of voting records linked to exact living locations). I’m not too concerned about script kiddies messing with elections (although this is also possible unless appropriate safeguards are implemented). However an electronic election is begging to be abused by any sitting government unless there is also a manual count of all the paper receipts (assuming they even have them), and if that is the case, why bother with e voting at all?
Richard,
Thanks.
Agree with CheebaCow.
Your bank has to know your account. The Government should not know how you voted.
The only way to retain secrecy is to break the link between the voter and the ballot paper once the vote has been cast. In Ireland this link is definitively broken (but only in the last few decades. Previously it was technically possible to trace votes.)
There are all sorts of fiddles possible with paper voting but the chances of them being discovered are a lot higher than with the electronic system.
I consider myself reasonably computer literate and enjoy exploring new cyber frontiers. But I would not abandon paper voting. It is too important to cede to the techies.
Democracy is underrated in Muslim communities. Firstly because a majority of opinion can never outweigh the command of God.It doesn’t matter how many people vote for alcohol, they can’t make it halal. Secondly because of the Hamas factor, that the opponents of Zionism and the West have lost not just their human rights but also their civil rights under the jurisdiction of G.Bush and T.Blair.
Thirdly, because the Zionist and Christian war against Islam dating from the Crusades or before legitimises falsehood in the opinion of many Asian Muslim scholars. Electoral fraud for the sake of self-interest would not therefore be a reason for going to Hell, even though not believing in One God would be a valid reason.
In a multi-cultural society, you have to put up with the fact that the UK has got up the noses of most of the world’s populations. Blair did not understand that the best thing for this country was to stop annoying other countries and to start paying the price of goods we want instead of killing people for them. New Labour got seduced by Zionists into totally immoral neo-colonial aggression. With friends like Israel, does this country need enemies? The friends of Israel in our House of Commons have shamed this country, for a few measly millions in their back pockets. Fortunately, the people of Iraq and even Afghanistan understand that the ordinary people of this country are NOT responsible for Blair’s crimes.
Anon, I totally agree with much of your analysis in relation to colonialism and neocolonialism, necons, Zionism, Israel, Blair, Bush, etc. in relation to ‘democracy’. However, I would like to point out that it is not possible that (to paraphrase) “Zionists have been waging war against Islam since the time of the Crusades”.
Zionism did not exist back then and furthermore, both Jews and Muslims were victims of the Crusades – whenever there was an external crusade against Muslims, there was simultaneously an internal one against Jews in Western Europe.
Quite apart from the massive, prolonged and mutually beneficial Mediaeval interaction, when the Jews were expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs in 1942, many of them migrated to Morocco and to the lands of the Ottoman Empire. In both places, they played a key role in building the strength of those states, esp. in the case of the Ottoman Empire. There is much, much more. Bokhara, Khurasan, Iran, Fez… the whole concept we have of Islamic civilisation was defined and created by people from very many faiths, including Jews and Eastern Christians.
This glossy brochure idea that ‘Jews and Christians’ have always been enemies of Islam is not accurate and is peddled by those on both sides – including dangerous nutters like Daniel Pipes et al – who seek to reinforce a simple, bipolar world-view.
Unfortunately, because of contemporary geopolitics, too many Muslims and Jews have forgotten this central fact and when reminded of it, behave as though one has just told them that the sky is bright green with pink spots. This is very sad and also very damaging. History is key and we neglect or obscure it at our long-term cost.
I meant 1492, of course.
assalamu ‘alaykum Suhayl
Two points about history.
People love re-writing history in the light of modern mores and history finds itself defenceless against the pen and the film. The re-taking of Jerusalem by Kurdish ruler Salahuddin with African Muslims was still remembered by the British in the first world war. So the collaboration between European and Jewish slave-traders was a calculated piece of racially inspired revenge against the African people. The 60 million people who were stolen and arrived if they survived the journey in the Western corner of the trading triangle in chains, had Muslim names and believed in the One God.
I don’t see any difference between that and what we now politely call neo-conservative Zionism. Of course the vast majority of Jews have always been and are still entirely exempt from any such accusation, but Zionism and colonialism have been partners in crime all this time.
Secondly the problem with history is lies. Like the farce in the House of Commons about the human rights of soldiers who are sent to murder and rape the innocent victims of Iraq and Afghanistan. History always records the lies, and anyone who challenges them is regarded as calling sky blue -orange spots.
Walaikum-as-salaam, anon.
Yes, the Western European powers – esp. France, where the Crusades had been based – used the Crusades as a mythic-historic triumphalist justification for their colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean region.: “Saladin, I am back!” intoned the disgusting French commander in Damascus during WWI. We should not make the mistake of conflating this propagandistic utterance with the underlying rubric of colonialism.
The Crusades were psychologically important in Western Europe as the feudal elites forged their collective, (in theory) cohesive and exclusive tribal identity that way. But at the time, in the (confident and civilisationally dominant) Muslim lands, outwith the ones immediately affected, the Crusades were not regarded as a major event, more a series of border skirmishes.
The Crusades came to assume more retrospective importance in Muslim lands in general as the devastating effects of colonialism became evident, i.e. in the nineteenth century and even more so, now, with the globalisation of the military-industrial complex of The West and the insertion of the colonial settler-state, Israel at the very locus of the Crusades.
It is also true that many of the slaves transported during C17th-C19th were from West Africa, and, as Alex Haley showed most movingly in his novel, ‘Roots’, were Muslim.
However, it is important to note that there were many African and Arab (Muslim) slave-traders – this was and still is used by the West as a propaganda tool to justify capitalist slavery and later, colonialism, but we do have to accept that it was not entirely without basis – and to portray the entire industrial evil of the slave triangle as a ‘Jewish Crusader plot to destroy Islam’ is really pushing matters into the realms of wishful thinking.
Zionism is a C19th political ideology and is basically a form of European colonialist nationalism. There was no coherent political movement which can be described as Zionist before C19th.
History is written by the victors ?” a truism first stated, I think, by Napoleon (and he should know) ?” and remember that the victors of the Crusades were the Muslims. There are many accounts of the Crusades written by Muslims – mostly untranslated though there are some good sections to which Amin Malouf – yes, I know that he is a Lebanese Christian – refers in his, ‘The Crusades Through Arab Eyes’, so there are different and (in relation to contemporary Western power) subversive sources to which one can refer in order to gain a broader understanding of specific historical processes. Edward Said (a Palestinian Chrsitian) and Rana Kabbani (a Syrian Muslim) have also written about this, of course.
History records lies, truths and much in-between and the study of history ought to be – though is not always – an attempt to delineate the mechanisms of these processes and who told the lies, and why, and what the lies might suggest about the historian’s politics, society, etc., etc.
I do not think one can simply dismiss history or rather the study of history because it contains different and often conflicting versions of what happened (as do eye-witness accounts of any crime, for example) and to do so is to avoid confronting the complexity of the world and of human society and also to abrogate our responsibility to exert a detailed critique upon power. Ultimately, such avoidance behaviour is a reflection of a fearful mindset and a spirit cowed by the overarching colonisation of the psyche effected by Western hegemony. This avoidance has nothing whatsoever to do with religion and the application of a kind of absolutist religiosity to the study of history is unhelpful, inappropriate and potentially disingenuous.