Here is a profile of the really appalling man who has been elected in Yorkshire and Humberside to be a MEP (hat-tip to Harry’s Place).

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/the-real-bnp/Andrew-Brons.php

It is astonishing to me that some ten per cent of any British electorate could vote for this. It makes me truly, terribly sad. It is certainly true that New Labour neglected the interests of ordinary people they took for granted, and were seen to spend more public resources on immigrant communities. That is not an entirely false perception. But the answer is to enfranchise ignored estates and help bring them into the wider community, not to turn towards fascism.

Education is also a major part of the problem, with appalling standards in failed communities and an excessively dictated curriculum that has abandoned much of the traditional liberal curriculum.

New Labour has also overseen the fruition of effectively racially segregated state schools throughout Northern England.

I have not heard even one mention of that appalling fact in all the analysis of why the BNP is making progress. Separate Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland were a main cause of bonding apart separate communities and inculcating hatred of the “other”. Forcible racial mixing in education – “bussing” – was absolutely key to the eventual success of the civil rights movements in the US. This must be tackled here.

A note on Harry’s Place, through which I found the excellent article linked above. In the post below about the EDP, the proprietor of Harry’s Place posted unpleasant personal comments about my being a manic depressive and my wife an “ex sex-worker”, which description he then justifies by saying it includes belly dancers.

Harry’s Place is a website which has an openly avowed purpose of defending the interests of the State of Israel and of US policy in the Middle East. They have every right to do that, as I have a right to disagree.

But I would make a plea to them, faced with the real problem of this rise in support for the BNP. Concentrate your fire on people who are actual racists and anti-semites. This is really not the time to attack people like me – liberals who believe that Israel has cruelly mistreated the Palestinians. We need to fight the racists together.

The Eastern Daily Press – known locally as the EDP – is one of Britain’s regional newspapers with surviving real influence. It is said to be still the highest selling newspaper in Norfolk. My grandparents had the EDP delivered every day, plus the North Norfolk News on Fridays (and the Pink’Un on Saturdays). They would never have dreamt of buying a national paper.

It was founded in the mid nineteenth century by the leading Norwich families – the Colemans (of mustard fame), Jarrolds (publishers and booksellers) and the Copemans. There was another family too but their name escapes me. What the Copemans did apart from the paper I am not sure, but they ran the paper literally for generations and produced at least one great editor, Tom Copeman, an inspirational man of a radical turn of mind, In the early 1970s, Tom retired to Sheringham, where he lived three streets from us.

I think I first got to meet the retired Tom at a Third World First meeting when I was about fourteen. He was, I think, quietly amused by my strong desire for justice allied to ignorance of – well, almost everything. We formed an unlikely friendship and I used to visit him on winter’s evenings, sit on his floor,and drink his coffee, chat and learn. I would meet people who to my small world seemed extraordinarily cosmopolitan. (You will laugh at me, but when I went to Chicago at the age of 20, I was asked if I wanted some pizza, and I had never heard the word before)!

I remember Tom telling me he had been sent to Arctic Russian – Murmansk I think – to link with the White Russians and fight the bolsheviks. It had been a complete shambles; they were not equipped properly for the Arctic and casualties had been very high, despite never really working out who they were meant to fight. The terrible futility and suffering of it all had convinced him that wars should only be fought in direct self-defence.

Tom left an imprint on my political thinking which undoubtedly helped me form the broadly liberal views I have stuck with since those days. If it were not for Tom and a few others like him, I would not have been the only person to quit the FCO or security services over what the government has finally admitted is a policy of using intelligence obtained by torture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG4ey3GtbP8&feature=related

All of which I hope leads you to understand why I was a bit hurt to read this in the EDP today:

Mr Murray was appointed British ambassador to Uzbekistan at the relatively young age of 43, and was dismissed from the post in October 2004. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied any controversy and said it was for “operational reasons”.

He separated from his wife, with whom he has two children, after starting a relationship with an Uzbek woman whom he met while she was working as a belly dancer in a night club. She followed him when he left Uzbekistan and they married in May.

http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=NOED07%20Jun%202009%2019%3A07%3A24%3A847

I do trust that, in the interests of balance, the EDP will publish a detailed history of the love lives of all the other candidates for the last seven years.

Sadly, the EDP has become perhaps the most rabidly Conservative paper in the UK. Its coverage of the largest political demonstration the UK has ever seen was, amazingly, even more biased than that of the Sun. The EDP ran an editorial denouncing the “ragbag coalition” of people it characterised as Marxists, supporters of dictatorship, pacifists and swampies. If there are over a million of those in the country, we are in trouble.

I hope the EDP has very deep pockets, because it employs as a columnist the well known libeller, Tory Iain Dale. Dale recently admitted guilt in libelling Tom Watson MP, and cost the Mail on Sunday 350,000 pounds including all costs. I have a notion of how I might find I am able to fund my Norwich campaign…

Iain Dale is of course all over the media nowadays and has become a political force to be reckoned with. In fact, through his EDP column, we can now see what psephologists are dubbing the “Iain Dale effect” for the Tories.

The “Iain Dale effect” can be seen most clearly in North Norfolk, where Iain Dale was the Tory parliamentary candidate at the last general election. Look at the council results last Thursday for North Norfolk.

http://elections.norfolk.gov.uk/fla_index.asp

Look at that map. You can immediately see Iain Dale’s constituency. Just join up those two big yellow blocks. Against the trend in the rest of Norfolk and the rest of the region, in North Norfolk there was a swing from the Tories to the Lib Dems of seven per cent and the Lib Dems had a net gain from the Tories of four seats.

That’s the Iain Dale effect.

The Tories of North Norfolk have sensibly dumped him in favour of some fat Norwich solicitor. I do hope he turns up in Norwich North to campaign against me. Could be just the boost I need.

I can’t let that map go without congratulating Brian Hannah on his victory in Sheringham. Brian’s father Joe was my grandfather Henry Grice’s best friend. Joe taught me to cut hay with a scythe, which is much harder than it looks. I shall stop before I drown in nostalgia.

UPDATE

Depressingly, the BNP have won a seat in Yorkshire and Hmberside. Just had ten minutes of Nick Griffin on Sky News. I must say I thought Chris Bryant was very sharp in cutting through the claptrap with his question about who is allowed to join the BNP – people who, according to Griffin, “You look, you know” are “indigenous British”.

I thought William Hague spoke well against the BNP too. Except for this. Every single word Griffin said about upholding our indigenous traditions and Christian culture, and the threat of alien traditions. could have been said by the polish Law and Justice party which the Conservatives are joining in a new far right group, leaving the centre right EPP. In fact their Polish allies flaunt racism more than Griffin. I can’t understand why Hague expresses a decent horror of the British far right, but wants to ally with their European counterparts. (Happily the Tories new far right allies in Poland lost badly tonight).

Great news from Scotland – the SNP are romping away with it. Extraordinary news from Wales – the Tories got most votes. In Wales – that’s not something I thought I would ever see.

Electoral Fraud Alert 3

Following the election results on the BBC and Sky. One very interesting development. While there is a national swing against Labour of about 9%, in Leicester there is a very suspicious anomaly – a swing to Labour of about 6%, according to the BBC.

Now Leicester is exactly one of those places where New Labour carry out concentrated postal vote farming among a patriarchal South Asian community. I spoke there during the 2005 campaign in support of Yvonne Ridley, and spoke to people who had witnessed the same postal vote abuses we saw from New Labour in Blackburn.

I strongly suspect that it will prove that in Leicester the percentage of votes cast by post was extraordinarily high. If anyone has a connection to one of the parties in Leicester, maybe you can get that percentage tonight

See:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/electoral_fraud.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/06/new_labour_post.html#comments

We may well see several small but populous urban areas where New Labour buck the trend against them, and I confidently predict that these will directly correlate to South Asian communities plus an unusually high percentage of people voting by post.

Here, from the famous back of my envelope, is my predicted result as percentage of votes cast in the UK in tonight’s Euro polls:

Conservative 29

Lib Dem 24

UKIP 17

New Labour 16

Green 6

Nationalists 4

BNP 2

Other 2

Gordon Brown has just done a triumphalist New Labour rally in Newham which was perhaps the most surrealistic thing ever to have happened in British politics. Really, deeply weird.

The media don’t quite seem to be picking up the absolutely incredible scale of the collapse in Labour’s vote. Staffordshire County Council is quite simply incredible. Previously a Labour Council, including Stoke and other big industrial areas.

New Labour have lost 30 of their 32 seats on the Council!!!!!!

http://moderngov.staffordshire.gov.uk/mgElectionResults.aspx?ID=5&V=1&RPID=653075

And nor is Gordon Brown.

For the medics among you (and a lot of doctors visit this site, for some reason) I am on Coartem, Ciprolex and paracetamol. Am typing with one hand as I have a drip in the other.

Raised from my sickbed by the sound of Michael White and Fraser Nelson on Sky News. (Must get someone to move the TV so I can see them. On the other hand…) If all the mainstream media can dish up is opposing arseholes, I need to say something.

First up is to note the absolute New Labour meltdown in the local council elections. This is almost a complete wipeout. In Lincolnshire, New Labour lost 17 of its 21 seats. (Excellent Lincoln council elections website which was updated in real time all night).

http://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/elecresultshome.asp?catid=2221

Look at the graphics. In this whole county vote, Labour fell into third place with just 11%! It is worth looking in detail at the graphics because you see that the Tories got well less than half the vote but three quarters of the seats, The Lib Dems got 19% of the vote but only five seats. A strong case for proportional representation – and a reminder why self interested Tories will fight it.

In Bristol, New Labour lost 8 of the 9 seats it was defending. Bristol elects one third of its seats a year, but the Lib Dems still managed to take overall control of the council – a good response to those who try to terrify people into voting New Labour lest they “Let the Tories in”.

Thanks to Bristol Blogger for his brilliant marathon stint.

http://thebristolblogger.wordpress.com/

In Central Bedfordshire New Labour did not win even one council seat. It is a new council, so direct comparison is difficult.

But from the three overnight counts, New Labour lost 85% of its councillors! I don’t think even the 1920’s Liberals went through this sudden a massacre.

Now to the really unpleasant subject. James Purnell. Fraser Nelson, the crazed neo-con with whom nobody in his home country agrees, praised Purnell (and Blears) in unequivocal terms as a “Great reforming social security minister”.

Purnell’s instincts towards social security were precisely those of Norman Tebbit, only mingled with less compassion. He attempted in effect to reintroduce the Victorian distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, opposition to which was one of the founding motives of the Labour Party. Like Blair, he had no left wing beliefs, but saw the takeover of a moribund Labour Party as a simple career opportunity.

John Prescott’s description of ‘Not so much a Blairite as a careerite’ is apt, except it misses the fact that the two are synonymous.

http://www.gofourth.co.uk/campaign-for-labour-not-the-leadership

There has seldom been a more obvious lie than Purnell’s claim in his resignation letter not to be interested in the leaderhip. If it were true, why say it? (Actually there was a more obvious lie, in Caroline Flint’s interview with Sky News denying that she had ever discussed with anyone giving Gordon the heave-ho. When that woman lies, she starts babbling at a quite incredible pace. I thought they were playing her at the wrong speed).

Purnell is positioning himself for a leadership election after the coming disastrous general election. The interesting thing is that very many of his Cabinet colleagues obviously think he might have a chance. A dozen of them have been interviewed (remember I have been stuck immobile listening all night) and every single one has gone out of their way to stress how much they like James Purnell, what a good friend he is, how they respect him as a minister. They have all parroted the same line, that they simply do not share his judgement in this matter – as though it were a minor difference opinion.

It is not a minor difference of opinion. With the party facing the road to oblivion, Purnell has, purely for career interest, stabbed his leader and his party in the back at the worst possible time. Ordinary Labour members, including the councillors who have virtually all lost their seats, are spitting blood at Purnell. Prescott can spit blood at Purnell because he has no further ambition. But all those cabinet ministers who are still desperately ambitious, are still being desperately nice to Purnell.

Interesting, eh?

This is another example of how MPs have failed to notice that the Westminster village is not the only place that counts. No matter how much the Woodwards and Milibands may want to suck up to Purnell, the activists will not forgive him or Blears, especially during the hard slog of opposition. And the days when New Labour’s “elite” MPs could ignore the views of their constituency activists died a month ago.

Get up, walk out the door and go and vote against New Labour.

NOW.

OK. you’re at work and you’re only a minion, so you can’t. Then on the way home.

Just do it.

I posted recently about the monumental scale of postal ballot fraud organised by New Labour in 2005 in Blackburn.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/electoral_fraud.html

I have irrefutable evidence that this is happening again, and New Labour are engaged yet again in criminal electoral activity in Jack Straw’s constituency.

Michael Poultney, New Labour sub-agent for the North West Region Euro Election, has written to the Electoral Commission to complain that the rules governing the discarding ot torn ballots inadvertently favour the BNP.

http://www.blackburnlabour.org/blog/Torn-postal-ballots-advantage-the-BNP.html

In doing so, Poultney reveals he has been looking at the postal ballots and seeing how people voted.

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

But party scrutineers are specifically banned from seeing where the “marked X” is when postal ballots are opened.

The rules on this are very strict and could not be clearer. Nobody is allowed to see how the postal ballots are cast until they are counted with the others – not least because at the opening of postal ballots, they are accompanied by signed forms identifying the voter.

This is the rule on opening postal ballots. It could not possibly be clearer:

candidates and agents should not make any attempt to see how any individual ballot paper is marked, nor make any attempt to take notes on how ballot papers are marked. In any event, all ballot papers will be kept with the voting side face down and so it will not be possible to see how the postal voters have voted

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0003/71661/2009-EPE-Candidates-and-Agents-GB-WEB.pdf

See Chapter 5 para 15 of the Electoral Commission’s Guide.

How then did Poultney know where the vote was on these ballot papers?

That is the law, and plainly Poultney – and very probably the Blackburn returning officer – has broken the law. I know from experience as a candidate in Blackburn that if you are not New Labour, you certainly won’t get to see how postal ballots are cast. The local returning officer is, of course, the New Labour chief executive of the New Labour borough council and the people actually opening the ballots are employees of the New Labour borough council.

Anybody who thinks that deep political corruption begins only at Westminster is a fool.

UPDATE

In response to New Labour commenters trying to defend this, look at Poultney’s letter quoted above again and read it carefully.

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

It is obvious that he has been looking at a number of ballot papers, and knows where the X is and that they have torn the paper in line with it – ie, rather than for example tear the paper in half a good way below their X. So he is definitely looking at who postal voters are voting for, (and not just the BNP voters). That is simply illegal – you can’t spin it away.

For goodness sake, New Labour have had Blackburn councillors jailed for postal vote fraud. The place stinks of corruption. The ex council leader, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, has just been suspended from the House of Lords for corruption. Stop acting all innocent.

UPDATE 2

Having been exposed, Poultney has now hurriedly added this lie in comments after his letter:

I have not referred to marks made by voters, only to the ‘official mark’. This is an icon at the top of the ballot to ensure that it has been printed properly. This is completely different from the marks made by voters to indicate their choice of candidate.

As lies go, that is completely unconvincing. Poulter wrote originally:

I have noticed that a few postal voters have cut or torn their ballot papers only submitting the portion of each paper in line with their marked X.

In that sentence, “their” plainly does refer to the voters, and we all know what “Their marked X” refers to on a ballot paper. On top of which, the official icon he now says he was referring to is not an X.

Michael Poultney. New Labour electoral cheat and transparent liar.

.

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,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/local-elections/5331700/British-pensioners-on-BNP-election-leaflet-are-actually-Italian-models.html

The Telegraph has republished Tim Ireland’s brilliant detective wrok in proving that the photogenic people endorsing the BNP on their leaflet are not supporters at all, but stock photos of models. Hilariously given the BNP’s message, they are not even British models!http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/05/bnp_stealing_im.asp#comments

Many congrats to Stephen Paulger as well, on this site which is new to me

http://www.newspeak.org.uk/2009/05/13/british-national-party-voters-dont-exist/

This is what the BNP pretended to look like

This is what the BNP actually look like

With Euro and local elections coming up, it is tempting to not vote at all. But if we give up on democracy, the alternatives will prove much worse. So please do vote – for change.

My advice is, if you can find a candidate you know to be a good man, you should vote for him regardless of party.

For example, out of the whole country, in the Euro elections I would vote for Rupert Read in the Eastern Region of England. Rupert is an honest and hard working man with a passionate concern for the environment and for the quality of life in this country. He sees the need for a society not motivated solely by greed. He is that rare thing in modern politics – somebody who wants to serve, not to rule.

http://www.rupertread.net/

So look at who your candidates are, not what party they belong to. Give special consideration to whether you have an Independent candidate worth supporting, including some of the Jury Team. Remember people are more important than labels. I would, for example, vote for Bob Marshall Andrews or Malcolm Rifkind in any election given the chance. There are a few more of them in their parties.

Having said that, when it comes to party, this is my ranking of parties in order of preference:

1= SNP/Plaid Cymru

2 Lib Dems

3 Green

4 Respect/Solidarity/SSP

5 Libertas

6 Conservative

7 UKIP

8 Anyone Else

9= New Labour/BNP

I decided neither BNP nor New Labour deserved better than last place. The BNP is a racist party. New Labour is not, but then New Labour is a real and present danger to everybody’s civil liberties, of whatever race. When you think about it, that’s no better.

I am feeling sickened by the deluge of petty greed exposed in MP’s expenses. It is like lifting a big damp stone and stepping back in revulsion at some of the multi-legged creatures squirming underneath.

Remember, these are largely the same MPs who took us into a disastrous illegal war, who fostered the climate of the Ponzi economc bubble and crash, and then voted to hand their constituents’ money to the bankers. These are the same MPs who have dismantled centuries old liberties and complacently overlooked the return of torture to our public policy.

All these things could only happen because of the degeneracy of a parliament stuffed on all sides with venal careerists and self-servers, with little or no genuine concern for the public good.

How did it happen? We get the MPs our political parties give us. The truth is that the MPs are not decided by the public, but by the party in selecting their candidate.

In 70% of British constituencies, the party selection procedure of just one party actually decides the MP, with a 95% certainty of rubber stamping by a tribal electorate. In nearly all the rest, only the chosen sons or daughters of two of the party mechanisms are offered as a realistic choice to the electorate.

It has taken the expenses scandal to bring home to the British people what should have been obvious from the appalling quality of government. The whole system is broke. The political parties simply are not producing candidates of anything like sufficient quality to sit in the Mother of Parliaments.

Anyone who thinks a simple switch from Labour to Tory will fix this, is a fool. What is needed is a bold initiative to seize the moment and break the hold of the corrupt parties on the political psychology of the nation.

A start would be a “Clean Hands” campaign to force the resignation of the most egregious crooks, and then run “Clean Hands” candidates in the by-elections. Political views would be less important than honesty, independence and good intentions. The campaign for resignations might proceed one MP at a time to concentrate resources, and combine legal and media pressure with street campaigning in the constituency.

We have to start somewhere and I suggest target number 1 should be Margaret Moran in Luton South, as a plainly indefensible case.

Harriet Harman’s latest wheeze is to warn us that querying MPs’ disgusting behaviour will “Play into the hands of the BNP”.

There is an excellent article on the BNP by Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bnp-european-elections-labour

It is absolutely true that under Blair the Labour Party abandoned the interests of the White Working Class. That hasn’t really changed. Bankers can have hundreds of billions from the taxpayers, but the Corus steel foundry on Tyneside can go to the wall.

Seabrook’s evocative description of “forlorn estates of liquor shops covered with chicken wire, leaky drainpipes, semi-wild dogs and tattered flags of St George ?” everything that symbolised the last gasp of a disappearing working class” immediately transported me back to canvassing in Mill Hill ward in Blackburn. There was little political downside to abandoning the “sinks”. Voter turnout among the hopeless voters of Mill Hill was down to around ten per cent. But I found the people friendly and engaging. I was frequently invited in for tea. They did not vote, not because they were stupid, but because they no longer believed it would do any good.

It was quite simply true that vastly more of the huge amount of public money which underpins the economy of Blackburn, ended up benefiting the immigant rather than the poor white community. But these essentially decent white people fully shared the strong British dislike of anything associated with fascism. The BNP only got just over 5% in Blackburn – the same as I got as an anti-war Independent.

Meanwhile, there was an incredible 29% of all votes cast by postal ballot in Blackburn. This was over twice the national average, and I believe the highest percentage in the country. As part of New Labour’s plan to maximise the value of their postal ballot vote farming through patriarchal power structures in immigrant communities, these postal ballots were by law mixed with secret ballots before counting, so it was not possible to record any discrepancy between postal and secret ballots. But I learnt from tellers that they looked to be “over 90%” for Jack Straw. (See Murder in Samarkand p. 365). That means Straw only got about 30% of secret, non-postal ballots.

These postal ballots came almost entirely from the Muslim community, and almost entirely went to Jack Straw. So he doesn’t need the white people of Mill Hill.

The mainstream parties exaggerate the electoral threat from the BNP because it is in their interest to do so. The astonishing thing is that the BNP do not have more support from the politically abandoned poor whites of this country. That is a reflection of the British people’s fundamental decency.

What is needed now is a politics of fairness and concern, of work and the dignity of labour, and which respects the values of liberty and toleration that still appeal to working class people as a fundamental part of their British heritage. The Labour Party can never again stand for that. New Labour never did. A radical political realignment is beginning to take place in the UK. How men of goodwill should try to influence that for the better is a grope in a forest rather than a march down an open road at present. I hope a track may be found soon. But getting rid of Brown, Harman, Mandelson and this terrible government is an obvious priority.

We would like to say a heartfelt thankyou to all those who have supported the Craig Murray Campaign, and especially to the 2,082 people who voted for Craig on Thursday. The election may now be over, but the issue of British complicity in torture is not going to go away.

The Guardian – Our man in Blackburn: As you read this, the polls will be open. The voters of Blackburn will be streaming out in their happy thousands to vote for me and to consign Jack Straw to political oblivion. Or not, as the case may be.

Anyone want a Green Goddess, slightly used?

The Independent – Straw’s seat is a hot-spot of postal vote fraud claims: In the Lancashire constituency of Blackburn, where the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is defending his 9,249 majority, the vote-rigging allegations have intensified as polling day nears.

The jailing of a Blackburn city councillor – an Asian Muslim representing Labour – for rigging postal votes in the May 2002 local elections has failed to silence the rumour mill. Voters in the Muslim community, which makes up almost a quarter of the electorate, say now they are being strong-armed by mosque leaders and councillors to vote Labour. The number of postal votes registered in Blackburn is 20,000, compared to 7,600 in 2001.