Shades of Zimbabwe

When Richard Mawrey QC, who presided over the inquiry into electoral fraud in Birmingham, said the tactics used in the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’ he was, if anything, understating his case. It was shocking enough that six men, all of whom were subsequently elected councillors, were found to have committed electoral offences so grave that they have been disqualified and barred from standing for election. It was shocking enough that three of them should have set up a ‘vote-rigging factory’ where they doctored hundreds, and possibly thousands, of postal votes (the men were caught red-handed, yet preposterously protested after their punishment that what had happened to them constituted ‘a dark day for democracy’). But it is most shocking of all that, in the authorities’ attempts to expose this fraud, they were obstructed at every turn by the Labour party. This prehistoric act of electoral malpractice was therefore sanctioned by a party about to campaign in a general election on ‘trust’ and in which, alarmingly, anything up to 15 per cent of the votes will be cast by post.