Election Skullduggery

The coming Tory coup

Election Skullduggery, Tories, UK elections
Published on 2 Comments on The coming Tory coup

Liberal Conspiracy has the lowdown on how the Tories plan to sieze power in a hung parliament:

Here is what has now emerged as the Tory plan:

• Declare victory anyway.
• Have the party’s media allies strain every sinew to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Insist on being given the keys to number 10 without having to talk substantively to any other party first – to avoid a coalition or any substantive policy concessions.
• Make a partisan challenge to the civil service in seeking to overturn any existing constitutional convention or practice that might conceivably get in the way, or even slow this down a little.
• Threaten to drag the Monarchy into political controversy for partisan advantage, by challenging the conventions designed precisely to avoid this.
• Hold out against electoral reform, whatever the election result.
• Threaten apocalyptic political and financial meltdown if anybody disagrees.

The key objective of this strategy is to use the vociferous campaigning of the press – no doubt amplifying interventions from friends in the City – to argue that any negotiations between parties would be democratically illegitimate, without first putting the Conservatives into power, even (or especially) if Labour and the Liberal Democrats could between them muster a majority of both votes and Commons seats.

What does that remind you of? Me, it does the Republican coup of 2000, when the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner of the presidential election, even though Al Gore had actually won Florida by all counts. There you had the situation that the Republican administration in the state before the election did its best to purge the voters rolls of likely Democratic voters, then when the election became too close to call did its utmost best to stop recounts, going so far as to fly in a rentamob of Republican staffers to stop the count in Miami Dade county. This was paired to a media campaign in which Bush was presented as the obvious winner and the need to get a decision fast rather than making the right decision.

The more it’s become obvious some form of a hung parliament is going to be the outcome of Thursday’s elections, the more we’ve heard about both the mistrust of business in it as well as the need for a speedy resolution because “Britain needs firm, clear leadership”. These are of course obvious propaganda ploys to prepare the ground for a Tory coup. Obvious, since the experience in other European countries with coalition governments clearly says otherwise. Our own dear Holland after all is not some third world hellhole and is in fact weathering the crisis better than the UK so far, despite having had a long drawn out coalition process during it, followed by a fallen government not too long after it had finally been formed.

Meanwhile, as Palau posted last week, Labour is fond of a little election fiddling as well…

Poll Fraud 2010 – Let The Vote Rigging Begin!

Election Skullduggery, Internet, Manufacturing consent, Media, New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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Black box

Never mind, Gordon, even when the election looks well and truly lost, there’s always voting fraud…

Is this story the reason why we’ve spent the last 24 hrs hearing smears about poor Gillian Duffy from the Labour-leaning media, rather than reports on Labour’s latest attempt to skew the popular vote?

Labour’s new media tsar Kerry McCarthy today admitted inappropriately revealing a sample of postal votes on Twitter one week before the general election.

‘Inappropriately’, Guardian? Surely you mean illegally? Already with the minimising language… it’s no surprise either that the Guardian’s been pushing the Duffy story to the detriment of all others. Classic diversionary propaganda.

But now the Twitter leak story is out the Guardian is reporting it as though a Labour candidate and senior Prime Ministerial aide’s committal of voting fraud were mere youthful high jinks:

The parliamentary candidate for Bristol East said she was “kicking herself” after posting the results of some 300 votes to her 5,700 followers.

Sure. Like she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Someone should be kicking her.

What’s more likely is that, if by some unexpected miracle (like, say, election security being breached, enabling Labour to more effectively target election resources) Gordon Brown is able to turn the Titanic away from the iceberg as a result, that McCarthy’ll be rewarded with a sinecure on the Table-Leg Enumeration Agency or some such quango.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Labour’s committed election fraud with postal votes, would it?

The 2005 election, and specifically Birmingham 2005, was described by election observers as the dirtiest UK election ever, and that was down to Labour:

Vote-riggers exploited weaknesses in the postal voting system to steal thousands of ballot papers and mark them for Labour, helping the party to take first place in elections to Birmingham City Council.

They believed that their cheating would be hidden for ever in the secrecy of the strong boxes where counted votes are stored, never suspecting that a judge would take the rare step of smashing the seals and tracing the ballots back to the voters. Election corruption has been so rare in the past 100 years that lawyers have struggled to find examples since the late 19th century, when Britain was adjusting to the novelty of universal male suffrage.

The elections last June were the dirtiest since the general election of 1895, when Sir Tankerville Chamberlayne, the Conservative candidate for Southampton, notoriously travelled by cart from pub to pub, waving and throwing sovereigns at the crowds. His election was later ruled invalid.

The Birmingham vote- riggers were more cunning than the flamboyant Sir Tankerville. They coldly exploited communities where many cannot speak English or write their names. They forced what the judge called “dishonest or frightened” postmen into handing over sacks of postal ballots. They seem to have infiltrated the mail service: several voters gave evidence that their ballot papers were altered to support Labour after they put them in the post.

So we don’t know if the postal vote results McCarthy tweeted can be trusted in the first place, given that Labour’s 2010 postal vote fraud effort was well already well underway before she brought Twitter into the equation:

McCarthy’s post, which has now been deleted, said: “First PVs opened in east Bristol, our sample: UKIP **; TUSC**; BNP ** Lib Dem **; Tory **; Labour **. £gameON!”

‘Game on’? How old is she? Certainly past the age of criminal responsibility, and let’s not forget, what she’s committed is a crime, not some silly, girlish error she can simper her way out of. The law is very clear:

An Electoral Commission spokeswoman said candidates who see the front of a ballot paper “must maintain the secrecy of voting”.

The guidelines state: “Anyone attending a postal vote opening session must be provided with a copy of the relevant secrecy requirements.

“They should be reminded of these requirements and of the penalty, on summary conviction, either of a fine of £5,000, or six months’ imprisonment in England and Wales, or one year’s imprisonment in Scotland.”

McCarthy said she had attended a “training exercise” in which staff verified personal identifiers on the postal votes. She said: “I was pretty silly to do it; it was just thoughtless, I was being over-exuberant.

Over-exuberant, my ass.

6 months in jail, eh? That ought to curb her exuberance, you’d think. But I doubt she’ll get it, especially if the miracle happens and the titanic turns. Table legs ahoy!

UPDATE

Maybe she will get the 6 months – her actions have definitely been reported to the police.

Did the Tories just threaten the BBC over Ashcroft?

Election Skullduggery, Sleaze, Tories, UK elections
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It certainly seems so, if this is to be believed:

Gove did a decent job fielding Jon Snow’s questions and then beetled over to the BBC to face Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark. Gove’s tactic was to keep repeating that the other main parties were bankrolled by men with equally poor senses of civic duty and ignore Wark’s point that Ashcroft’s role as deputy chairman made his case different. Then, at the end, Gove went on to the attack.

“We’ll be watching, Kirsty,” he said darkly (although it’s not as if he ever sounds like Bagpuss) and then, in a significant tone: “The broader question will be, ‘Is the BBC failing in its duty to hold other parties to account?'”, leaving Wark to wrap up the interview in a fluster ill-concealed by a pretence of being hurried. Maybe she had the director general screaming in her earpiece: “Tell him we’ll get rid of CBeebies if he’ll just leave us alone!”

In completely unrelated news, new polls show that Labour is now level with the Tories in marginal seats, despite the Tories’ strategy of targetting these must-win seats for the next election. The mastermind behind this strategy? Ashcroft…

On an even more unrelated note, did it really take ten years for anybody to notice Ashcroft was still a non-dom, after having promised to start paying taex if only he could be a lord? Realy? And do we think that’s due to incompetence or malice?

I Expect Gordon Brown Already Has His Complimentary Copy, Not that It’ll Do Him Any Good

Election Skullduggery, Gordon Brown, New Labour, Totalitarianism, Video
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North Korea’s video instructions to the populace on how to vote:

See, apathetic UK voters, it’s easy. Step up, bow to the nice party officials, and don’t forget to vote overwhelmingly for the Dear Leader. It certainly works for Kim Jong Il, who got 99% of the vote in the last North Korean election: it could work for Gordo too. He could put a copy through every letter box along with the swine flu leaflets.

It’s the only way Labour under Brown will ever get elected again anytime soon, despite their members’ best efforts to subvert the vote.

Labour MPs know this. They see the gravy train rapidly steaming out of the station. That’s why there are so many carefully placed rumours Charles”I’m ashamed to be a Labour MP” Clarke is plotting for the leadership as a Blairite ‘safety’ candidate, just to get rid of Brown.

Prepare for mean, stalking safety elephant on a media rampage and worse; like the once-laughable Squirrel Nutkin Hazel Blears and the lightweight James Purnell being touted as actual contenders for PM.

But the Blairites’ve tried it numerous times before, and like the Dear Leader Brown’s still there, despite being universally loathed by the public and his own party alike.

They’ve all failed to dislodge Brown; despite every failure, every disaster, every mismanagement and however many Nokias and printers he’s attacked in temper, the bugger’s still bloody there. It’s at least a year until the general election. We may yet get the instructional voting videos in the post.