The Today programme (RealAudio) this morning reported that vote fraud in Birmingham – which took place three years ago – may have been more extensive than originally thought.
“There was even a riot” said Ed Stourton.
There was indeed – in fact there were a couple of incidents – all reported at the time in the local media and on blogs – and all completely ignored by the £3bn BBC. Even postmen weren’t safe.
Yet the BBC is fascinated by some forms of alleged vote fraud or electoral malpractice, devoting report after report to the subject – where the alleged fraudsters are US Republicans.
The BBC are catching up with the Birmingham frauds three years late – and they still can’t report it correctly – Ed Stourton stating that the (Kashmiri) People’s Justice Party is ‘now defunct’. Maybe they shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia. As Brummie gossip site the Stirrer and Labour councillor Bob Piper report, the PJP is actually standing in the 2007 elections.
But at least they’ve caught up with the Brum news. In contrast, BBC listeners and viewers remain blissfully unaware of last weekend’s Sunday Times allegations of postal vote malpractice in Leeds or the joint police-council statement on the subject. Expect an in-depth Today report in 2010 ?
I was listening to the fraudulent voting scam being reported on Radio 4 this morning. One point which really was remarkable is that the BBC refused to say which party was the beneficiary of the fraud. And definitely not mentioned was who were doing it – any particular community?
Yes. Who’s going to be the first and say that postal vote fraud has links to the Asian Muslim votership? I hate to use the cliche, but in that Radio 4 thing this morning, it really provided an ‘elephant in the room’ moment.
Farewell ‘Religion of Plumbers’ – hello, ‘Religion of Postal votes’?
As you can tell from my nickname, this took place in my area – some of the disturbances were outside a relative’s house. Although BBC West Midlands did report this in very vague terms, the protagonists were described simply as ‘rival factions’, whereas other local media reported the incidents as involving ‘Asian factions’. It was about 2-3 days before the beeb mentioned this, doubtless hanging on to this critical information until it could no longer be surpressed.
I’m seriously considering withdrawing my lifelong support for the Libs/Lib Dems, as they appear to have become a flag of convenience for the ROP.
No doubt the al-beeb will shift the blame onto someone else,those poor racially abused,it’s all your fault,it’s your foreign policy minority. This multi-culterism is really working! for one side of the community at least.
The PJP are certainly not defunct as far as I am aware, more’s the pity.
There is some good news for me at least in that there is no sign of one of their candidates in my ward this time round.
I do recall a ‘gentleman’ called Allah Ditta standing for them in this constituency before.
I have to admit it surprised me, not sadly because it was the PJP – who most people acknowledged were a front for the terrorist movement in Kashmir – but because even the ROP-MA were not up in arms that a man would have the so-called name of God as his name, I would have thought it blasphemous even for them.
Laban
Contrary to the impression you seek to give, BBC radio news programmes such as Today/WATO/PM etc. have covered this story extensively.
Since 1 April 2005. they have run no fewer than 29 stories about it.
In addition, voter fraud has been the subject of feature packages in the following TV programmes during the same period:
Look North – Date: 30/04/2007
Politics Show – Date: 22/04/2007
North West Tonight – Date: 20/04/2007
10 O’clock News – 02/05/2006 (Midlands)
Midlands Today – 28/04/2006
BBC 1 1pm News – 20/05/2005
BBC1 1pm News – 13/05/2005
10 O’clock News – 13/05/2005
Newsnight – : 13/05/2005
Look North – 11/05/2005
6pm News – 26/04/2005
1pm News – 26/04/2005 (Bradford)
1pm News – 19/04/2005 (Derbyshire)
Look North – 15/04/2005 (Newcastle)
1pm News – Date: 15/04/2005
Midlands Today – 07/04/2005
1pm News – 06/04/2005
Breakfast – Date: 05/04/2005
Daily Politics – 04/04/2005
Newsnight – 04/04/2005 (Birmingham)
Midlands Today – 04/04/2005
John Reith
1pm News – 26/04/2005 (Bradford)
Look North – 15/04/2005 (Newcastle)
Where is your proof? None of these news claims have links? And what was actually reported? Where are you getting this information from?
Cut the local broadcasts and you’re not left with much, particularly when you consider the gravity of it.
However, when it comes to hanging chads! The BBC are still banging on about that one.
A question jr. Are you now on a retainer from the BBC? If not how on earth are you earning a crust these days?
This reminds me of something an acquaintance told me a couple of years ago. She used to work for Bradford Metropolitan Council, and heard from coworkers how young Muslim women were complaining about the introduction of postal voting. Previously, they had all been able to go out and cast their votes in person. Now, however, the ballot papers would arrive and the man of the house (usually the father) would sit down and fill in each single one himself. To use a current buzz-word, they had been disenfranchised.
I don’t have corroboration for this, but would be interested to know if any of the posters here had had this experience.
BBC thinks selling council houses a worse crime than vote rigging
In 1989 I uncovered evidence that led first to the District Auditor and then the High Court to accuse Dame Shirley Porter of gerrymandering or attempting to rig the Westminster City Council’s elections.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/panorama/5037214.stm
Now we have evidence of large scale, real, authentic vote rigging in the UK. it should be a massive story and the national broadcaster should be investigating why it has happened and who is behind it.
Maybe John Ware could have a go?
JR, Laban’n piece and my reply were about the disturbances 3 years ago – most of the dates you quote are after this. I made the point that BBC DID report the disturbances between ‘rival factions’ but did not ‘educate’ or ‘inform’ further, in accordance with their charter.
Doubtless any viewer/listener would be interested in knowing what lay at the heart of this ‘rivalry’, something the beeb were very slow to report.
Go to Google.
Enter: ‘Religion of plumbers’
Press ‘I feel lucky.’
Go to Google.
Enter: ‘Religion of plumbers’
Press ‘I feel lucky.’
Chuffer | 02.05.07 – 12:24 pm
That’s brilliant! 😆
(Does anybody have a tip on how to remove coffee from a flat screen?)
Sadly, it’s not just the BBC that takes this lightly.
In principle, I have a postal vote (I travel a lot and can rarely be present on election day) and on two recent occasions have not received a ballot paper.
To describe my local electoral registration officer as ‘laid back’ about it, would be profound understatement.
That said (and ignoring Reith’s amusing ‘rapid rebuttal unit’ response ), it seems pretty clear that the Corporation is far less interested in vote-rigging in Gt. Britain than it is in sneering at the US system.
John Reith | 02.05.07 – 11:02 am
Wow, that’s quite a list. You’ve been in that rapid rebuttal office again haven’t you?
Now seriously, please give the real reason why the BBC is ‘soft’ on this issue.
A google search of the BBC News website using search terms @postal vote@ and fraud yields more than 500 stories.
Most seem to be from the past three years.
Soft?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=fraud+&hl=en&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=postal+vote&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=news.bbc.co.uk&as_rights=&safe=images
American experience has some lessons on this subject — though those lesson may not interest the BBC.
About 20 percent of votes in national elections here in the US are mailed in. But most fraudulent votes here — at least 80 percent of them, in my estimate — are cast with mailed ballots.
And the proportion may be much higher. I have to judge by the cases that are detected — and it is harder to detect illegal votes when they are mailed than when they are cast in person.
If you want more vote fraud in Britain, move toward greater use of postal ballots.
(If you want to investigate this subject, you may want to know that Americans commonly say “absentee” or “mailed” ballots, not “postal” voting.)
I believe it was mentioned on this very site a year ago, but I recall that one of the ways the postal vote scams came to light was by way of the BBC telly-tax enforcement agency sending nasty letters to non-existent addresses in a block of flats.
‘A google search of the BBC News website using search terms @postal vote@ and fraud yields more than 500 stories.’
John Reith | 02.05.07 – 1:24 pm | #
A cursory examination of the Google hits reveals a number of repeats, but then again that’s the Beeb for you.
So you are on a retainer from the Beeb you sly old fox. I knew it couldn’t be put down to a ‘labour of love’ with you starving in a garret somewhere.
Re:John Reith:
A google search of the BBC News website using search terms @postal vote@ and fraud yields more than 500 stories.
Forgot to add ‘-low’ to the search terms in order to remove all the duplicate low graphic content.
Then you’d get 50 stories, part of which are irrelevant.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fraud++%22postal+vote%22+site:news.bbc.co.uk+-low&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&as_qdr=all&start=60&sa=N
I love it when the BBC (in the cyber garb of ‘John Reith’) feels it has to repond. Whenever it does you know you’ve hit a raw nerve. Good job, Laban.
So what’s the story then?
A. Terrorists are rigging the vote
B. Vote fraud is extensive but the BBC is too biased to report it because they can’t bash America with it
A or B?
I posted
“there were a couple of incidents – all reported at the time in the local media and on blogs – and all completely ignored by the £3bn BBC”
these incidents being
a) a riot involving 200 people
b) a Lib Dem team having to seek shelter in a police station from their political opponents
c) mailmen being threatened unless they handed over their bags
all taking place in June 2004 – none reported on the Today programme, the BBC website or any other national programming. If the riot had been in Florida in 2000 there’d have been a team of journalists reporting.
In response to these specific examples of BBC non-reporting, deniable BBC spokesperson John Reith gives us a list of OTHER election fraud stories (of which there are many), starting eight months later.
I believe the technical term is “making smoke”.
And by the way, JR, while we’re in Birmingham.
Six months ago in the comments you said you’d “get back” on the question of why the murder of young churchgoing black person Anthony Walker by racist white thugs got about 8 times as many stories on the BBC news site (not to mention the huge TV and radio coverage) as the murder of young churchgoing black person Isiah Young Sam by racist Asian thugs.
** tumbleweed blows across road **
“I’m seriously considering withdrawing my lifelong support for the Libs/Lib Dems, as they appear to have become a flag of convenience for the ROP.”
smallheathen
Good God, smallheathen ! What’s taken you so long ? What more do you need to see from the craven Lib Dems before you exit their ROP fold ?
The Lib Dems are all things to all men, depending where you are. In rural Worcestershire they’ll lead the opposition to a camp for asylum seekers. 30 miles up the road in Brum, election literature features photos from Abu Ghraib prison. Different strokes for different folks.
“Ultraviolets:
So what’s the story then?
A. Terrorists are rigging the vote
B. Vote fraud is extensive but the BBC is too biased to report it because they can’t bash America with it
A or B?”
C The importing of Third World political culture, a glaring indictment of the mass immigration & multiculturalism the BBC cheerleads for and cannot acknowledge as a natural consequence of all that it holds so dear.
R
C. Hmm.
I’m too lazy to search can someone just link me to the most juicy article?
Laban said
“The Lib Dems are all things to all men, depending where you are. In rural Worcestershire they’ll lead the opposition to a camp for asylum seekers. 30 miles up the road in Brum, election literature features photos from Abu Ghraib prison. Different strokes for different folks”
Now that’s something we can agree on. You (generally) know what you are getting if you vote Labour – “crypto communist, Islam loving, tax and spend fools” (to paraphrase the contributors on the B-BBC forum)
and with the Tories you get “bigoted, reactionary, free market worshiping, public sector hating, social Darwinist loons” (to paraphrase, well, me)
With the Lib Dems you get what ever they think is opportune according to the circumstances – they have no principles and no ideology.
Good Morning
“I’m seriously considering withdrawing my lifelong support for the Libs/Lib Dems, as they appear to have become a flag of convenience for the ROP.”
Smallheathen
Left them ages ago-Things were fine and Dandy when ‘Paddy Pants down: Man of Steel’ was in charge-but John Smith and later TB nicked the ‘middle ground’.
They never got over TB ‘promising’ them a seat at the top table in 1997….
The biggest mistake was getting Charlie “Dead” Kennedy to run the show-the man was so ‘tipsy’ he let the Indy write his foreign policy…..
And of course the moon bat’s needed a home in 1997.
But as Laban points out-depending on the local chapter you either get crypto-BNP Lib Dems OR some long lost outpost of the KGB (pre-1991 of course)
I view local elections quite differently from the general election.
I’ve told our local ‘call me Dave’ man that I will not vote for him in the general election (not that we will be here then).
Early this morning I took the greatest pleasure in voting for the “bigoted, reactionary, free market worshiping, public sector hating, social Darwinist loons”.
Made even better as we could vote for 6 candidates.
Hopefully by September we will be in Alberta which has what is described as a ‘conservative’ government
Still haven’t voted yet and I absolutely always exercise the hard earned franchise.
The selection is as about as bad as it gets in my ward of Birmingham this time, with the candidates locally even worse than the parties nationally, which is truly saying something.
I have to say that spoilt ballot paper with me adding my cross next to a hand written candidate bearing the name none of the above appeals, but we shall have to see if I change my mind when I enter the booth.
I wonder if we might see an IBC look at those with this dilemma sometime, somehow I doubt it…
A Lurker obviously never reads the MSM or the blogs: if only Cameron’s “Conservatives” were “bigoted, reactionary, free market worshiping, public sector hating, social Darwinist loons” how happy we’d all be. Instead we have the three main parties in the UK all spouting the same feel-good multi-culti crap and climate change hysteria egged on by the Guardianistas at the BBC and elsewhere.
Why do you think 45 million viewers watched the Royale-Sarkozy debate yesterday? It’s because there’s a genuine choice. A debate between Brown, Cameron and Campbell would get about 273 viewers (and that’s if there were no repeats of “Jeremy Hardy Does It Again” on BBC2, BBC3, BBC4 . . . . . at the same time)
What is a social Darwinist loon anyway?
What is a social Darwinist loon anyway?
nbc | 03.05.07 – 3:32 pm |
Acording to A Lurker, himself.
And apparently me as I voted for the local Tories.
To Umbongo –
If you ever hit 100 nails on the head….
“What is a social Darwinist loon anyway?”
Someone like myself that feels that scroungers,skivers ne’er do wells and the “have a kid get a flat” crowd should either work or starve . Benefits should be for those fallen on hard times and who want to return to work as soon as possible
The leaflet I got from the local Conservatives could have come from the Green Party. I voted for the one guy who bothered to knock on my door – independent candidate, ex-forces, interested in local issues, nice chap. I’d take someone like him over one of Cameron’s Stepford candidates any day.
Anonanon: said
“The leaflet I got from the local Conservatives could have come from the Green Party.”
Well where I live you have a choice of 2 candidates the left or the loony left – so I am now disenfranchised.
Vote rigging council elections seems to me as much an exercise in futility as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you take all the local authority powers and subtract from them all those powers which are substantively exercised at Westminster or Brussels and merely administered by the councils, what you have left amounts to the power to build childrens’ play areas and erect bollards.
Never mind debasement of democracy: why don’t these people get a life and, if they must be involved in wrong-doings at all, at least devote their criminal energies towards something vaguely worthwhile.
I think you’re missing the bigger picture, British Lion.
1. Whilst you are only shuffling the deck-chairs around, you get paid to do it. Quite a bit, in fact.
2. You can go on foriegn holidays to ‘fact-find’ about how they shuffle deck-chairs on other ships.
3. Because you are chief assistant to the assistant chief of shufflers, people who want thier chair in a particular spot, or facing a particular direction, they are prepared to invite you to thier cabin for a drink, a meal, or even ask you to accompany them on thier fact-finding trip. Bahamas? Far East? Where do you fancy…? Perhaps we could use your vast experience on our board of directors? Only 1 day a month, of course…
4. You have to turn up for this ‘work’ of course, but then it’s not so bad. Sit on a few commitees (grab a few bob), open a few supermarkets, re-route the new by-pass so that it doesn’t trash the new extension to your favourite golf club (club captain? oh, how nice!), fast-track a few planning applications through (leave the envelope on the table, thanks), refuse a couple of others (no satellite tv for number 46 – I don’t like thier kids)
Plus, of course, the Titanic eventually sank. No such luck with local government.
Well where I live you have a choice of 2 candidates the left or the loony left – so I am now disenfranchised.
Jon | 03.05.07 – 8:32 pm
Pleased to say that the independent guy I voted for got in. Neither of the green Tories standing in my ward were elected.
PJP got slaughtered, we can be thankful for small mercies…
TheCuckoo: you forget that the building of local party machines staffed by immigrants is the traditional way for immigrants to make their way up the national political ladder. That is how the Irish made it in America, and how the ROP intends to make it here. There already are a number of districts where well-mustered hosts of bearded Muslim electors and their obedient families are decisive for Labour or LibDem victories, and the parties are therefore in debt to them. Increasingly, local representation will mean national representation. Plus, long-serving councilmen end up in the Lords. All grist to the mill of establishing a powerful Muslim blocking interest in British politics.