Ballot rigging is so last year. There are now new ways of buying votes
Politicians no longer use their own money as bribes; they use yours insteadribery has always been the main concern of opponents buy bulk votes of political corruption. The virtually non-existent threat of fake voters turning up at ballot stations and pretending to be legitimate citizens is as nothing when set against the crooked politician’s promise to buy your vote. Since parliament passed the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act in 1883, the UK has not seen as concerted an attempt to rig elections as the venality initiated by the Johnson administration.
Its bribery is practised in public view without the police intervening or anything like the level of public outrage a robust democracy would muster. Only a country in Britain’s turgid decadence could view with complacency the communities secretary approving payments to each other’s constituencies from a government fund that was meant to help left-behind towns, not Jenrick’s comfortable Tory seat.
You scratch my backyard and I’ll scratch yours.
Few remark on the audacity of a government that seeks to suppress genuine voters by demanding photo IDs at polling stations, while getting away with perpetrating the oldest and most effective political swindle of them all.
Perhaps the government should try harder to avoid “accusations of pork-barrelling”, an overly genteel from the House of Lords quoted a witness as saying last week. The Commons public accounts committee was more year when it said ministers directed money from their £3.6bn towns fund to affluent constituencies, despite their officials warning that they were “the very lowest priority”. Even the admirably forthright committee didn’t realise that the government was practising electoral fraud.
The last major vote-rigging scandal was in Tower Hamlets in the East End of , the mayor found guilty by an election court on many counts of electoral fraud in 2015, ought to be remembered because he was a harbinger of Britain’s future. His Tower Hamlets First party was a Bangladeshi communalist movement. T and the ultra-left backed it nevertheless, apparatchiks put identity politics before secular socialism and stood with Rahman to the end.
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