"It's a culture clash": how VoteWatch frames Pakistanis as uniquely guilty of election fraud.

It seem innocent enough, even noble - VoteWatch they call it and it, we're told, does this:

Exposing ballot burglars, reporting on elections, opening-up politics & producing documentaries

What could be wrong with an organisation dedicated to exposing electoral bad practice and to hold the feet of those running elections to the fire? The answer is pretty simple, VoteWatch isn't really about any of this as a quick visit to its website would tell you - just on the 'UK' section of that website we see:

An attack on Labour MP David Lammy's expenses claims

More on David Lammy as they look at whether the hate mail he receives is self-generated

A report on the resignation of the UK ambassador to the USA

A nasty police siege in Peterborough - badged as in the 'Multicultural District'

Gordon Brown attacking Corbyn over anti-semitism

A tenuous link to a convicted vote fraudster describing his nephew in a 'drug fuelled rage'

Eventually we come to a video that says it's a 'guide to the Pickles Report'. And this is where we begin to see the real agenda of VoteWatch and why the Brexit Party (and the right of politics in the UK should be concerned). You can read the Pickles Report (here) and you'll find that it gives a series of proposals for tightening up the administration of of elections and the prevention of illegal and corrupt practices at the polls. This covers the location and management of polling stations, the intimidation of voters, postal voting, personation and the administration of the count. Pickles was critical of the Electoral Commission and strongly supported the use of an easier election petition system rather than that commission.

What Eric Pickles didn't say was that the problem was confined to places with concentrations of Pakistani or Bangladeshi population. Reference is made to concerns raised by people from those communities (over intimidation, family voting - where a man accompanies a woman into the polling booth, and political party access to absent voter lists) as well as to the shocking Tower Hamlets case where the failure of police and Electoral Commission to act was eventually exposed by a private petition. More than anything it was the scale of Lutfur Rahman's electoral fraud that shocked:

Lutfur Rahman was found personally guilty by the court of making false statements about a candidate, bribery, and undue spiritual influence. The court also found Rahman guilty by his agents of personation, postal vote offences, provision of false information to a registration officer, voting when not entitled, making false statements about a candidate, payment of canvassers, bribery, and undue spiritual influence. A finding that corrupt and illegal practices for the purpose of securing Rahman's election, and that such general corruption so extensively prevailed such that it could be reasonably concluded to have affected the result was also returned.

It remains a concern that, in general terms, public authorities are loath to take strong actions in investigating election offences but although Pickles alluded to 'political correctness' as a factor his main concern was that the Electoral Commission set itself up as both rule-maker and policeman. Nor can we dismiss - as my colleagues in Bradford know well - the malign impact of clan and birideri politics in some Asian communities.

It is clear, however, that VoteWatch is not interested in encouraging improvements to the way in which we ensure fair elections but rather to suggest that malpractice is a specific problem for Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and for nowhere else. Here is a map and graphic showing where the organisation has set up branches and, I assume, an image of the sort of people (South Asians) who are doing the alleged fraud:



So we have an image of South Asian men (plus a child) and a list of towns with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations. Returning to VoteWatch's article on the Pickles Report, we find that a good part of it isn't about voting fraud but about the street grooming scandals in Rotherham and elsewhere that did largely involve Pakistani men. Challenged on this apparently racist targeting, Jay Beecher who runs VoteWatch said:

"...voter-fraud is carried-out predominantly by members of the Pakistani community..."

Given that Lutfer Rahman in Tower Hamlets is of Bangladeshi heritage and noting the constant references to street grooming, we can only guess that VoteWatch want us to join the dots and come up with the word 'Muslim'. By inference VoteWatch want us to believe that, were it not for Muslim voters, there'd be no problems with elections. Here's Beecher again:

It's a clash of cultures. Democracy is seen in different forms, with varying attitudes towards it in certain countries. Voter fraud is rife in Pakistan for instance, along with cultural voting, bribery etc. Those methods are now employed over here in the UK

I have some news for Jay Beecher - our laws on bribary, cultural voting, intimidation, impersonation and false registration date back to the nineteenth century when there were at most a couple of thousand Muslims in the UK and none of them from Pakistan because it didn't exist. This handy list of election petitions - filled with bribery, personation, intimidation and general skulduggery - gives a flavour.

This isn't to say that we have no problems with corrupt and illegal practices in our elections - false registration, dodgy nominations, postal voting abuse and personation - or indeed that some of these may be more prevalent in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Rather it's to notice that in the world of VoteWatch all the baddies are brown (or privileged white people too scared of the brown people to act).

Last year (2018) the Electoral Commission reported:

Of the 266 cases that were investigated, 191 needed no further action. A further 55 were resolved locally with informal advice given either by the police or the Returning Officer. 17 cases are still under investigation or are awaiting advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. We will continue to monitor these.

There has, to date, been just one conviction - for forging signatures on a nomination form - relating to elections in 2018. Even if the Electoral Commission could up its game this does not suggest that there are widespread problems with the administration of elections or with corrupt and illegal practices. Furthermore, half of the 2018 allegations related either to "allegations about someone making false statements about the personal character or conduct of a candidate" or for not including an imprint on a leaflet. And there's no obvious difference in investigations between years with metropolitan council elections (covering more than half of the Muslim population) and those without.

I've gone on at length here because VoteWatch and other organisations that focus on Muslims as peculiarly criminal or strangely 'culturally distinct' represent a real threat to politics on the right. You only need look at what became of UKIP when it turned itself from a centre-right eurosceptic party into an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim campaign group. With close associations between the Brexit Party and VoteWatch, it seems to me that there's a real risk that its noble cause of securing democracy gets compromised by these links to a campaign saying "Pakistanis are stealing elections - look at Peterborough" despite there not actually being much evidence that this is the case.

VoteWatch link voting fraud with street grooming and use reports of criminal activity by Asian men to reinforce a message that in Beecher's words - it's a clash of cultures. What lies behind this is the worrying - and too widespread - view that, in some way Islam is incompatible with British life and culture. It is this lie that marginalised UKIP and it will do the same for the Brexit Party if it allows Jay Beecher and people like him to set the agenda. What's also important is that my party - the Conservatives - set clear water between the racially-tinged campaigns of groups like VoteWatch and our response to legitimate desires to ensure voting is safe and fair.

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