"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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Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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Voter registration...

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I'm convinced that we need individual voter registration. So, it's a bit of a pain for my son and other students but that's the price of democracy. A democracy compromised by the explosion of deception, cheating and downright fraud, much of it around registration.

Yet the Labour Party - egged on by MPs for inner city constituencies - are adamant that such an idea is an offence to democracy. We must continue with the situation where one person fills in the registration form for everyone living at an address. Here's one such MP:

However, the evidence is that, without mums, many young people will not register to vote: when ‘individual registration’ was introduced in Northern Ireland, the register collapsed by 11 per cent, and the Electoral Commission says this ‘adversely affected’ disadvantaged groups like the young, the poor, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities.

What is so hard about this? Are Labour voters so unable or unwilling to complete a simple form (and it is simple)?

Or is it really a worry about something else?

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Benefit fraud: In defence of the bounty hunter!

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Fraud, error and administrative cock up are a real problem for our benefits system. Despite this we sink to the level of ‘debate by headline’ where the prejudices and preferences of different sides to the argument are paraded like a political version of a 1960s Brighton Bank Holiday.

What follows is an attempt to put a little perspective into the argument – to escape from silly ad hominem and straw man arguments and actually talk about the issue – fraud, error and administrative cock up in our benefit system. And let’s be clear this stuff is there – benefit fraud isn’t the invention of frothing right-wing pundits writing in the Daily Mail. Every Government in my memory has, at some point, announced a ‘crack down’ on benefit fraud (albeit mostly to get a headline or two).

So what’s the deal? How big an issue is fraud and what should we do about it? Well much has been said about it – anecdotally and statistically and the new Government is no exception:

“We are looking urgently at different options for reform. Tougher penalties for
fraud, more prosecutions, encouraging those who know fraud is taking place to come forward, and making greater efforts to reclaim money that's wrongly paid," the prime minister wrote. "We will look at all these things and more. Including, for example, using more information from third parties such as credit referencing agencies to identify circumstances which are incompatible with the benefit claim. I have asked Iain Duncan Smith [the work and pensions secretary] to draw up an uncompromising strategy for tackling fraud and error which we will publish in the autumn."

Cue frothing media debate and a stream of absolute nonsense from pundits and politicians on all sides – from scaremongering about the use of credit referencing data to hyperbole about ‘bounty hunters’. Plus, of course, the compulsory “it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a drop in the ocean of Government spending” and “why are we worrying about benefit fraud, what about tax dodging?”

So, from me, an attempt at a more balanced analysis!

Firstly, benefit fraud is a problem – somewhere between £1.1bn and £5.5bn worth of problem. And it is compounded by the additional problems of overpayment, underpayment and ‘claims in error’. Once we shake all this stuff down there’s something around £10bn of spending involved – which is a lot of people’s taxes however you want to slice them (I would net this off against under-claiming of benefits except the Government already does that in its projections on public spending so to do so would be double counting – just as is the case with estimates of tax revenue).

The problem is that ‘clamping down on fraud’ costs money – you need to employ armies of fraud investigators and I’m sure they don’t come cheap. So there must come a point where further clamping down on fraud – however morally justified – actually costs the taxpayer more money than allowing the fraud to continue. Unless, of course, you can find another way to ‘fight fraud’.

Well there are two important considerations here – what negative incentives can we build in to prevent fraud? The obvious one is to catch more fraudsters (this influences both the fraudster caught and the whole market since the more caught the less incentive to cheat). Except that we’ve already spotted how this doesn’t make fiscal sense. Unless we shift the Government’s risk (in employing fifty grand’s worth of investigator) into the private sector. This is called by some ‘bounty hunting’ but it might be more sensibly named speculative private investigation – you bring evidence that leads to a successful prosecution for benefits fraud we pay you an agreed amount. This amount would represent the median cost of a benefit fraudster to the public purse – the only risk the government faces is that the investigator behaves badly. And, as far as I know, we have other laws to deal with that!

The other approach is to make is less profitable for the fraudster to take the risk – either because of the increased chance of being caught or else because the balance of risk and reward isn’t good enough. In a less complex system based on less information, fraud would be less profitable (and error less likely – addressing a related problem). At present we have a complex system that is relatively easy to game which results in a great deal of abuse – some of which is openly fraudulent while the rest is what might be called ‘pushing the envelope’.

As it stands – and given the number of claimants and the amounts of money involved – there is no chance of any Government making much of an impact on fraud. And with what we might call “fiscal ullage” running at a maximum of 2% and probably less, it makes little sense (beyond headline moralising) to run such programmes and campaigns. Unless of course you take my advice and shift collection risk into the private sector – which means fraudsters will either get caught or else the problem will disperse because the risks are too high. Simple really!

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