More panic in Leeds...

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Last year (according to the figures in Wikipedia at least) over 25 million people trooped through Leeds station on their way to work, to shop or to enjoy Leeds celebrated nightlife. And in that same year 0.00089% of those passengers injured themselves:

In the past year 179 people have been injured at Leeds, and Network Rail said most incidents occurred when people lost their balance after a night out drinking.

Revellers have fallen off platforms, down stairs and escalators and slipped on the station concourse.

Injuries suffered included fractures, cuts and bruises.

Apparently this is a 'high' figure (although the BBC don't report any comparative figures from other stations) and is entirely due to booze:

Ahmed Abdalla, 20, said: "It's the city centre, people are drunk everywhere. From the afternoon they start, early drinking, partying all the time.

"They should be more careful, it's stupid. They're putting themselves and people around them at risk. It's mostly young college boys, uni boys, and girls sometimes."

Network Rail have panicked and are putting up posters telling people to be careful when they're smashed out of their brains. This is to cope with about three incidents a week.

Seems like another moral panic. What is it about Leeds and moral panic?

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Voting fraud - for heaven's sake don't over react!

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A stray humped cow points out that the Government’s latest wheeze to deal with “voting fraud” is – how do we say – obviously sub-optimal (that’s bureaucratic for really, really stupid). This is quite correct – as is the lack of confidence we have in any bureaucracy to keep records secure, to prevent misuse or to even get them accurate.

But – I hear the great cry – we have to do something to stop voting fraud. It undermines our democracy. It means we get the wrong results. It’s exploding. Action must be taken or we’re all doomed!

So let me explain:

*Voting fraud is rare. That’s right, it’s rare – it doesn’t happen very much. It isn’t really a problem

*There are not organised (doubtless hooded and secretive) gangs farming votes so as to get favoured and corrupt politicians into power. We already have these – without the hoods – they’re called political parties

*Most voting deception is preventable through effective polling station vigilance. The decline of telling by political parties makes abuse more easy, of course

*Registration is pretty accurate (more accurate that the census) and good administration is all that’s required to minimise abuse

When I trained as a party agent nearly 30 years ago we learnt the laws on fraud, personation and other electoral abuse. But in our practice we hardly ever – in my case, never – encountered real examples.

So what changed, you ask? Quite simply the Government – desperate to increase turn-out (for not good reason, in my view) allowed anyone to get a postal vote just by signing a form. We created a system where abuse was easy and, to all intents and purposes, undetectable. Today, because the Labour Party can’t admit to being wrong (and may, some naughty people suggest, be the main beneficiary of postal vote abuse) we have to put up with pointless, expensive, 'big brother' solutions to poll “security”.

Might I suggest we just go back to the system we had prior to 1997? That seemed to work pretty well.

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