Sayeeda Warsi has told The New Statesman that voter fraud cost the Tories at least three seats:
This is the first time a senior minister has made such a blunt and specific allegation about the impact of electoral fraud on the general election result. Can she reveal the names of those seats? “I think it would be wrong to start identifying them,” she says, but adds: “It is predominantly within the Asian community. I have to look back and say we didn’t do well in those communities, but was there something over and above that we could have done? Well, actually not, if there is going to be voter fraud.”
Why would it be ‘wrong to name them’? It’s a crime and if she has evidence she should produce it.
The accusations about fraud in areas with significant Asian (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) voters often surfaces up around the time of the general election, and there’s always anecdotal stuff available for those who follow local politics in Asian areas. The Independent carried a report back in May on similar claims of voter fraud in Tower Hamlets. And there was this in 2005:
One of their lawyers admitted that might have looked suspicious. But he argued it would be wrong to conclude they were guilty of corruption and forgery.
And earlier this month, Lutfur Rahman was removed as Labour’s candidate mired in accusations of both being an ‘Islamic extremist’ as well as engaging in ‘vote banking’.
Still, it’s not just low-level local Labour politicians who can be accused of fraud and using their local contacts to ensure votebanking:
Every political candidate and agent knows that this is illegal. It is a specific criminal offence known as “Treating”. It carries a jail sentence and disqualification for the candidate.
The point I agree with Warsi on is that the Labour Party (and sometimes the Liberal Democrats) are better placed to take advantage of ‘Asian block voting’ by hook or by crook, although it isn’t only Labour politicians who have been accused of electoral fraud (a warrant is out for a Tory councillor found guilty of election fraud and thought to be hiding in Pakistan). Craig Murray, hardly a racist or an Islamophobe by any stretch of the imagination, noted his own experience of campaigning in Blackburn, home to a large Asian Muslim population where the local mosques have close ties to the former New Labour minister Jack Straw in particular:
Again, I speak from experience, having listened to many first-hand accounts from intimidated people in Blackburn – and, in every case, the intimidation was to vote New Labour.
I can understand Khalid Mahmood’s quick response to dismiss this as ‘Islamophobia’, and no doubt racists will use this a (stupid) example of ‘Islamisation’, but I think he has it the wrong way around: it’s really about the way liberal democracy tends to problematise and then treat minority groups.
thabet is discussing. 
