Not The Sort Of Thing We Do In Hackney

I was shocked to read the exposé of postal vote fraud in The Sunday Times this morning. The revelations were based on information gathered by one of the paper's undercover reporters, whose investigations of election fraud have led her to believe that the problem has become endemic in Britain’s cities.

According to the Sunday Times "Insight" story, Labour Party student volunteers gathered in the car park of a boarded-up pub in a rundown suburb of Leeds, in a ward crucial to the Party’s fight to seize back control of the City Council. One of the politicians addressing the group was Labour Councillor Graham Hyde, who works as a parliamentary aide to local MP George Mudie, a former Parliamentary Whip and staunch Gordon supporter. Labour Group Leader Keith Wakefield was also present in the car park, underlining the importance of the Gipton and Harehills ward to the Party.

The purpose of the gathering was to instruct the student volunteers s to "chase" postal votes. The students were told to trawl the surrounding streets collecting postal ballot forms from voters and, if necessary, to help residents to complete their ballots. Councillor Hyde is reported to have warned: "Put the postal vote form out of sight...Don’t get caught with any on you. We are not supposed to collect them." According to the Sunday Times article, he appeared well aware of the ramifications of what he was suggesting. When one of the students referred to what they were doing as "illegal", Hyde responded: "Yes it is. But we’ve done 25% already, so..."

Just in case anyone gets any stupid ideas, I want to make it absolutely clear that Hackney Labour Party has never engaged in such illegal activities. Allegations made in the past that we "farmed" postal votes in the 2002 local and mayoral election and repeated the exercise in the 2006 local elections are totally malicious and without foundation.

As Hackney Labour Group Chief Whip I can assure you that no member of the Labour Party has ever followed the deliveries of postal ballot forms, collected up forms and envelopes or countersigned the envelopes on behalf of voters. We never issued any leaflets on which we asked which party the recipient was supporting at the same time as inviting them to apply for a postal vote. Especially not any such leaflets containing application forms to be returned to the address of a property owned by the election agent of the MP for Hackney South & Shoreditch, Madge Hillside. Nor have any ballot boxes ever been improperly accessed while being stored in the Town Hall overnight. And even if we had operated a "vote factory" in Hackney, we certainly wouldn't have based it in the Victoria Park home of someone very prominent in the local Party.

All of this is complete and utter lies put about by Communists, Trotskyites, LibDems, Greens, swimmers and the b******s who run this crappy little website where I first saw the story about this morning's Sunday Times nonsense. Even more drivel is the risible report on the 2006 local elections and its appendices, to which they published links on their sordid little site.