Colin Thompson was in his sixties, with bottle-bottomed glasses. He was carrying a laundry basket when we met, so he offered me his forefinger to shake instead of his hand. When I asked who he had voted for, Colin became visibly confused. It was just after 9 pm on 5 May 2005 and polling stations would be open for another hour. (1) Colin – not his real name – is one of five residents in Bunyan Lodge, Bedford, a care home for the long-term mentally ill. And the great thing about being in care with a mental illness is that you can still vote. Six men at Bunyan Lodge had apparently given permission for votes to be cast on their behalf. (2) Their votes had gone in pairs to relatives or friends of a local Conservative party worker; for the law states that a person cannot have more than two proxy votes assigned to them.
Bunyan Lodge is in the De Parys electoral ward – a quiet and leafy area of Bedford, with a number of care homes. Care homes are required to keep visitors books, and the Bunyan Lodge book records that someone called ‘T Paul’ dropped by on five separate occasions. (3) On February 27, the same ‘T Paul’ (to judge by his handwriting) had also signed the visitors book at Hepworth House, a retirement home in the same ward. Hepworth House has 18 residents, some with dementia. Ten of them ended up nominating proxies without knowing it. Owner Mr Keith Hepworth-Lloyd said: ‘Normally, we take our residents down to the polling station to vote in person. But this year, we didn’t get any voting cards so we didn’t have any choice. I find this quite disturbing.’ Mr Hepworth-Lloyd has contacted the police over the suspected theft of the voting cards.(4)
Resident Frederick Wright is 73 and of sound mind; he ‘nominated’ someone called Jonathan Ellwood. I asked Mr Wright if he knew Mr Ellwood. The answer was an immediate ‘no’. Two other residents nominated Mary Ellwood, who lives at the same address as Jonathan. Four residents at Hepworth House apparently gave permission for their votes to be cast by a couple called Anthony and Norah Ellwood. One of the residents who ‘gave’ her vote to Anthony has advanced dementia. Staff told me ‘she can hardly put two words together’.
Beatrice Vickers is 89 and lives in nearby Lloyd Lodge, also managed by Mr Hepworth-Lloyd. Mrs Vickers, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, has also managed to nominate Jonathan Ellwood. When I put his name to her, Mrs Vickers was adamant she had never heard of him.
When the local election results came in on May 6, it was found that the Lib Dem councillor for De Parys had been unexpectedly defeated. Lynda Aylett-Green was beaten by just 96 votes. The new county councillor for De Parys is a Conservative called Tarsem Paul.
Another care home in Mr T Paul’s new ward is called Lilibet House. There, in early April, a manager answered the door to a man fitting Mr Paul’s description, canvassing for the Conservative party. The manager was wary about letting canvassers in, so the man asked her if she would hand out some forms to the residents. He asked the manager to get the residents to sign them. The manager’s understanding was that the rest of each form should be left blank she thought they would go off and be processed somewhere. A day or two later the man returned. He left with five signed proxy vote forms, each signed by a resident that the manager knew was capable of voting. The manager never saw the forms again but all five residents ended up as proxy voters. One of them gave his vote to a Tory County Councillor who lives just three doors away. The manager has now contacted the police.
Granny farming
Lobster readers will be aware that this grotesque trail of deception and abuse of the elderly is characteristic of the rigging technique called ‘granny farming’. (5) The election authority in all the above cases is Bedford Borough Council, which requested a police investigation after the anomalous proxies came to light.
On the afternoon of polling day, I had spent two sweaty hours shut in an interview room with a council officer, poring over the register of absentee voters. Every election authority is required to keep a register of proxy and postal voters. Bedford’s postal vote total alone has jumped from 4,500 to nearly 11,000 in just over two years, meaning that rifling through the directories was a time-consuming job. It was made more time-consuming by the fact that viewers are not allowed to photograph the register’s pages, so details must be transcribed by hand. I told the council officer what I was looking at.
‘Look at these names’, I said. ‘Violet, Godfrey, Muriel, Wilfred – they’re all old people. And they all live at the same address. This is an old folk’s home full of proxy voters. And look at the way the proxies are arranged.’
The proxies came in surname-matched clusters. Often, the proxies were in pairs. Proxy A would appear on two consecutive entries, followed immediately by proxy B twice. Despite the fact that the register lists streets alphabetically, there often was a jump from one street to another between two consecutive appearances of the same proxy. Almost exactly as though someone had taken a list of friends’ names and a copy of the electoral register, and worked his way around, ticking off votes as he went, in fact.
If you ever want proof that it’s a small world, the register of absentee voters will amply repay your time. One proxy lived two doors away from another, who lived next door to a proxy with the same surname as four others…….. who in turn lived in one house opposite two more proxies. Another two proxies lived five doors away from the home of Tarsem Paul, at whose home five people were listed as designated proxies (i.e., ten votes). By the time we had finished checking the lists, the council officer with me was looking slightly paler than he had when I arrived. I later learned that when I had left, he went straight with the books to the Returning Officer, who blanched and rang the police.(6)
All this information had been sitting in council offices, available to anyone; and no-one, not even the people who had compiled it, (7) had thought it odd that so many unrelated elderly people should nominate so many proxies with clearly related names and addresses. And the funny thing is that none of this is in itself illegal.
The local NHS Mental Health Trust – which runs a home where three unrelated voters gave proxies to sisters living in a house two miles away (8) – indignantly pointed out that mentally ill people had the same right to vote as everyone else. It also stated that it would co-operate fully with the police investigation…… ‘If we receive a complaint from a client that their vote has been misrepresented.’
Indeed, the astonishing thing about fiddling an election is how many people won’t lift a finger to prevent it.
A conspiracy of silence
In Lobster 43 I reported on the case of the then breaking electoral fraud case in Birmingham, which has now come to fruition with the sacking of Labour councillors who rigged the city’s elections. Although warned repeatedly in advance (by very reputable civic figures) that an election was being corrupted, Birmingham Police were so annoyed at having to investigate that they code named their investigation ‘Operation Gripe’. In April this year Richard Mawrey QC sacked six Labour councillors in Aston and Bordesley Green. After listening to evidence that included accounts of bundles of postal votes being carted into polling stations in carrier bags, he decided that six councillors – Shah Jahan, Shafaq Ahmed and Ayaz Khan in Bordesley Green and Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi in Aston – were guilty of corrupt and illegal practices. Cllr. Muhammed Afzal was fingered by Mr Mawrey as the ringleader of the vote-riggers.
The judge said: ‘Postal ballots are sent out by ordinary mail in clearly identifiable envelopes. Short of writing “Steal me” on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands.’
In a whopping 192-page judgement Mr Mawrey damned a Government statement which said there were no proposals to change the rules governing election procedures for the next ballot. (9)) Mr Mawrey told the packed courtroom: ‘Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising.’
On the contrary, a banana constitutional monarchy like Britain has good reason to be proud of its glorious history of electoral fraud. And this is something of which the political parties are well aware. In each and every case of electoral irregularity, the silence from the non-implicated political parties is deafening. Labour’s Birmingham riggers are damned and sacked…… and not a peep is heard from the Lib Dems or Tories. In the case of the Bedford granny-farming scandal, not even the dubiously-defeated Lib Dem has voiced a complaint.
The secret behind all this abuse is that the parties are all in it together. The silence from the opposition every time a rigger is caught out, is an unspoken sigh of ‘There but for the grace of God ….’
Aa former Lib Dem activist once related to me a detailed account of how he had participated in successfully stealing a by-election for the Lib Dems. (The Parliamentary candidate who was elected is now dead and it would be unfair to name him.) The Lib Dems had allegedly used every trick in the book: granny farming, smears, postal theft, bugging, sabotage. I asked my source whether he didn’t feel just a bit guilty at having stolen a supposedly democratic election. After a moment’s pause, he replied: ‘No: I’m proud that we stole it better than the opposition.’
It was this activist who also explained to me why the Poll Tax was such a great electoral asset for the Tories in the 1980s. Some of the people who were most likely to vote Labour the less well off simply disappeared from the electoral register to avoid payment. No-one’s quite sure how many voters disappeared in this way, but Baroness Thatcher herself has been quoted as saying that the Poll Tax helped win the ropey-looking 1992 election for the Conservative party. She put the number of disappearing pro-Kinnock voters at ‘about one million’. (10)
More than six million UK voters (15.5 per cent) are believed to have voted by post in May’s general and local elections, almost four times the figure in 2001. The total number of proxy votes is not known. At the time of writing, fifteen investigations involving eight UK police forces were under way into allegations of voting fraud and malpractice during the campaign. What will happen if the allegations are proven? New elections?
Yeah, and then you wake up.
Notes
[1] Personal visit, 5 May 2005, 9.08 pm, Bunyan Lodge, Kimbolton Road, Bedford.
[2] The sixth man, Ian Butterworth, had died on 11 April after a fortnight in hospital with heart problems.
[3] I am particularly grateful to a care home staff member I shall call Mohan who helped me obtain this information against a tight deadline
[4] Information emerging since this visit indicates that a worker who regularly visits the home as a hairdresser is the wife of a local Tory party worker.
[5] The case of another Bedfordshire woman with Alzheimer’s who was apparently tricked into voting was taken up by BBC news. Louisa Garrett was seen on TV claiming that she ‘doesn’t really know’ who she voted for, but that she had ‘voted for Tony Blair and then put him to bed’. In actual fact, she had signed away her vote to the brother of a local Conservative party worker. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/england/4510971.stm>
[6] This was a delicious irony, since it was the same man who had brought a libel action against my newspaper some years ago over allegations of electoral impropriety.
[7] At least, I assume they hadn’t. But I must reflect that I had been requesting a viewing of the register for nearly ten days before I was finally allowed to see it at three pm on polling day.
[8] Two miles away……. but only fifteen metres from the home of Tarsem Paul. There is, of course, no suggestion that any of the proxies named in this article have done anything illegal.
[9] Mr Mawney’s report (which is written in a refreshingly ‘from the hip’ style) can be read in full at: http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/docs/icBirmingham/0005A0A6-8715-1252-B36F80BFB6FA0000.doc
[10] The Sunday Telegraph, 12 April 1992.