Labour’s stolen votes

Birmingham

At one o’clock in the morning of 9 June last year, two days before the local council elections, Police Sergeant John Rattenberry of Erdington police station, Birmingham, was called to investigate something strange going on inside a warehouse. Here’s what he witnessed, in his own words:

‘I entered the first floor of the warehouse and went into a room where I saw approximately five Asian males along with four police officers. I could see a large table on which there were a lot of miscellaneous papers and A5 unsealed envelopes. I could see that the envelopes contained several pieces of paper including marked ballot papers. I was informed by a Mr Zulfikar Khan, who identified himself as a Labour councillor, that the numbers on these documents were being matched up and that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.’

Sergeant Rattenberry mulled this over for a bit and decided he wasn’t so sure. The transcript above comes from his appearance before an election court in Birmingham, which is investigating alleged systematic electoral fraud perpetrated by the Labour party on what we might call an industrial scale. It is alleged that of the 7,000 postal votes cast in Bordesley Green ward, some 3,000 were stolen or altered or falsified: Labour subsequently or consequently won all three seats.

Judge Richard Mawrey QC heard the last of the evidence this week and has already denounced the postal system as an ‘open invitation to fraud’. He will deliver his judgment on 4 April: six Labour councillors from two wards in the city could be disbarred and the elections deemed null and void. The court was convened through a petition from four local electors and has heard tell of residents bribed or threatened with knee-cappings to hand over their ballot papers; on two occasions Royal Mail postmen were at first offered bribes and then threatened with violence to part with their sacks of ballot papers, which they refused to do.