Author:
Publication: City Journal
Date: April 19, 2005
URL: http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_04_19_05td.html
A new Labour Party scheme to allow
voting by mail is a recipe for corruption.
Under the firm leadership of Tony
Blair, Britain, once a country notable for the honesty of its inhabitants
and the uprightness of its public administration, is fast descending into
banana-republic status.
The latest institution subverted
under Blair's rule is the electoral system. His Labour government has extended
the option of voting by mail, previously open only to those who could show
good cause, to anyone seeking it. The system is so casual, with so few
safeguards-and the government received so many warnings about the corruption
likely to result from it-that one suspects that it was introduced not in
spite of its open invitation to electoral fraud but because of it. And
in any contest to find which party can commit the most fraud, Blair's party
is likely to win hands down.
A recent inquiry-obstructed by Blair's
party every inch of the way-found that six Muslim city councilors from
Muslim areas of Birmingham, Labour Party members all, had committed outrageous
electoral fraud. They, their acolytes, helpers, and corrupt or intimidated
allies in the post office stole and altered thousands of mail votes. In
one case, the police stumbled upon a postal vote "factory," where six men,
including three of the councilors, were busily filling in scores of votes.
The police, now thoroughly corrupted by Blairite methods, in effect did
nothing, and the three candidates wound up duly elected to the council.
The inquiry, set up after vociferous protests, concluded that up to a third
of the votes for the six elected candidates were fraudulent. The winning
candidates would not have won without them, nor would Labour have controlled
the city council.
Of course, postal votes (the numbers
increased in one ward alone from 691 to 8,488 between one election and
the next) are a disaster for Muslim women, even without widespread ballot
box stuffing and vote-altering. In effect, the postal vote deprives Muslim
women of the franchise and gives Muslim males more than one vote: when
the ballots arrive at the house, the Muslim women, who are subordinate
to the men, will be forced to go along with the men's voting preferences.
Combined with Mrs. Blair's defense
in court of Muslim schoolgirls' "right" to wear concealing clothes in school,
and the Labour Party's resort to latently anti-Semitic election posters
(if a Conservative government were elected-no longer unthinkable though
still unlikely-the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer would
be Jewish), we see a government desperately trying to square a circle:
how to wage war in Iraq and retain the allegiance of an electorally important
Muslim population. If doing so means resorting to anti-Semitism and condoning
the abuse of women and depriving them of the vote-well, it is a small price
to pay for the inestimable good that Tony Blair thinks he's doing in the
world. Like Hillary Clinton, he was born not with original sin, but original
virtue.
