Category Archives: Gerrymandering

Rees-Mogg admitted ‘voter ID’ plan he supported was vote-rigging. Where are the calls for punishment?

Shifty: Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted ‘voter ID’ was vote-rigging – and failed. He should be punished – but some media outlets would rather misdirect you to something that hasn’t happened, and perhaps never will.

Don’t you find it strange that an alleged newspaper like the Daily Mail would drag readers’ attention – for two days’ running – to a rubbish Labour Party idea to give the vote to visitors from the EU…

… when a former Conservative minister has admitted that the Tory “voter ID” scheme was a genuine attempt to rig the vote.

Speaking at the National Conservatives’ conference (it makes perfect sense that he would be a Nat-C), Jacob Rees-Mogg said:

“Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.”

The local government elections in England earlier this month were the first at which people were required to bring photographic identification in order to cast a vote – and the electorate punished the Conservatives by taking 1,063 council seats away from them.

The admission is even more serious for Rees-Mogg because he argued in favour of “voter ID” in Parliament:

He must have known then that it was an attempt to gerrymander votes in the Conservatives’ favour – to rig elections. Mustn’t he?

Indeed, Labour’s Dawn Butler has said Rees-Mogg’s admission should be reported to the Parliamentary Standards Authority – or even to the police. The Electoral Commission is another option – although its current status as an arm of the Tory government makes it a poor third choice.

Yet the hard-right headbangers of the Daily Heil want you to concentrate on an idea mooted about by the Labour Party, that is unlikely ever to come to pass.

In light of the fact that election-rigging is a crime, I’ll leave it to you to work out why they might want to do that.

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Starmer snubs unions over threat to party democracy – & may now face leadership challenge at conference

The flag and the faker: Keir Starmer has revealed his true – blue – colour in an 11,500-word rejection of Labour Party values, and is attacking party members both electorally and psychologically. He must be stopped before he does any more damage – and could face a challenge to his leadership if he pushes ahead with these vicious plans.

This Writer was practically salivating with anticipation about what I might read on BBC News after discovering the following on Twitter:

And what did I find?

If this is what he stands for then it could have been done in far fewer than 11,500 words – and that’s down from his original claim that it would be 14,000 (let’s thank providence for small mercies)!

The short version is that Starmer has abandoned all Labour Party values. He proposes a “contribution” society – not in which contributions go from those according to their means, to those according to their needs – but (if I’m reading this right) from those who can be made to work the hardest to the UK as a whole (by which I’m presuming he means rich people like himself).

And he’s suddenly fully in favour of privatisation:

What’s the difference from Toryism?

And there’s a nasty return to the old “strivers v skivers” rhetoric that demonised a generation of people with disabilities and long-term illnesses and sent many of them to early graves because of benefit refusals on the basis of trumped-up excuses.

Some commentators have referred to fascist language that is reminiscent of Vichy France.

Others were more visual in their condemnation:

Personally I think that, if it’s supposed to be an essay, we should give it a mark and a comment:

D-
Needs improvement.

The BBC story unaccountably neglects to mention the meeting with the unions, so let’s see what we can get from elsewhere.

It seems that not even one union supported Starmer’s plan to return to an “electoral college” system of voting in Labour leadership elections, that would steal a huge amount of power from party members by depriving them of their individual votes altogether, and hand a huge amount to MPs – the party’s 200+ elected representatives would have one-third of the vote.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise – Starmer’s offer would not have benefited the unions in any way so they were able to reject it without any qualms:

And of course, handing veto powers to 200 high-earning middle-class MPs will do nothing to make Labour relevant to working-class people.

Now: we had understood that, if he didn’t get enough support from the unions (or indeed any, as has happened), Starmer would scrap the plan and would not take it to the NEC for inclusion in the agenda for the annual conference at the weekend.

It seems that claim was a lie.

I think Starmer is panicking. He reckons this will be his only chance to force through the changes he needs to secure his position as leader.

You see, Starmer’s hired guns at the Governance and Legal Unit have apparently been busily despatching notices of suspension to constituency party delegates, in order to ‘fix’ the result of conference votes.

Recipients of these letters are being told, it seems, that the reasons for the suspension of their membership will only be revealed after the conference, in what must be a breach of investigatory rules that is also attacking them financially (because they’ll already have paid for transport and accommodation at the Brighton-based conference) and psychologically:

As a victim of this treatment, I can confirm the truth of Mr Sellers’s words.

So Starmer has launched an attack against the Labour movement, on several fronts: against the trade unions, by snubbing them and ignoring their wishes; against party members, by pressing on with his plan to disenfranchise them while also subjecting them to the torture of the disciplinary process; and to the wider Labour-supporting electorate by betraying everything the party should represent, in his scummy little screed.

Fortunately it seems he’s not going to have it all his own way.

The unions will oppose his plans – and that’s half the conference vote against him before he has even made his first proposal. More than half, if he has deliberately suspended a significant number of delegates.

The remaining delegates – if they’re worth a farthing – will want to reject his plan in solidarity with their wronged colleagues. Right, delegates?

And even some Labour MPs are preparing to rebel against this insult to democracy. Starmer may think this is bad enough:

Worse for Starmer – much worse – is this:

Here’s corroboration, for the sceptical:

Expect fireworks at this conference.

Strange to think that these shenanigans all started because Starmer was worried about losing the vote to confirm his despotic acting general secretary David Evans in the role that has made him despised across the UK.

Whatever happens, Evans is toast.

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Gerrymandering Tories are trying to rig constituency boundaries YET AGAIN

How gerrymandering works: constituency boundaries are drawn to give a particular party the best chance to win – even (especially!) if they don’t deserve to.

This is yet another perennial piece of corruption from the Conservative Party.

Recently we’ve seen them revive their plan for a “Royal Yacht” for them to sail in on trade junkets to foreign countries. It was a waste of money in 2012 when it would have cost £60 million. Today it’s supposed to cost £200 million that would be better spent alleviating poverty.

We’ve discovered they have revived their plan to give NHS England patients’ confidential medical records to private companies. The idea was for all patients’ data to be included unless the opt out – but there was no publicity, meaning nobody knew about it until organisations like This Site published stories about it.

They are pushing on with a plan to stop courts from ruling on whether government decisions or actions are unlawful – a serious blow against the rule of law and a huge step towards dictatorship in the UK.

And now we have been told they are reintroducing – for around the third time since they took office in 2010 – plans to rig national election results by changing constituency boundaries to give themselves the best possible chance of winning seats.

It’s a very old and well-known form of political corruption and it’s quite easy to tell when the change isn’t coming in to ensure all constituencies have roughly the same number of voters: instead of looking roughly square or circular, constituencies turn into very strange shapes indeed.

This is because whoever redrew the electoral boundary was trying to get as many voters for their party into each constituency as possible, while limiting the support for other parties.

I haven’t seen the proposed new constituency map so I can’t say for sure that this is what is happening.

But I can make an educated guess, on the basis of the BBC’s commentary on it here: “Overall the changes will benefit the Conservatives at the expense of Labour.”

If anyone – of any political persuasion – was serious about making constituency boundary changes fair, they would base their calculations on the last election result, so that – if the new map had been in operation then – the number of seats going to each party would have been the same.

But they’re not.

So I’m confident that this is another corrupt Tory stitch-up.

My advice is that you need to look at the proposed new boundaries of your constituency and, if it’s not currently held by a Tory, find out if it would be from now on.

If the new borders mean it would, then complain, campaign and get it changed.

Source: Parliament: Shake-up of England’s electoral map outlined – BBC News

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