Respect seeks suspension of postal voting
George Galloway’s anti-war Respect Party is to take legal action in an attempt to have postal voting suspended for the general election.
Speaking at the launch of the Respect manifesto, Mr Galloway said a ban on postal voting – except for those completely unable to make it to the ballot box – was needed to ensure there was no repeat of the postal vote scandals in Birmingham and Blackburn.
If the courts would not agree to ban postal voting, they should at least rule that postal votes were counted and announced separately from ordinary votes, he added. That was the only way that it would be possible to investigate possible fraud after the event.
Speaking of the fraud case in Birmingham, Mr Galloway said: “It started with precisely what the New Labour machine is doing in Tower Hamlets, and it ended in a warehouse at midnight with New Labour apparatchiks filling in thousands of other people’s ballot papers.”
Mr Galloway’s comments come in an increasingly bitter battle with Labour MP Oona King, who Mr Galloway has accused of being a Labour stooge.
Ms King vehemently denies any wrong doing, and Labour has repeatedly stressed that it operates within the law at all times.
Mr Galloway though said he was worried by the “huge” increase in applications for postal votes in Tower Hamlets – the borough that makes up most of the Bethnal Green and Bow seat he is contesting – which were already double their 2001 level.
Mr Galloway’s concerns centre around forms that Labour and unions have been sending to constituents in Bethnal Green and Bow, asking people to send their applications for postal votes via the Labour Party processing centre in Gateshead.
Asked if such practices were not in fact within the letter of the law, Mr Galloway said they were in breach of the Electoral Commission’s guidelines and “blatantly” flouted the recommendations of the judge in the Birmingham fraud case.
Ms King’s campaign manager, Alan Barnard, told the BBC that the candidate’s mailshot was completely legal. Mr Barnard said: “It seems to me that Mr Galloway has come here from Scotland having read a lot of stories about the East End such as those about Ronnie and Reggie Kray and thinks everyone is a crook in the East End.
“How dare he try and decide who can and can’t have a postal vote. That is more like the way Saddam Hussein used to run his elections.”
Respect is campaigning on anti-war and socialist platform that it believes will appeal to disillusioned Labour voters.
Key manifesto promises include withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, bring public services back into public ownership, raising the minimum wage to £7.60 and taxing “big business and the wealthy to fund public expenditure”.
Mr Galloway was thrown out of the Labour Party last year after being accused of having “incited foreign forces to rise up against British troops”.
