If allegations of ‘family voting’ taking place at Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election prove substantiated, the incidents will not only mark a grave infraction of the law, they will give further weight to the fear that this country is becoming perilously fragmented, terminally Balkanised and mired in sectarianism.
Polling had scarcely closed when, a few minutes after 10 p.m., Sam Coates of Sky News posted on X intelligence related to him by a team from Democracy Volunteers, a group of voluntary election observers, in which they claimed to have witnessed a total of 32 cases of family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations in the constituency. Speaking that night, John Ault, the director of Democracy Volunteers, said: ‘Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10-year history of observing elections in the UK.’
That is quite an accusation, not least because the practice, which entails the act of multiple people entering the polling booth together, is illegal. The 2023 Ballot Secrecy Act even makes it a criminal offence to be in or near a polling booth with another person in order to influence them to vote in a particular way.
No wonder on Friday the two major beaten parties in the contest felt obliged to make known their disquiet at the reports, with Labour chairman Anna Turley calling them ‘very concerning’ and Reform leader Nigel Farage likewise saying it was ‘deeply concerning’ feedback which ‘raises serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas.’ Farage has now lodged a complaint of electoral fraud.
Typical sour grapes from sore losers, some might say. And an especially typical response from Farage, some might add, who is never one to miss an opportunity to stoke division and spread hate. Indeed, the usual online mob of apologists for Islamo-gauchisme – a neologism long established in France, and one we need to start using here – have been piping up to denounce with tiresome predictability Reform and their supporters as racists who simply hate to see ordinary Muslims voting.
Equally predictable in their response have been that from the type of limp, mainstream leftist who would prefer to ignore the growing sectarianism in our midst and make light of the matter with flippant, preposterous comparisons. Step forward Kevin Maguire of the Mirror, who posted on X the conceited retort: ‘I usually go to the polling station with my partner. My adult children came too when they lived at home. Was that “family voting” or absolutely fine because we’re White skinned and not Muslims?’
Although the officer responsible for running the by-election said no reports of family voting had been made by polling station staff, and although Greater Manchester Police have as yet received ‘no reports’ of electoral offences at the by-election, we ought to take the allegations deadly seriously. We should do so because they are entirely plausible, given that they fit an established pattern of behaviour within a section of the Muslim community, one which in many enclaves throughout the country live in a parallel existence in insular, conservative and strictly patriarchal communities.
The postal vote is similarly abused
We were reminded of this uncomfortable truth only last weekend, with the report of the growth and prevalence of sharia courts in Britain, and the degree to which edicts deriving from sharia law which break the law of the land go overlooked by authorities too fearful to intervene. The occurrence of family voting would accord with the endemic and well-attested trend over recent decades, also widespread these patriarchal Muslim communities, of the postal vote being abused, with the custom of the male head of the household, or a Muslim activist, filling in ballot papers on behalf of the rest of his family. The reports of family voting also accord with the reality, something which a cynical Green party electioneering video reminded us of, that many Muslims in this country don’t speak English as a first language, or at all.
As Sam Coates related of his time in Manchester, when he asked a number of members of the South Asian community who they would be voting for, he was met with the response: ‘my husband deals with that’. A female demographic that doesn’t speak English, and one prone to spousal pressure or intimidation, is not one best equipped to engage in the demographic process in an open, healthy manner. Nor would it be healthy if these serious allegations went unchallenged, or ignored.
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