UK Elections Neither Free Nor Fair

Craig Murray, the UK's former Ambassador to Uzbekistan (withdrawn in 2004 after exposing appalling human rights abuses in that country), believes that the UK electoral process doesn't stack up too well against that of the average banana republic. It's a damning analysis.

"Against international standards, British elections leave a great deal to be desired. The first crucial failing is the lack of an independent administration of the elections. In each constituency, the election is not run by the Electoral Commission, but by the local authority. The national Electoral Commission has only an advisory role and cannot even monitor or instruct local returning officers. The returning officer is almost always the chief executive officer of the local authority.
The problem is that, de facto, those chief executives are party-political appointments. Particularly in the long-term New Labour rotten boroughs of the north, local government appointments are a New Labour nexus... Reciprocal agreements between New Labour councils to provide full-time party staff – at the council taxpayer's expense – are not uncommon...

The polling booth is the vital question here. Those bits of board that prevent anyone from seeing how you vote, are an essential element of the secret ballot. New Labour has, in effect, deliberately removed it. Any vote made at home is a vote that may be filled in under the coercive eye of an individual able to enter your home and intimidate you – something nobody can do in the polling booth...

The regulations have been designed specifically to prevent the exposure of postal ballot fraud. By law, the postal ballots have to be mixed undetectably with the polling booth ballots before they are counted. Therefore, there is no way to prove if, as I suspect happened in Blackburn, a candidate received 25% of secret ballots but 80% of postal ballots...

But there is a still more fundamental point, which raises doubts about the democratic validity of Britain's elections – and that is the question of whether a real choice is being presented to the voters.
International electoral monitoring bodies pay a great deal of attention to this. For example, in December's parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan, it was the lack of real choice between five official parties, all supporting President Karimov's programme, on which the OSCE focused its criticism...

A traditional feature of British elections is the electoral communication, under which each candidate can send out a copy of their electoral address, delivered to every voter free by Royal Mail. Under another bit of Kafka-esque New Labour legislation, the Royal Mail now vets the content of every electoral address. The text must be seen and approved by a central Post Office unit before the leaflet can be printed and prepared for delivery...

Now, we come to the most fundamentally undemocratic aspect of British elections: the electoral system. It delivers massively disproportionate results with minority parties virtually unrepresented in parliament. At the last election, it delivered a good majority to an unpopular Tony Blair, even though New Labour received only 36% of votes cast – which represented just 22% of those entitled to vote.
But it does not favour the big parties evenly. New Labour can get a working majority with 34% of votes cast, while the Tories need 39%. If New Labour and the Tories both got 36%, New Labour would probably have almost 50 more seats. The Lib Dems could get 34%, yet win under half the seats that New Labour would get with the same percentage."

Craig Murray was unhappy with the Guardian's treatment of his article and I hope he won't mind me reproducing a large chunk of it here.  Most of what he writes about has been common knowledge amongst electoral system geeks for some time but he does summarise some of the key issues quite succinctly and the whole article is definitely worth a read.  However, I must admit that the process of the Royal Mail becoming the official censors of election leaflets had completley passed me by. How the heck did I miss that one and was it just me or did it bypass the usual anti-liberty regulation detection networks too?