Democracy inaction

Fat white kid in “bling” tracksuit on the Tube this morning:

KID: Who won da fing?
MATE: Uh?
KID: Who won?
MATE: Labour.
KID: Who’s dat?
MATE: Tony Blair.
KID: Oh, did he get in?


At the other end of the spectrum, the very politicised sister of an old friend went to vote in London yesterday afternoon and was told that she had already voted by post. After she had raised hell for half an hour they eventually admitted that they had had over 200 similar incidents at that polling station alone. She ended up having to leave without casting her vote, and obviously there was no way for her to find out how her doppelganger had voted. This morning it's becoming clear there were two main scams in operation: first, abuse of the postal vote system [Crowd: “Gasp! It cannot be!”]; secondly, and rather more oddly, punter turns up to discover they’re not allowed to vote because someone has informed the polling station that they’re Irish.

However, even the postal fraud pales beside the sheer number of people who couldn’t be arsed to vote. I don’t mean those who feel disenfranchised, betrayed or even just miffed and actively didn’t want to vote for anyone; rather, it’s those who are smart enough to be vaguely aware they should probably be doing something but, as someone I was talking to said yesterday, “I meant to vote this evening, but then I went to buy records instead”. They tend not to be natural Tory voters, and I strongly suspect that if they actually had to spend any time around The Natural Party of Government® they’d have been queuing at the polls before they even opened.

Democracy inaction II

Once again I find myself citing Britain’s Most Reasonable Man (strictlytrue), but, as ever, he makes a good point: the main parties, especially in a general election, wouldn’t dream of trying anything like a major postal vote scam. It would be an insane endeavour. They’d never get away with it. The sheer scale of the undertaking would require the involvement of a huge number of complicit party members, all of them ruthless, conscienceless, and at the very least competent. It would also mean there could be not a single fuckup, or the entire fraud would be blown open and the party tarnished for ever.

That isn’t to say that local branches of the majors might not be open to the idea; in local council elections, for example, which tend anyway to be more unpleasant and corrupt than the nationals, where voter turnout is minuscule and someone’s seat on the council might be decided by as few as 20 votes, the idea of fraud is not only tempting but actually feasible.

However, should it turn out that the problems I mentioned are the result of a systematic campaign and not just appalling administrative blunders (and frankly it’s a miracle that elections are as well administered as they are), I’m willing to put actual money on it not being the work of any of the major parties, but instead on some local activist nutters on behalf of the No Flavourings On Peanuts party, or similar.

The same goes for George Galloway’s thundering denunciations of Tower Hamlets’ electoral roll as being “so shot through with errors and anomalies... as to be almost meaningless”. For someone who keeps banging on about the decades he has spent in British politics, he seems curiously never actually to have seen or worked from an electoral roll, or he’d have known that by their very nature they’re inaccurate; people move, move again, die, emigrate, immigrate, and rarely with a thought to updating their details on the register. Could it have been just yet another chance to make himself out to be the only honest man in a sea of LIARS? Or a pre-emptive strike in case one or two of Respect’s votes are questioned in the future?

In ENTIRELY UNRELATED news, who on earth is Holy Moly talking about here?

Imagine if you worked for an accountancy practice in Glasgow, which dealt with oil company accounts.

Imagine if you were contacted by someone wanting to know if your company could look after some property rights in the Middle East.

Imagine if it turned out Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz had gifted a number of oil fields to a certain British representative of the people.

Imagine if that lucky person couldn’t look for investors to assist with exploiting the oil because of sanctions, and had lost a tidy little pension in the desert since Coalition tanks went in.

Wouldn’t that be *fucking weird*?

“Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta Bethnal Green.”

S, P, S

In all the kerfuffle of the last couple of days, this story appears inexplicably to have been overshadowed:

The [Tokyo-based] Maspro Denkoh electronics corporation was selling its $20 million collection of Picassos and Van Goghs, but the director could not decide whether Sotheby's or Christie's should have the privilege of auctioning them. So he announced that the deal would go to the winner of a single round of scissors, paper, stone.

Sotheby's reluctantly accepted this as a 50/50 game of chance, but Christie's asked the experts, Flora and Alice, 11-year-old daughters of the company's director of Impressionist and modern art, and aficionados of the game.

They explained their strategy:

1. Stone is the one that "feels" the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors first

Sure enough, the novices at Sotheby's went for paper, and Christie's scissors got them an enormously lucrative cut. [BBC]