Allegations that fake candidates were stood at this month’s British local elections to split the vote have been followed by a series of arrests, with Manchester Police stating they are working with the Electoral Commission to investigate “conspiracy to defraud”.
Greater Manchester Police arrested five people, four men and a women between the ages of 23 and 47, in the Tameside area over “suspicion of conspiracy to defraud as part of an investigation into alleged offences committed leading up to the local elections” on Thursday. The force said in a statement they became aware in the run up to this month’s vote of “concerns about candidates” in the St Peter’s Ward, a local government district in Ashton-under-Lyne, the area represented in the national Parliament by prominent Labour politician Angela Rayner.
Police further said: “The work is specifically investigating the process of how candidates were put forward and represented in the ward… We are working closely with the Electoral Commission and local partners as part of our enquiries.”
While the United Kingdom has long enjoyed a reputation for electoral integrity, concerns about dishonest practice and outright fraud have grown this century. Brexit leader Nigel Farage has long pointed to these problems, and responded to the arrests with remarks on Friday and said: “I have warned repeatedly over many years about election fraud and always been ignored. The Gorton & Denton by-election was a disgrace, but at last there have been some arrests in Greater Manchester.”
British broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph notes the arrests followed serious allegations about the election made by local news site The Manchester Mill, which claimed that in addition to “people being forced to fill out postal votes on the doorstep”, that “fake” election candidates had been stood, and in one case one real person tracked down wasn’t aware they’d been put up for election.
The Manchester Mill site claims that two fake candidates had been stood as independents in the St Peter’s Ward intended to hoover up votes that would have otherwise gone to genuine independent candidates.
It is claimed, reports The Times, that this deceit was engineered by the local Labour Party to neuter the political impact of former Labour voters voting for independents instead. The Manchester Mill report asserted that it had managed to link the fake candidates to the Labour and that it had been told by a former party insider, now a Green Party defector, that discussions about the scheme were had within Angela Rayner’s home during a house party.
However, as that Times report notes, it is “understood” that the people arrested are not connected to the local Labour Party, and Angela Rayner has denied any knowledge or involvement. A Labour spokesman said: “No evidence has been presented of any Labour Party involvement in these allegations. We categorically reject any suggestion that the party was involved”.
Nevertheless, the newspaper stated:
Independents in other cities, including Birmingham, have regularly accused Labour rivals of “planting” independent candidates to split the vote in their local elections, but this represents the first time anyone has faced a police investigation.
As previously reported, Labour insiders are aware of the risk posed to the party and their candidates by voter defection among some ethnic communities to independents standing on sectarian platforms, for instance with single-issue candidates running on Gaza. That senior Labour figures have these conversations was revealed earlier this year when a tranche of private text messages between now-leadership candidate Wes Streeting and Labour grandee Peter Mandelson became public.
In those private texts, Streeting wrote of a recent local election loss in a heavily Muslim area to a ‘Gaza independent’ candidate: “I fear we’re in big trouble here – and I am toast at the next election… We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats”.