Exposed: Brick Lane's vote riggers

Friday night in Brick Lane. The street is full of tourists looking for the exotic and edgy experience promised in all the guidebooks, and ending up with ropey chicken tikka masala instead. But, unknown to the backpackers, in the buildings above their heads, level with the silly Banglathemedlamp-posts, something genuinely exotic and dangerous is taking place: the undermining of a democratic election.

The ground floor and basement of 118 Brick Lane are part of the Preem curry house. In the street at the side of the restaurant, a separate door gives immediately on to a steep staircase, leading to the flats above.

The first floor is the locked-up office of a travel agent. It is the flat on the second and third floors that is of interest. According to the electoral register, this flat, comprising four small rooms and a tiny landing, contains no fewer than 12 Bangladeshi voters.

They all appeared on the electoral roll at 118 Brick Lane this year. None of them was registered at this address before. And they certainly don’t live here. “We live here,” says Sam Butler and his flatmates, a Belgian, Gilles Ubaghs, and two Canadians, Craig and Chuck. “And the tenants before us were white, too.”

Could these 12 mysterious Bangladeshis have been a clerical mistake, long-ago occupants whom the council somehow put back on the list? “No way,” says the landlord, Azmal Hussein. “I’ve never had any Bangladeshi tenants.” And he shows me the tenancy agreements going back five years to prove it. According to the electoral register, the flat had no eligible voters at all registered to it in 2002 and 2003.

The flat occupied by Sam, Gilles, Craig and Chuck is a classic place for a vote-rigging scam. All you have to do is register a certain number of fake voters, apply for postal votes in their name and come and pick them up. The street door looks locked, but a not-very-hefty nudge of the shoulder is enough to open it and bring you on to the communal staircase, with the newly-arrived post waiting at the bottom.

Then Gilles remembers something.

“A week ago, a whole stack of envelopes arrived in the hall,” he says. “Not addressed to any of us. They had ‘You need this to vote — very important document,’ or something like that, on them. I left them on the steps. The next day they were all gone.”

It is still not clear whether the “ voters” of 118 Brick Lane have applied to vote by post. They do not appear on an initial list of people who have done so — but the list is incomplete.
Even if they have not, however, they could just as easily vote in person under their false addresses and using their possibly false identities.

A few doors down Brick Lane is another small flat above a restaurant and another implausibly large group of 12 voters. Above it, from the front, the flat looks occupied, with curtains at the windows.

But the staff in the restaurant say it is empty. And go down a side street, slip into the courtyard behind the houses, look up at the back of the property and most of the first and second floor windows are either smashed or boarded up.

Evening Standard was unable to establish-definitively whether the people named on the roll for this address lived here or not. Nobody answered the door. But it did not look inhabited by anyone, let alone 12 people.

Brick Lane is a major artery of Britain’s most bitterly-contested constituency, Bethnal Green and Bow, where Labour’s Oona King is fighting the anti-war war-machine of George Galloway and the Respect party. Hundreds of journalists have flocked to the East End, writing stories about how the seat will, or will not, be decided by the war, the economy, the state of the housing, King’s record as an MP.

It is equally possible, however, that Bethnal Green and Bow will not be decided by any of those things, but by fraud, intimidation and direct threats. Few seats can be more vulnerable. Voter turnover is huge, perhaps a third a year. Many Bangladeshi voters don’t understand the voting process, and are susceptible to community pressures of a sort no longer found in other parts of British society. And the voting roll, the basis for any fair election, is, at best, grossly inadequate.

A fairly cursory examination throws up a further dozen suspicious- looking cases: six Bangladeshis apparently living in the same flat as two Irish people, eight more living in a two-room bedsit.

At Pat Shaw House, an old people’s home in Globe Road, most of the residents seem to have at least two votes each, often under subtle variations of their names: for instance, Elsie Fernie and Elsie Ferniel, Derek Hall and Dereck Hall, Joseph Swerner and Joseph Swerwer.

There is no suggestion that these people are fraudsters, but are these old people being exploited by vote-stealers? Or could it simply be exceptionally incompetent clerical work that nobody has bothered to check?

Even an old political streetfighter like Galloway is knocked back by the sheer scale of the shenanigans in Bethnal Green and Bow. “This makes me feel physically sick,” he says. “In all my years in politics, I’ve never experienced such a brazen conspiracy to steal an election.”

It is impossible to attribute blame for any of these phoney voters. All parties deny any involvement. “I know I’m going to win fair and square,” says King. “If anyone is responsible for a dirty-tricks campaign it’s not me.”

Some of it may, indeed, be freelance; Ron McKay, Galloway’s spokesman, says they’ve been approached by someone offering 200 votes at £100 a throw.

But there are some below-the-belt campaign tactics that can be attributed to particular parties. Round the corner from the Columbia Road flower market, with its middle-class incomers obliviously drinking coffee in the sunshine, the Standard finds direct evidence of something even more worrying.

A Bangladeshi couple called the Begums told me, through an interpreter, how they had been twice visited by a local activist from one of the main political parties — not Respect or Labour.

This man, also a Bangladeshi, demanded that the Begums hand over their completed postal votes, saying that it was their duty to him as an elder of the community. (We have promised the Begums that we will not mention which party it was, or their full names.)

Luckily, the Begums have a teenage daughter, born and brought up in Britain, English-speaking, and not so schooled in deference to authority. “I argued with him,” she said. “I told him to get lost. It was obvious he was just going to take my parents’ votes.”

The activist harangued Mr and Mrs Begum, saying their daughter was being disrespectful and they were humiliating themselves as parents by taking orders from her. But he eventually withdrew.

Their votes — for a different party — are now safely in the postbox. “I think my parents would have handed them over if I had not been there,” says the girl. Who knows how many other Bangladeshi families — not blessed with spirited teenagers — have lost their votes in this way?

And then there is the vexed question of the council funding. On the record, Rana Miah, a member of the management committee of the Brick Lane Youth Development Association (Blyda), tells the Standard that two

Labour councillors have threatened his colleagues that if they do not vote for King in the election, their funding is at risk.

“They’ve been told that some of the Labour councillors feel that if we don’t side with them, we’ll lose out on funding,” says Miah, who is a Green Party supporter. “This is not politics, this is blatant thuggery. I am sickened. And if our kids’ future is taken away for political reasons, those councillors will have to answer to those kids when they approach them on the streets.”

King condemns any such threats as ”scandalous” and says there is “no excuse” for corruption. “It’s been a problem in the past,” she admits. There is no suggestion that King has been involved in the threats. But if Miah is to be believed, others are threatening on her behalf.

It is a pattern of behaviour which other local observers, off the record, have also confirmed to the Standard. “Some public funding is about buying influence and always has been,” said one.

King says: “We can either bring this community together or we can split it apart. Respect are creating a racial tinderbox and have no hesitation in lighting a match underneath it.”

But the kind of malpractice found in Bethnal Green and Bow is far deeper rooted than the current bitter election battle.

The constituency may be in a class of its own when it comes to electoral malpractice but it exposes far wider weaknesses in Britain’s system for regulating the election. Whatever happens on Thursday, it seems clear that in Bethnal Green and Bow, at least, the counting of the votes will not be the final word.