Isn’t it about time we got a little angrier and a little more scandalised? On 5 May we will troop up to the polling booths having endured four weeks of unfathomably banal soundbites, platitudinous drivel and vapid party political broadcasts — and we will do so because we believe it is our duty and because we have faith in the process. General elections and the whole notion of parliamentary democracy is as British as steak-and-kidney pie. We have it and many others do not, much to their disfavour. We trust it and we have implicit trust in ourselves not to abuse it. ‘Vote early, vote often’ is nothing more than a little joke, isn’t it? — unless you’re speaking from Harare or Chittagong or Kiev.

Well, not this time, maybe. This time around we will be participating in an election which, simply put, has been loaded in favour of the government. Not just because it will take many thousands more voters to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour MP, of which more later. Almost without question, there will be frauds committed and again, almost without question, the overwhelming majority of these frauds will favour the Labour party. We all know this, the government knows this and has even accepted as much by signing up to legislation to make postal voting more secure — but only after the election has taken place. In other words, it will benefit from the fraud and only then maybe change the law. Isn’t that scandalous?

Labour is treating the British ballot box with the kind of holiness and reverence one might expect of a bunch of Zanu-PF officials in some fly-blown corner of Matabeleland. If Robert Mugabe wanted to score an instant and hilarious propaganda coup against the ‘homosexual gangsters’ of the Blair government, he could do no better than to dispatch a team of election monitors to Britain to cover this election, and their first stop should be the Midlands. ~Rod Liddle, The Spectator