Tuesday, 12 September 2023
If outcome points to intention
I only know that as one grows older one calls things coincidence more and more seldom.
Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)
As we know, the Blair government made postal voting available on demand in 2000. As we knew at the time, it has certain obvious security weaknesses as a democratic voting mechanism. Reported to be a very minor issue here in the UK and successive governments choose to keep it.
The tinfoil hat question is obvious enough - outcome may point to intention. If the weakness is there then it is supposed to be there. A relaxed political attitude to petty fraud is not necessarily the whole of it. The elephant in the democratic room is that it could also function as a backdoor security measure for the permanent administration.
This doesn’t imply it ever has been used or is even likely to be used, but in a political situation viewed as sufficiently threating, it could provide protection against a radical populist viewed as dangerous. The precise mechanism may not exist in any formal sense, but the exploitable weakness does.
Yet intense propaganda is very effective and clearly the preferred option, we know that now, if we didn’t know the power of it in 2000. Legal and bureaucratic harassment is effective too, we caught glimpses of that with Boris Johnson and the Partygate silliness. The pandemic debacle and Net Zero offer much more than a glimpse.
On demand postal voting is inherently dubious, but rather like an old nuclear bunker it may already be a relic of the past. With Brexit still recent and from the perspective of the permanent administration, it could still be seen as naïve not to leave an exploitable possibility in place - just in case. That’s what postal voting looks like - a relic of the times when voting mattered. Off comes the tinfoil hat.
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4 comments:
"a relic of the times when voting mattered"
Since then, thanks to Conservative ineptitude, the self-destruction of any viable alternative, wokeism and the "civil" service's invulnerability, our no-party electoral system is crying out for their return.
"the times when voting mattered."
The transition was a fun time. I vividly remember the Lib Dems' manifesto claim over Brexit: "Vote for us, and we'll annul that silly old vote you all had a couple of years ago."
Voting now takes its place among more pressing factors such as appeasing NGOs, international law, political expediency, and the latest "emergency".
Blair was being racist. He assumed Pakistanis would take most advantage of looser rules and that the cheating would all be in Labour's favour.
Then he launched wars on Islamic countries. Not the brightest bulb, Blair.
Jannie - it will be interesting to see the Conservative vote at the next GE. We've probably reached a stage where it's a case of the lower the better.
Sam - ah yes, Jo Swinson who couldn't even keep her own seat. She was right of course, telling us our votes don't matter, but she didn't seem to realise that it was never to be admitted.
dearieme - and Blair probably assumed that fraud investigations would be initiated by complaints and there wouldn't be any from Pakistanis.
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