UK Local Elections: Croydon and Tower Hamlets.

Last Thursday (22/5/14) every seat in all of London's local councils was up for election. A week before hand I foolishly suggested that voter's in Croydon might want to use this as an opportunity to register a protest against local crime by voting for minority parties such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP) for traditional Conservative Party voters or the Green Party for traditional Labour Party voters. As a result of this off-the-cuff comment I've been forced to analyse the results of Croydon's election in painful detail. This involved drawing up a list of all the candidates and how many votes they received and comparing them with each other and the total number of votes cast.

On reflection this seems to have been a massive waste of time because electorally Croydon is very dull. Despite all the hyperbole about UKIP breaking the traditional three party status quo elections in Croydon are very much a two horse race with wards either voting strongly for the Conservative Party or strongly for the Labour Party. Across the board the difference between the two parties is 10-15% meaning that swing needed to shift power is too large to be realistic.

The main difference between whether a ward votes Labour or Conservative is a demographic one with the northern wards in which voters are mainly Black or Asian and generally poorer voting Labour while the southern wards where voters are mainly white and generally richer vote Conservative. However rather then race alone the main issue appears to be home ownership. This means that voters of Indian or Pakistani heritage are sort of the wild card element because while their skin colour makes them sensitive to racism they have a strong culture of home and business ownership.

The 7 seats that the Labour Party won to gain overall control of Croydon Council directly reflect this demographic pattern with 3 of the seats being won in the Ashburton ward and 3 being won in the Waddon ward. These both sit on a clearly marked front line between the Labour north and the Conservative south. However the specific thing that has helped Labour to win those seats is the effect of people switching from the Conservative Party to UKIP. If UKIP had not stood in the election the 4-5% of the vote that went to them would have meant that the Conservatives would have retained the wards by 2-3% rather then losing them by 2-3%.

Due to demographics being key to election victory in Croydon and crime seeming to be the main driver of demographic change in Croydon I think it would be very interesting to monitor crime rates in the Ashburton and Waddon wards along with the neighbouring wards of Fairfield, Addiscombe and Shirley in the run-up to the next election.

If I wanted to properly assess the impact of any protest vote I would need to assemble all the data from the previous (2010) council elections, weight it for changes in voter turnout, changes of individual candidates and national trends. I simply don't have the time to do that. However based on an unweighted average there does appear to have been a slight (1-2%) increase in the votes for minority parties such as UKIP and the Green Party at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives. As such is appears that a noticeable number of Croydon voters have taken the opportunity to send an anonymous letter of complaint to the council over the crime problem. Unfortunately that swing to is too small to effect the outcome so Croydon council is likely to just ignore it. However they should be warned that it could become more focused at the 2015 Parliamentary election where there are far fewer seats up for grabs with the Croydon central seat becoming a key battle ground.

The other thing I noticed going through the results was just how badly the Liberal Democrats (LibDems) actually did. In almost every ward they were beaten by the Green Party who are still something of a single issue party who only control one council and have only one MP. This was even true in wards that are dominated by the Conservative Party who seem to have an almost anti-environment agenda. Although I have little love for the LibDems I actually find this worrying because if it is repeated nationally - and it appears to - the LibDems will cease to be a factor in UK politics leaving us with a US-style two party system of either Labour or the Conservatives. The problem is that here in the UK we also have a Monarchy which of late has become very involved in politics. As such we run a risk of having only one set of political policies that are set by the Monarchy but dressed up in either a blue suit of a red suit depending on which way the public mood is swinging. As such I think the LibDems need to hurry up and apologise to UK voters for going into coalition with the Conservatives by sacking Nick Clegg.

Overall the political direction Croydon seems to be heading in is towards Tower Hamlets which has to be the most rotten of Britain's rotten boroughs.

Essentially the problems began in Tower Hamlets when the Labour government changed the national election rules to increase the use of postal/absentee ballots. This almost seemed intended to make it easier to increase election fraud and therefore rig election results. Firstly by removing the requirement that voters turn up at a polling station it made it much easier for people to vote multiple times using fake identities - often of people who had recently died. Secondly with ballots papers being posted too and filled in at people's homes it has removed the secrecy of the ballot. This is a particular problem in Indian and Pakistani households where the male head of the household will simply fill in the ballots of all the women and adult children in the household. There have also been reports of people being forced to bring their ballots papers to their Mosques, Churches and Temples where they are filled in on their behalf.

The thing that Labour didn't count on when they set about undermining democracy in this way is that very soon the people who are carrying out all this electoral fraud decided to start rigging the elections in favour of themselves rather then the Labour Party. So Labour quickly lost control of the elected Mayor and now appear to have also lost control of the council that oversees that Mayor creating something of a private fiefdom which many people are starting to suggest needs to be brought under the direct control of central government so it can be cleaned up.

The problems in Tower Hamlets have been known about for years but at this election the UK has seemed very keen for them to be pushed to the fore. Firstly the BBC ran a national "Panorama" program about the problems and on election day itself police guards were very publicly deployed to polling stations in Tower Hamlets to prevent opposition voters being physically attacked. Finally the vote count in Tower Hamlets was so plagued with problems that it has still not being completed and the Electoral Commission have promised to carry out an investigation. This delay in the Tower Hamlets vote also significantly delayed the declaration of European Parliament results for the entire London region although the two process could quite easily have been separated as they eventually were.

The reason for this focus on Tower Hamlets appears to be threefold;

Firstly it draws focus onto immigration policy. Amongst the British Establishment it has long been alleged that the Labour Party purposefully relaxed immigration controls to ensure a steady stream of poor immigrants into the UK who would vote Labour keeping the Labour Party in power for ever and ever. Of course the hope is that no-one would notice the difference between European Union (EU) immigration and visa controlled immigration from UK Commonwealth nations such as India and Pakistan.

Secondly it draws attention to political corruption particularly amongst people of Indian heritage such as Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman and his "Tower Hamlets First" party. India - the world's largest democracy - has just voted out a Congress Party which has ruled for decades in favour of Narendra Modi's BJP Party who campaigned on economic competence over corruption. This is big news globally not least because the BJP's Hindu nationalist tendencies could lead to an interesting relationship between India and it's mainly Muslim neighbour Pakistan.

Finally Britain seemed to be laying the groundwork for arguments over Ukraine's election that took place on Sunday (24/5/14). Having spent months pumping out anti-Russian rhetoric Britain appears to have made the mistake of starting to believe its own lies. As a result they seemed to be expecting a close election in Ukraine with the neo-Nazis doing well forcing Tymoshenko and Poro­shenko into a run-off vote. Russia would have then been expected to reject the result making all sorts of accusations of electoral fraud and voter intimidation similar to those seen in Tower Hamlets. Of course as it turns out Ukrainians ended up voting heavily in favour of Poro­shenko and heavily against Tymoshenko and the neo-Nazis creating quite a bit of confusion in the process.

16:30 on 28/5/14 (UK date).