This election campaign has been criticised by some commentators as being relatively uneventful. However, some things worthy of being reported are not always evident at the time they happen. So it has proven with the hard hitting judgment of Electoral Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC, handed down in the High Court yesterday. Almost 11 months on from the elections of 22 May 2014 and having heard the petition of four courageous residents from Tower Hamlets, Mr Mawrey has held that the election of Lutfur Rahman as Mayor was void. Lutfur Rahman is now disqualified from standing in the new election and, as a solicitor. He will also be referred to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority.
The scale of the judgment testifies to the gruelling battle between the petitioners and Mr Rahman in which the Judge upheld nine counts of corrupt and illegal practice against him in a 200 page written judgment. In the concluding peroration the Judge remarked “The real losers are the citizens of Tower Hamlets, and, in particular, the Bangladeshi community. Their natural and laudable sense of solidarity has been cynically perverted into a sense of isolation and victimhood, and their devotion to their religion has been manipulated – all for the aggrandisement of Mr Rahman.” While this judgment will hopefully pour oil on the troubled waters of Tower Hamlets politics there are far wider ramifications in the decision.
Mawrey is a veteran of electoral law cases and his comments in this instance are insightful. Campaigners of all parties, especially candidates and agents, should acquaint themselves with his recitation of the 1983 Representation of the People Act at the start of his judgment. As the judge states ‘to take an extreme example, a person elected to Parliament with a majority of 20,000 in his constituency who is proved to have arranged only one bogus vote to have been cast through personation [where an individual votes in an election pretending to be a different elector], will forfeit the election and suffer disqualification for five years under section 160.’ This is entirely separate from any criminal sanction that could be implied. Importantly this includes actions by a candidate’s agents. So if a candidate’s agents were to be found guilty of postal vote fraud, even without the knowledge of the candidate, disqualification could still apply (paragraph 28 of the judgment). This is vital as the legal definition of agent for these purposes encompasses canvassers, committees and supporters.
In what will be one of the closest electoral battles for some time, candidates must ensure that they make their supporters fully aware of what is and is not acceptable practice. At this stage when postal votes have been sent out, canvassers should not place themselves in a position where they are dealing with ballot papers or postal vote forms other than their own. To do so could undermine the efforts of the Labour party and fellow campaigners.
Another fascinating section of the judgment relates to the treatment of undue ‘spiritual influence’, which is based on a line of Irish cases involving the influence of the Roman Catholic clergy in the late 19th century. The Judge held that ‘the participation of Muslim clerics in Mr Rahman’s campaign to persuade Muslim voters that it was their religious duty to vote for him…[did] cross the line.’ Although this was one of the counts on which Mr Rahman was found guilty, the Judge stated that ‘undue spiritual influence’ should be recast for a 21st century setting if it was to be retained. Whilst it remains law, this could be a potential pitfall for some communities who seek temporal as well as spiritual guidance from their religious leaders.
For those of us busy campaigning hard for a Labour victory on 7 May, this may seem tangential to our mission. However, the judgment is not the end of the matter. Electoral reform will be an issue for the next government. For example, the judge noted that there may be others who benefited from the practices he criticised, saying that this problem ‘will probably be sitting on the desk of the new secretary of state for communities and local government when he or she takes office after 7 May 2015.’
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Sara Ibrahim is a barrister whose focus includes employment and equalities law. She is a member of the Fabian Society executive committee and former chair of the Young Fabians. She tweets @sara_e_ibrahim
I think this is right about electoral reform being on the agenda. But misses the point entirely in that Rahman is a monster we created. We have to change our ways so that there are not more Rahmans.
I don’t know the facts on which the judge made his decision, not having sat in his chair for the many days he did hearing evidence, but wonder if I am not alone at being uneasy about the rather subjective and value-laden trenchant tone in which he expressed his decision, judging by reports.
In a jury trial, the judge sums up the issues on which the jury must make a decision and gives guidance on law, and this is usually done calmly and in unprovocative terms, but where the judge is the decider of facts unassisted by a jury I think it is wrong that he should go beyond announcing his findings of fact in an unemotional way as he seems to have done here. Perhaps the Electoral Commission should issue a “Calm down … ” guidance note to judges. Which should not be interpreted as that I am on Lutfhur Rahman’s side or anybody’s in this case. In another newspaper report on the same day, a judge – again in a non-jury case – pronounced one party as charming but a very convincing rogue or some such. I’m not sure that was helpful. He only needs to say he, on a given issue, did not find X a credible witness.
The main issue might be in the Tower Hamlets case whether it is right for an Electoral Commission judge to overturn an apparent decision of the electorate, even if that decision may have involved some fraudulent votes and some intimidation. This is a slippery slope. It is worth observing that two police enquiries did not find sufficienct evidence apparently to put before the Crown Prosecution Service.
However i think it probably is right to declare the election null and void and order a re-election. Candidates and their agents have to ensure their campaigns are above suspicion.
The ban on “undue spiritual influence” is like the former ban on “the promotion of homosexuality”. That was a prohibition of something that was in any case impossible. This ought to be recognised as being a prohibition of something that is in any case impossible.
No prosecution was ever brought under Section 28, and no one much noticed when it went away. In fact, its time on the Statute Book coincided with an almost total change in the general attitude to homosexuality, and not in Section 28’s direction. It was a dead letter from the start.
This, however, is something else. No action had been brought under it since the century before last. But it is back now.
You miss the main early point of my post, with respect, that a judge should not in hs judgment get carried away from findings of fact.
As with the horrors of Rotherham, Bristol, Telford, Rochdale and so on, political and religious correctness stifled justice and excused the corrupt practises of these evil primitives.
Lutfur Rahman’s voters were mainstream Labour until the Iraq War.
More than anything, the case of Rahman illustrates that directly elected mayors are wholly out of place in this country. We ought not to have them. The next Government ought to abolish them forthwith, as well as requiring that councils return to the traditional committee system.
But aspects of the Rahman judgement are worrying. The revival of “undue spiritual influence” ought to be laughed out. Is it going to be applied in Brent Central, or in Finchley and Golders Green, or in Hampstead and Kilburn, or in Harrow East, or in Harrow West, or in Hendon, or in Hornsey and Wood Green, or in Hove? There, we are talking, not merely about a deity who for political purposes may or may not exist, but about voting on 7th May in the interests, and even under the direction, of a foreign state the very lively reality of which is most certainly not in any dispute.
I must emphasise that I carry no candle for Lutfur Rahman, a supporter of David Miliband. He has certainly committed many serious offences. I hope that John Biggs is as anti-austerity and as anti-war as Rahman has at least affected to be. Just as I hope that Naz Shah is as anti-austerity and as anti-war as George Galloway. I have every reason to expect that she is. Come the next Tower Hamlets Mayoral Election, Galloway might very well be looking for a new challenge.
But Rahman would easily have been cast down for treating and all the rest of it. Labour’s Catholic, Muslim, and black-majority church bases must demand that the “undue spiritual influence” law be repealed. Labour’s Catholic and its old school Temperance Methodist bases ought to have done so a hundred years ago. Indeed, that law criminalised the very foundation of the Labour Party by, especially, Methodist preachers acting as such. The wonder is that it was never enforced. Labour would have been strangled in the cradle.
The original legislation related and relates only to what Irish Protestants thought (and English atheists think) that Irish Catholics believed. No properly formed Catholic ever could have believed that he would go to hell if he had not voted as directed by the bishop or by the parish priest, or even by the Pope. And Islam, especially the Sunnism to which Bangladeshis and Pakistanis overwhelmingly adhere, is a great deal less hierarchical than Catholicism.
Meanwhile, over to the Labour candidates at Brent Central, Finchley and Golders Green, Hampstead and Kilburn, Harrow East, Harrow West, Hendon, Hornsey and Wood Green, and Hove. Get your petitions ready for 8th May if Labour does not win those seats. For, if you won before the Electoral Court, as Labour and against the power of the State of Israel, then this law really would be repealed. And you will still have won.
It is also time to look into “undue spiritual influence” in certain wards that voted Labour for the Greater London Assembly, but which voted on the same day for Boris Johnson rather than Ken Livingstone as Mayor. Although, speaking of Livingstone, he managed to remain a member, not only of the Labour Party, but of its National Executive Committee, while campaigning for Rahman against John Biggs, Labour’s candidate.
Just as several Fleet Street types managed to retain their party cards (even if one of them has since given it up his over Syria, of all things) while using their columns to advocate a vote for Johnson against Livingstone, Labour’s candidate. The London Labour Party is a complete and utter shambles.
Why Brent Central? So far as I am aware, this is pretty well a secular campaign all round.
It will turn, apparently, on the Israeli interest. According to The Spectator, anyway.
I doubt there are many Spectator journalists or readers for that matter in Brent! Were they perhaps thinking of Hampstead & Kilburn next door or in Finchley ?! I cannot see Israel featuring in any Brent Central voter decision-making – issues like Bedroom tax and housing crisis are much more likely to rouse voters, to say nothing of disastrous mishandling of NHS, in particular A&E closures and private health care spending by CCGs. As so often happens, one or two parties are trying to make local issues then hub of their campaigns but given the Labour council got re-elected last May by 56 seats to 7, that wont cut much mustard.
No idea why someone like Rahman is allowed to retain his British Citizenship after this.