ElectionLeaflets.org

# Important: We need your Support

January 2010: A selection of Election leaflets for the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election have been uploaded to ElectionLeaflets.org (formerly known as TheStraightChoice.org).

Copies of the Phil Woolas’s leaflets from the 2010 General Election that got him into so much trouble can also be found there too, along with many other interesting memories from the campaign.

The LibDem by-election campaign finds it okay to drop the ‘L’-word, on account of the judges having said that:

Phil Woolas had “published several false statements of fact in relation to the Petitioner’s personal character or conduct which he had no reasonable grounds for believing to be true and did not believe to be true.”

The Labour Party leaflets are just bland and talk about sending a message in a bottle to the coalition about the government cuts.

In 2010 their candidate stood in Colne Valley where she delivered some luscious lippy leaflets like so:

(Voters don’t get information about her political career or how she was selected as the Labour Party candidate in this by-election from her leaflets or website, presumably because it’s none of their business and their votes can be taken for granted.)

And the Tories are delivering expensive A2 size folded colour prints, which included this particular graphic…

…which corresponds to the one in Woolas’s 2010 leaflets…

…and are both obviously derivations of the frequently used LibDem two horse graphic:

The practice of mucking around with each other’s graphics does give an indication as to the intensity of the campaign.

What next?

These horse-race graphics are telling you about our First-Past-The-Post electoral system.

As you know, there is a national referendum on the question of changing the UK’s voting system coming up this May.

Different voting systems favour or disfavour particular political interests in different ways.

The purpose of a political party is to win elections, so they are always going to campaign for the voting system that happens to favour them more (and disfavour them less).

If the balance in favour is perceived by the public to be fairer, then they are going to be able to campaign for it openly — because making things more fair is an essential ingredient of any public campaign.

But if the public believes that the electoral system favours you in an unfair manner, you’re going to have to campaign for it discretely — because winning General Elections is of a higher priority than any other long-term interests in society.

Discrete campaigning can manifest in the form of strange front groups, which politicians may deny any connection to, who deliver interesting leaflets like so:

Would you like to know about these interesting campaign leaflets as they get delivered to millions of households across the country in real time?

You do?

Well…

ElectionLeaflets.org Needs Your Support Now!

 

We need:

• Media publicity in order to increase the number and spread of leaflets uploaded
• A modest amount of cash to pay for computers, bandwidth and programming hours
• Vocal encouragement and support, because it’s a lot of work when it comes down to it

We’ve obviously tried everything — without any success — and raised no money from outside sources.

We’ve got some pretty good ideas about where money could come from, and have tried them all.

The pots of money which could be used to fund an election leaflet monitoring project in the public interest, could easily be obtained out of:

• The £1.5million ESRC academic grant for the British Election Study

• The £1million spent by the Joseph Roundtree Reform Trust on Power2010, or the £500,000 on TakeBackParliament and YesToFairerVotes. (Yes, we have applied to them many times; someone is going to have to have words with them on our behalf)

• About 10% of the value of the £150,000-300,000 grants that have been awarded by the Electoral Commission in the past.

If you believe that election leaflets should be monitored by the public and published on the internet for posterity, please consider sending letters or emails to the above institutions (and any others that could be argued as having an interest), telling them to get in contact with us as soon as possible so that we don’t lose this moment.

Reasonable letters from unknown members of the public do make a difference, in the way that letters from the usual suspects, like ourselves, do not.