ElectionLeaflets.org

Here’s a fine election leaflet preview from the blog of Michael Crick, who is Newsnight’s political editor:

The Conservative MP Charles Walker has given me a sneak preview of the design for a leaflet which his local party will shortly be distributing in his Broxbourne constituency in Hertfordshire.

It’s always an interesting test of how much a party leader is an asset – either to his own side, or to their opponents – to see how much they feature in campaign literature of one side or the other…

Yes, it would be rather interesting to see this, Michael. If you actually told viewers on peak time TV about uploading leaflets to this site maybe this would be a result.

We, at ElectionLeaflets.org, don’t have the PR skills or the budget to hire a salesforce to breach the media bubble and actually get any publicity.

We are just software developers with good, tried, tested and executed ideas with very limited resources who have grown used to the wilderness.

There’s this lovely leaflet up in Glasgow about knife crime:

I like this because it has it all, from presentation of a perceived problem to an utterly counter-productive remedy.

Vincent Mullen says he and his neighbours in Royston were left shocked following a murder on their street. Strathclyde has seen a 50% increase in knife murders this year alone.

Vincent woke to find a crime scene at the end of his road. “This is a quiet street with families and pensioners and we were stunned. It isn’t the first time this has happened and we don’t feel safe in our own beds any more. People just want a peaceful life, but we get crime on the streets all the time,” he said.

“That is why I am backing Labour’s tough policy of ‘carry a knife, go to jail’. The SNP are too soft to back the plan. They actually scrapped short prison sentences meaning thousands of people who carry knives escape jail altogether.”

Who is Vincent Mullen and where does he live? Is he a taxi driver? Is there a rough pub with cheap alcohol at the end of his street?

Evidence suggests that the Scottish Labour Party are putting this single issue at the centre of their election campaign and are showing up on the telly with fabricated figures such as £500million per year is spent on A&E fixing knife wounds which, if they have their way, will instead be spent on thousands more jail places for warehousing kids who get stopped and searched at random by the police — because there will be no more knife crime.

Jail, as we know, provides young people with the opportunity to educate themselves about all other types of crime they could instead commit, as well as a hardened criminal record that makes them virtually unemployable in civil society for the rest of their lives.

This really is very poor political behaviour.

What does the professor say?

In the past few years politicians both north and south of the border have steadily increased the penalty for carrying knives, but Richard Garside said there was no evidence tougher sentences act as a deterrent.

Garside’s Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has published some very extensive international research about Young People, Knives and Guns, which involves actual surveys and comparisons of many varied policies across jurisdictions that do give a sense of hope.

Clearly, if Mr Kerr or Mr Mullen actually gave a damn about reducing knife crime in Strathclyde they would begin with the evidence presented in this report and work forwards from there.

But no, their game is to throw the whole lot out, actively and maliciously dis-inform the public on the policy choices in order to get elected. And once elected they will no doubt carry out their wrecking procedure on the current complex and informed policy — because the promised to do so.

And it’s the only damn promise they actually made!

Life goes on.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

I picked up a few leaflets from a friend on the Wirral and scanned them thismorning.

Exhibit A is this fine LibDem attack panel condemning the party for joining a coalition with the Conservative Party.

Thus they have automatically transferred their [Parliamentary] votes to the Tories.

There were no Lib Dem leaflets in the house. I don’t know if any are being delivered.

Listen, we need some grown-up talk about coalition governments.

I can remember as far back as last year when the coalition agreement was formed in haste because we didn’t want to be like Belgium.

No one can argue that the LibDems would not have preferred to form a coalition with the Labour Party, but the problem was they had lost the election big time. And they lost it, not because of the existence of a third party, but because people wanted to get rid of Gordon Brown. (Who he?)

People who truly hate the Tory-LibDem coalition government (brought to us under a First Past the Post election) have got to tell us whether they would prefer a pure Tory government instead. I doubt that. Really.

For one thing, a coalition government can collapse in the way that one-party governments do not.

And there is no better reason to collapse than if one of the parties dumps so comprehensibly and heavily on the other party that it threatens its very existence.

What would the campaign look like:

“Vote for us, we broke the coalition and saved you from 3 more years of Tory government.”

And they’d bring in the same team as the ones selling the YesToAV campaign and lose it so comprehensibly we really would get a pure Tory government after that next election.

That would at least show up if there was a difference.

I was out in the nearby streets hand-delivering individually addressed envelopes containing Green Party election leaflets last night to known postal voters.

These names and addresses are held in the database of the local Green Party councillor John Coyne who is running the campaign, cross referenced against the electoral register which contains information as to who is sending in a postal ballot and who actually bothered to vote in the last election.

There is no point in delivering leaflets to people who have already voted or don’t vote.

The package of propaganda contained the following window notice, ostensibly to save us delivering leaflets onto a place that has already voted whilst simultaneously advertising the Green Party during the leaflet drops I will no doubt be roped into doing over the coming days.

The candidate in this ward is Lewis Coyne, son of the Green councillor, John Coyne. Electoral participation so frequently runs in the family. If they taught this stuff at school maybe more new blood would get involved.

At least young Coyne signed up to be a candidate voluntarily, unlike the son of the former council leader for Liverpool.

A regional election has just been held under the controversial Alternative Vote system in Australia.

Under First Past The Post, which is what we have for the upcoming local elections in the UK, the party that is second in the polls has to harangue the voters intending to vote for the third, fourth and fifth place candidates not to waste their vote on sure losers, but to cast their one and only vote for them if they want to depose the leader.

It is necessarily negative message:

“Vote for me if you want to get rid of him”

Sometimes, to increase their share of the vote, a candidate will lie about their position in the polls, or even falsely inform voters about the voting system.

Under the Alternative Voting system, there isn’t any of this problem, and you have beautiful friendly leaflets, like this one collected by our sister site in Australia:

Yeah, clearly, the Green vote is going to come in third in this particular constituency. And rather than yell at these voters to get real and stop wasting their votes on a loser if they really hate the guy who is in the seat now, they’re told:

“It’s okay. Go ahead and vote for who you believe in. And then, because there can only be one winner, transfer your vote to us as your second preference. We’ll be kind with it.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be in a place where the political parties had to attract your vote for them, rather than drive wedges into the polls while taking for granted their core unquestioning base of people who identify themselves as always casting their vote for a single party throughout their lives?

Finally, here is this extraordinary story involving the former Liverpool council leader (as of last May) who forged his son’s signature as a candidate for the local elections.

Our very good friend and volunteer Ross has just ported the Elections Leaflets site from PHP into Django.

If you don’t know what it means, the effect is we can maintain and improve the site at far less cost and with more speed than before.

Which is handy as we have succeeded in raising no money from the Electoral Commission or the JRRT who have better things to award their grants to than establishing a real-time publicly accessible archive of misinformation and lies that are being told to our fellow citizens who will then out-vote us on everything we hold dear.

For example, I have just uploaded this leaflet, which just came through the post today.

Let’s start with that £91 million number.

The following words came from the lips of Mark Harper MP in Parliament last July.

Many of the cost elements of running the proposed referendum on the alternative vote system will be similar to those for a general election.

The previous Government estimated the cost for conduct elements of the 2010 general election in Great Britain at £82.1 million…

[T]he cost of conduct elements for the proposed referendum will be similar… were it not to be combined with any other polls…

[We]… estimate a saving of £17 million on the conduct costs of the referendum through combination [with another election].

Additionally… the Electoral Commission has estimated that the cost of its own activities in relation to the referendum at £9.3 million.

And by adding the numbers £81million to £9million and neglecting to subtract the £17million because we holding the referendum at the same time as the local elections, as well as ignoring every other parliamentary statement on the matter, you can see how they built up this fraudulently inflated figure.

I covered this claim in detail in my blog last month, and it was already exposed as false during a press conference in February where the campaign refused to disclose where their money came from.

I can guess their money does not come from the sorts of people who would like to see their campaign practices exposed online for scrutiny by people who are not always as stupid as they treat us as.

It’s okay to knowingly publish false information in a political message to win votes, but what you cannot do is defame someone in particular.

As part of the process of legal action being taken over one particular leaflet, I can show off some good documentation of the sequence of events.

This election leaflets website, formerly known as thestraightchoice.org, was the result of my association with the Liverpool Green Party which exposed me to the importance of election leaflets.

The party holds a small enclave in St Michael’s Ward, which the Liverpool LibDems (then the majority party in the city) made it their business to erase from the face of the earth.

I covered an example of a later trick here where they falsely alleged that the Green Party had given up on the campaign.

But there was a leaflet from before the election leaflet website was founded, which had a section like this:

The Liverpool Daily Post has the story:

Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Twigger faces £6,400 defamation bill after homeless slur on Greens

A SENIOR Lib-Dem was hit with a £6,400 bill after agreeing to pay damages to two Green councillors who he alleged had forced homeless people to sleep in the snow.

Cllr Paul Twigger agreed to settle with Cllrs John Coyne and Sarah Jennings, who both represent the St Michaels ward, ahead of a defamation trial.

The case centred around a planning application to use a community building in Lark Lane as an overnight homeless shelter.

The Greens proposed an alternative venue, before Cllr Twigger published a leaflet claiming that “shockingly, the city’s Green councillors refused to allow a local community building to be used, meaning some homeless people were forced to sleep rough in temperatures well below zero.”

The Greens had sought an apology but documents obtained by the Daily Post showed Cllr Twigger’s legal team had claimed justification on the grounds the leaflet’s statement was true.

But before the trial could take place, Cllr Twigger – shadow cabinet member for children’s services and member for Knotty Ash – agreed to pay £6,000 costs and £200 damages each to Cllrs Coyne and Jennings.

The details are actually more interesting.

You have to work backwards from the assumption that these types of smear tactics actually work and that manoeuvring your political opponents into a difficult no-win situations whenever possible can give rise to these opportunities.

St Michaels and Lark Lane Community Association (SMLLCA) is a voluntary organisation which owns and manages a building used as a community centre in Lark Lane within St Michaels Ward.

The executive committee of SMLLCA had offered the use of that building to the City Council’s homeless service so that it could be used overnight to provide a city-wide shelter for rough sleepers at times of extreme cold weather. [The local Green Councillors] were consulted in advance by the Homeless Service and raised no objections.

Use of the building overnight required a planning application for a change of use. [The Councillors] were content that the notification of that application would provide a suitable opportunity for consultation with local residents on the principle of using the centre for cold weather shelter.

There was a strong reaction from local residents and some real and perceived weaknesses in the planning notification increased feelings of mistrust of the City Council. [The local Councillors] attended public meetings and came under pressure to oppose the use of the centre.

Instead of opposing the application, [The local Councillors] sought to ensure that residents had and were seen to have a full opportunity to express their concerns and objections.

So far so good. Why was a city of this size, which was controlled by the Lib Dem party at the time, positioning its emergency homeless shelter some miles from the centre in this particular ward? Surely there were other places being planned.

Here’s a question put down by one of those Green Councillors:

The answer isn’t very interesting. There are lots of facilities being explored. The place in St Michael’s ward is not essential to avoid people sleeping rough in the streets.

But then there’s this question put down by another councillor who does not belong to the Green Party:

The answer detailed the numerous provisions in the city of this size.

But it contained the following unusual final paragraph:

The Green Councillors discovered that this was not the original answer.

Here is the original final paragraph:

As you can see, the council officer who wrote the original answer has put their name to it. That’s the clue. It wasn’t there on the published statement.

Answers that are given anonymously cannot be held accountable. People avoid putting their names onto false statements when they don’t have to. And no one has admitted authorship of that paragraph. But it was undoubtedly part of that chain of events that resulted in that section of a political leaflet.

Now election leaflets are not anonymous documents. By law they need an imprint naming the publisher and the printer.

We should start coding them up in Electionleaflets Mark 2.

In the meantime, here is the court settlement, which obliges there to be an apology in their next leaflet in the next two weeks.