Sir Keir Starmer may lack warmth and charisma, and he may come across as dull and serious. But at least, his supporters maintain, he has a reputation for integrity. After all, this is a man who was once the country’s top prosecutor — a stickler for the rules who picked Sue Gray, the former government ethics adviser, as his chief of staff.
Last week, however, a scandal erupted that suggests Labour may be just as sleazy and corrupt as some of its Conservative opponents. In the plum seat of Croydon East, there are complaints that Labour’s selection of a parliamentary candidate may have involved identity theft and voter manipulation. Moreover, there are suggestions that this could be part of a much wider campaign that involves senior party figures, a systematic programme of data protection offences, and interference in Labour’s supposedly democratic procedures.
Such allegations largely relate to the option for party members to use an electronic voting programme in parliamentary selections, which many see as a way for party bigwigs to fix elections for their chosen candidates. “The online voting is as dodgy as hell,” one successful candidate from outside London tells me. “There was an unbelievable discrepancy between votes on the day [of their selection meeting] and online votes.” Another candidate, who failed to win their distinguished reputation, added: “I was stitched up on the electronic online vote. I won the selection [among non-electric ballots] and the party machine then picked the winner, not the members.”
What form might this “stitch-up” take? According to Joanna O’Pray, an alleged victim in Croydon East, she discovered that an e-vote had been issued in her name, even though she hadn’t applied for one. The former youth worker has already complained to the police and the Information Commissioner, and has submitted a data protection request to the Labour Party demanding to know if somebody fraudulently voted in her name.
Joanna, 56, was first alerted to the discrepancy after a Labour activist friend called her to say she was on the membership lists handed to the contenders in the Croydon East selection, and therefore entitled to vote. This came as a surprise: Joanna had decided to let her Labour membership lapse at the end of 2022, having become disillusioned with the way things were being run under Keir Starmer.
Peculiarly, she was told that the membership list had recorded the wrong address for her — at number 50 on her street, rather than at 59, where she had lived for years. Stranger still, she then received a call from one of the campaign teams to say she had asked for an electronic vote.
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