Like many, including a few polling organisations, I was one of those who predicted that the Peterborough by-election could be the breakthrough night for the Brexit Party. Sadly it was not. The Labour Party candidate, a trades union organiser, Lisa Forbes, has taken the seat and again by a very small majority of 683. Based on the Brexit Party’s performance in the Euro Parliamentary election, it was expected that either the seat would revert to the Conservatives, who had held it in the past, or that a challenger party could take the seat. This was because local people forced this by-election via a recall petition when their former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya, whose majority was a mere 607 was gaoled for Perverting the course of justice. Many believed that the local people would vote out the party whose previous MP had brought so much shame and unwanted public attention to Peterborough.

However, this has not been the case. The voters have chosen a representative of a party led by Jeremy Corbyn a man who has never found an anti-British or anti-Western cause that he didn’t like. It is right to ask why this has happened?

Of course it could be that Lisa Forbes and the rest of the local Labour party ran a good and effective campaign motivating those normally disinterested in politics to get out and vote? Labour’s win could also be put down to the fact that the Brexit Party has very few other headline policies apart from Brexit. When people vote in elections they rarely vote on one issue alone. Despite being a strong Leave supporting area (69.3% Leave win) voters may also have voted on more local issues and local concerns that came ahead of Brexit considerations.

The win could be put down to good legitimate campaigning by Labour and failures by the Brexit Party, that is true, but some of the numbers and stories I’ve seen from this contest make me somewhat worried about its probity. In particular I am concerned that there could have been postal vote fraud in this constituency and although it is difficult at this stage to prove categorically that this fraud has taken place, some of the numbers for things like turnout for example, don’t look right to me.

The first number to give concern is the size of Lisa Forbes’ majority. It’s not much more than the previous, disgraced, MP got when she won the seat from the Tories and overturned the previous Tory MP Stewart Jackson’s relatively healthy 1,925 majority at the 2015 General Election. The majority that Lisa Forbes has gained doesn’t at all look like the voting shifts that have previously taken place in this seat. When the seat has changed hands in the past, the shift in voting has handed considerable majorities although the gap between the Tories and Labour have been narrowing since the early 2000’s. This could be down to increased migration into the constituency as Peterborough grew from 156k to 183k between 2001 and 2011. The majority that Lisa Forbes has does not look big enough to be a normal shift between parties caused by public sentiment and not small enough to look suspiciously small or to be easily challenged. Now I need to make it clear here that I’m not accusing Lisa Forbes of electoral fraud, but there may well be communal elements gaming the voting system in order to get a political pet into a seat.

Another worrying number or rather numbers that give rise to concerns about electoral probity is the turnout figures. Lisa Forbes won this seat on a mere 48.4% of potential voters turning out. That does not strike me as a ringing endorsement in the context of this seat and its history.

I would have expected that the high profile nature of this contest in Peterborough would have driven up the physical turnout figures a lot. But, this does not seem to be the case. Turnouts for elections in Peterborough have generally been high. I’ve looked back at the figures and going back to the 1970 General Election, Peterborough has consistently had turnout figures of 60%+. I could not find a single election in this constituency, apart from a 1943 wartime by-election (where no turnout figure was published) and the most recent contest yesterday, where the turnout was so low. I went back to 1883’s polling numbers to get a picture of this constituency and this most recent result is notable for its low turnout. This is really odd, not just because it is normally a high turnout constituency, but also because of the media and political focus that was on the campaign. A local resident could not fail to be aware that there was an election going on.

Further probity concerns are raised for me when comparing the figures at the polling stations with the postal vote figures. According to the Cambridgeshire Live website the postal vote turnout was a whopping 69.4%. This means that nearly 70% of those who requested postal votes actually used them, which was the average postal vote turnout for the 2017 General Election. Whilst I agree that postal voting increases voter turnout, because the voting process is not overseen by third parties as it would be at a Polling Station, postal voting does open up avenues for electoral fraud as well as people being disenfranchised by their own stupidity or a lack of clarity about the electoral process. According to the Electoral Commission during the 2017 General Election, 2.4% of postal votes were rejected for the permitted reasons, such as being filled out incorrectly, as opposed to 0.2% of similar ballot rejections in physical voting.

Because of the mismatch between physical voter turnout in Peterborough and the postal vote turnout, along with the pictures in the media of Muslims celebrating the Labour win, I have concerns that all may not be right and proper with the postal voting system in that constituency. This seat may have been taken by Labour not because of party running a good campaign but because of the effects of a whipped mosque postal vote. This whipped mosque postal vote may or may not be honest or whipped up without coercion, but previous cases in for example Tower Hamlets, should not lead us to totally discount the idea, at least at this stage, that organised Islamic voter fraud may have occurred in Peterborough.

Suspicions that the seat may have been handed to Labour by possibly fraudulent postal voting or Labour pandering to Islamic interests (as has been the case in the London Boroughs of Newham and Redbridge) will have been raised by the publication by Cambridgeshire Live of an agency picture (below) showing Muslim Labour party supporters celebrating the Labour win.

Muslims celebrating Labour’s win in Peterborough. Pic from Cambridgeshire Live

When I saw this image, several thoughts crossed my mind. The first was wondering whether wearing a hijab or a beard was now fashionable in the Labour party and did the local Labour Party have any non-Muslim members at all? The vast majority of the people labelled as ‘Labour Party supporters’ were obviously Muslim.

The second thought that struck me was that it may be the domination of Muslims (who are no strangers to controversy or playing fast and loose with the law) in the local Labour Party that almost guaranteed that the anti-Semitism allegations that flocked around Lisa Forbes, would not harm her prospects with Muslim voters. In today’s Labour Party being a Jew-hater is a positive boon when it comes to attracting the votes of Muslims, many of whom imbibe Jew hatred with their mother’s milk and from the Koran and Hadith.

My other thoughts on this image were more concerns about the future. If there has been Islamic voter fraud occurring in Peterborough and it has been to the benefit of the Labour Party then the future looks very bleak for the non-Muslims of the area. If the Labour Party has made promises to local Muslim bigwigs and ‘community leaders’ regarding future policy or support for Islamic causes, then that is going to come at a cost.

Sadly, if what has happened in other places where the Islamic vote has been pandered to then that cost will be borne by the non-Muslim inhabitants of Peterborough. Like in the London Boroughs of Newham and Redbridge, infiltration and domination of a ruling Labour Party branch brings many benefits for Muslims. It diverts funding that should be shared equally to organisations that may either be Islamic themselves or may align themselves with Islamic ideas. With this dominance, over time, it becomes necessary for the Labour Party to engage in greater and greater appeasement of Islam in order to get the Muslim vote out. This means that there is little or no chance of voting out a sitting Labour/Islam Party representative because the Muslim vote, both genuine and fraudulent, is so large and influential. I suspect that the Labour Party in Peterborough may have made promises to the Muslim community that the ‘community leaders’ are now going to demand are fulfilled. Unless there is a return to the high turnouts of the past by those opposed to the Labour/Islam Party and at the next General Election replace Lisa Forbes with someone less to the liking of Muslims and more to the likings of non-Muslims, then they will be stuck with her or someone like her forever. The Islamic vote machine will ensure that this is the case.

I’m not one of those who often shout ‘fix’ when my preferred candidate loses an election. This is because, for all its faults, the British electoral system is a lot fairer than that of many other nations. But, something really doesn’t smell right about the result in Peterborough.

Sure, polling organisations can get things wrong and media and social media hype can, as we saw in the Newport West by-election earlier this year, not be reflected at the ballot box. In the Newport contest we saw how parties that had big followings on social media such as For Britain, did not see their online support translated into votes. In contrast to a contest like Newport where you are dealing with a very safe Labour seat, the Peterborough result in a marginal that has stayed marginal, looks really odd.

The tiny minority, the perceived Islamic influence over the local Labour Party and the high turnout of postal votes when compared to the physical turn out, should all be questioned. These factors may have had some influence on the election. I don’t know about you, but there is a bad stench about this particular election. It’s a stench that I associate with electoral shenanigans and unfortunately, if my concerns are justified, we might be seeing the birth in Peterborough of yet another Labour Party Rotten Borough to go along with the great many other similar solid, and solidly bent, Labour fiefdoms that exist.