How The Pakistanis Rig Elections

And Why Nobody Should Be Surprised.

Matt Goodwin was shocked on Friday morning. Reform were shocked. The commentators were shocked. The producers booking guests for their shows were shocked.

Why?

I was not shocked. Nor was anyone else familiar with the demographics of constituencies where the Muslim Bloc Vote plays a role in determining the outcome of elections.

What happened in Gorton and Denton on Thursday night is not new. It is not unusual. It is not a protest vote or a demographic shift or a community expressing its values. It is a system. A system has been running for at least thirty years, in over 100 towns and cities across this country, in plain sight.

I know how it works because I have lived inside it and experienced it.

The truth is Goodwin knows what happened. Reform know. The commentators know. The politicians know. The police know. The returning officers know. Every journalist who has covered these constituencies for more than five minutes knows. The shock you saw on Friday morning was not ignorance. It was performance. Because knowing and saying are two very different things in this country, and most people have decided that saying costs too much.

It is time you knew too.

1. The Clan Delivers the Vote

Biraderi is the clan network. It came from villages in Mirpur and Azad Kashmir and it works here exactly as it works there. The man at the top tells people how to vote. Stepping outside it has consequences for your whole family, not just you.

A 2008 report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust documented the biraderi system and its connection to postal vote fraud. It described ballot papers being completed within the family home or, in their own words, "taken to a central facility (so called 'voting factories') for completion by party representatives." That phrase has been in the public record for seventeen years. It was cited in official Parliamentary research briefings. It was submitted to government. It is the findings of an organisation that no one would describe as politically of the right.

Reports like this have been replicated for years. Nobody has dared act on any of it.

Every politician who has stood in one of these seats knows this exists. Every single one has decided that saying so publicly costs more than staying quiet.

I have been saying it for eight years. I am saying it again. The rape gangs did not operate in isolation. They were part of a system. The biraderi system.

2. They Remove You Before You Start

Inside the parties it starts at selection. If a clan wants to put forward its candidate for a Labour council seat and that candidate is from the wrong biraderi, the branch gets suspended. No suspension, no selection meeting. No selection meeting, no candidate. Clean. Nothing written down. Nobody to complain to. The branch suspension is only possible with the complicity of the political party.

I have seen White MPs help suspend local branches because it would negatively impact on those they had helped secure in to positions who supplied them with sackfuls of postal votes.

If someone decides to stand anyway, as an independent or through a different party, the visit comes. Late at night. To the family home. The message does not need to be spelled out. Within days the candidate withdraws. Sometimes they go further than that. They record a video. Sitting there, looking into a camera, endorsing the clan's official candidate. Hostage-style. Distributed across the community WhatsApp groups before anyone outside notices what happened.

And sometimes the clans do not even bother with any of that. They deal with each other directly, across what should be rival parties, and the seat is divided up before a single vote is cast.

How else do you explain the Greens running effectively uncontested as the left's alternative to Labour in Gorton and Denton? Why did the BBC 'mistakenly' report on the Workers Party candidate only for the party to later withdraw and step down?

This does not happen by accident. This happens when groups of men meet late at night in smoke filled rooms.

3. The Mosque Gives the Instruction

The week before polling day there is a meeting. Or a sermon. Or both. The congregation is told who to vote for. Sometimes directly. More often wrapped in the language of community protection, of what happens if the wrong party wins. Sometimes, the imam even leads the congregation in prayers where he will specifically name the candidate. Everyone understands what this means.

This is not a coincidence of timing or community enthusiasm. Many of the mosques in the UK may as well be political headquarters as well. Time and again, the committee members who run these mosques are leading members of the same political parties whose candidates are being endorsed from the pulpit. The mosque and the party machine are not separate institutions with a shared interest. They are the same people wearing different hats on different days of the week.

In the town where I live, the mosque was secretly funded by the council with an interest free loan with no paperwork. It is controlled by the brother of the Deputy Leader of the Council. The committee members include politicians and past candidates. Even the local MP was a regular until we exposed how he had been attending the local mosques thanking the congregations 'for all the votes'.

When the candidate goes out canvassing, a senior mosque committee member walks alongside them. Think about what that conveys to every door they knock on. Think about what it says to every voter who opens their door.

This was proven in open court. In 2015, Richard Mawrey QC voided the election of Lutfur Rahman as Mayor of Tower Hamlets after finding that Muslim clerics had campaigned for him and persuaded voters "that it was their religious duty to vote for him." The judge found he had no option but to conclude there was undue spiritual influence. Rahman was removed from office and barred from standing for five years.

He came back. He is Mayor of Tower Hamlets again today. Because in these communities, what the judge called corruption is not experienced as corruption. There is no separation between the mosque and the ballot box. There never has been. The imam's instruction and the party's instruction are the same instruction, delivered through different mouths. To challenge one is to challenge the other.

Some of my friends on the political right would go further. They would argue that this is not incidental to political Islam but central to it. That the purpose is precisely to ensure the political serves the religious. That every council seat, every mayoralty, every MP is a step toward an environment in which the community governs itself by its own rules. Specifically, the Sharia.

Whether you accept that framing or not, the practical effect is identical. The vote is not an individual act. It is a collective obligation. And the collective is not the nation. It is the faith.

A vicar who told his Church of England congregation how to vote from the pulpit would lose his position before the week was out. There would be questions in Parliament. It would lead the news for days. But here, not only is it common practice, it is something the Labour Party has utilised for decades.

4. Compliance Gets Rewarded

Social housing. Planning permission. Jobs. Taxi licences. School placements. Visas. Grants that appear when the vote goes the right way and disappear when it doesn't.

The MP, the ward councillor, the community leader, the men with the right phone numbers, controls all of it. Vote correctly and your family gets looked after. Step out of line and your nephew misses the job, your planning application sits in a drawer for eighteen months, your organisation is told it no longer meets the criteria.

Nobody writes it down. Nobody needs to. Everyone understands how it works.

I have seen entire streets of brand new social housing go to the same clan members as if they are rebuilding their village in the United Kingdom. In my own town, in the run up to a local election, a swimming baths was sold at mates rates to an organisation that openly boasted of its influence over the result.

And all of that is before you get to how criminals aligned with political parties are now openly running for office. Do you really think gangsters have suddenly developed a social conscience?

5. Resistance Gets Punished

Speak out and you are demonised inside the community first. The biraderi then moves fast. Within days the calls go in. To the council. To the police. To anyone with the power to make your life difficult.

I know this from my own experience. The police have admitted to me that I was arrested on the instructions of Pakistani politicians. The council hired a law firm to threaten me and attempt to prevent me from lawfully speaking out. When a member of the biraderi publicly offered to kill me, the response from the now leader of Oldham Council was to post love hearts in response. That politician holds a senior role in Keir Starmer's Labour Party today.

Businesses that refuse to play along get visited by council food safety inspectors. A five star hygiene rating becomes a one star. No explanation necessary. Everybody understands the consequences for stepping out of line.

The local media, dependent on council advertising and relationships with the people running these communities, does not report on any of it. In many cases it joins in and helps target those that the politicians dependent on the bloc vote want an example making of.

When you know what happens to people who do not comply, and you have watched it happen to others, and there is a knock at your door at election time asking for your postal votes, what do you do?

Most people hand them over. Do you blame them?

6. The Postal Vote Is Where It's Won

The postal vote was sold to us by Tony Blair as making democracy more accessible. What it did was move the ballot out of the polling booth and into the home. Into the home where the clan elder has authority. Where the instruction from the mosque has already been delivered. Where nobody independent is watching anything.

I have watched this with my own eyes. What I saw was not opportunistic. It was an operation running with the precision of a trading floor. Postal votes were not just being harvested. They were being traded. Allocated. Moved around. People were calling in from overseas to direct what was happening on the ground. Someone sitting in Pakistan or Bangladesh, on a phone, managing the movement of British ballot papers in a British election.

This is not new. In Washwood Heath, Birmingham, in 2004, postal vote applications went from 478 the previous year to 5,583. A 1,068 percent increase in twelve months. The same pattern appeared across multiple wards across the city. Richard Mawrey QC, the judge who heard the evidence, said that anybody who had sat through it would find it "evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic." He was describing a British election. Six Labour councillors were convicted, banned from standing for five years and ordered to pay half a million pounds in costs. Then they got on with their lives.

This is his own evidence submitted to parliament. Read it here.

Mohammed Hussain, a Labour councillor in Blackburn, won his seat in 2002 with a majority of over six hundred. Police later found he had sent friends door to door to collect postal ballots from voters. The completed papers were brought back to his house. His home became a production line.

Campaigners went house to house asking voters to hand over blank ballots, telling them: "Don't worry, we'll take care of them."

He was jailed for three years and seven months. The judge said he had no precedent for the sentence because electoral fraud on this scale had been unknown in Britain for a hundred years. That was eight months before Birmingham.

Between 2020 and 2024, police investigated 1,318 cases of alleged electoral fraud in this country. Eight led to convictions. Eight.

The Count Is Built To Hide It

And the count is designed to keep it that way. Polling station votes are counted separately, station by station. You can see the geography of the result. You can spot anomalies. Postal votes are different. Every postal vote in the constituency goes into the same pile, all mixed together, with no breakdown by area. There is no way to see that one particular neighbourhood returned postal votes at four times the rate of everywhere else. No way to see it on the night. No way to prove it afterwards.

So the fraud happens in the community, weeks before polling day. The cover is built into the count. The low conviction rate tells you what happens when it gets reported. And the people responsible for delivering free and fair elections have read every judgment and every report that has ever described any of this and pretend nothing is wrong. Everything about postal votes in the UK is wrong.

By the time the first ballot box is opened, they already know who won. The celebrations in Mirpur are well under way.

7. They Watch You Vote

Family voting has been a criminal offence since the Ballot Secrecy Act 2023. On Thursday in Gorton and Denton, Democracy Volunteers, an accredited election observer group with ten years of monitoring UK elections, deployed four observers across 22 of the 45 polling stations. They recorded 32 separate incidents of family voting across 15 of those stations. Nine incidents in a single station. They observed 545 voters in total. Twelve percent of them were either involved in or affected by family voting.

Their director, John Ault, said it was the highest level of family voting his organisation had recorded in a decade of observing British elections. They issued their findings on the night, which is rare. The data, he said, was too significant to wait.

Manchester City Council said no concerns had been raised and called the timing of the report "extremely disappointing." Democracy Volunteers pointed out that issuing findings after polls close is the accepted international standard.

Family voting means someone stands over you in the booth and watches you vote. Or goes in with you. Or positions themselves close enough that you know they can see. The secret ballot exists precisely to prevent this. The decision about how to vote is supposed to be made alone, in private, with no one watching. In these wards, in these communities, that is not how it works.

The decision was made at home before they left. What happens at the booth is confirmation those casting the vote are doing as they are told.

I'm not really sure why they call it family voting when the person steering mainly women, and sometimes the elderly, toward the booth is often no relation to them at all.

The Labour Party run council can cite cultural reasons all they want. No surprise, as historically it is the Labour Party that has benefited from such illegal activities.

8. They Don't Just Stand Outside and Watch

The men outside the polling station in certain wards on election day have a job to do. They watch who comes through. They notice who has not appeared by three o'clock. Calls get made and people are rounded up. Want that council house? Isn't your cousin trying to get a work visa? Looking for a good husband for your daughter? The levers are endless. And in a tight community, these levers are powerful.

Inside, polling agents from certain parties approach elderly voters, people voting for the first time, voters with limited English. They offer guidance. The guidance points one way.

Some voters are required to prove they voted correctly. Not asked. Required. I know who you are. I know you are here to vote. Show me a photograph on your phone of your ballot paper so I can see where you put the cross.

Democracy Volunteers observed several voters in Gorton and Denton on Thursday taking photographs of their ballot papers inside the polling station. That is not curiosity. That is compliance. Someone is waiting for that photograph.

I have spoken to many people who have been intimidated at polling stations. There is no point reporting it anymore. They know nothing will happen. And the consequences they face afterwards are not worth the risk. The police, just as with the rape gangs, are in on it.

9. The State Is a Partner in This

None of what I have written here is new. Court rulings. Parliamentary reports. Electoral Commission findings. Journalism going back twenty years. All of it submitted, formally, to returning officers, chief constables, council chief executives, MPs and ministers under every government since 2000.

Every single time, it was set aside.

In Birmingham in 2004, West Midlands Police received more than fifty complaints of fraud during the election itself. They charged nobody. They named their investigation Operation Gripe. The judge put that on the record too.

Warehouse was electoral fraud factory

Poll officials broke rules, police ignored evidence and Labour councillor lied, Birmingham postal voting investigation concludes.

The GuardianSandra Laville

The Hussain conviction in Blackburn came on 8 April 2005. Mawrey's Birmingham judgment came four days earlier. In the space of one week, the British state had a criminal conviction for postal vote fraud and the most damning judicial indictment of the postal voting system ever written. Charles Clarke, Home Secretary, defended the postal voting system. A spokesman for his department said the system "works, and works well."

A judge used the words banana republic in a British courtroom. The people sitting in front of him were not imprisoned. This was an election court, not a criminal court. They were banned from standing for five years, ordered to pay costs, and then got on with their lives. No criminal charges followed. No minister resigned. No chief constable was held to account. No systemic change came.

And that was Birmingham in 2004. One case. One city. One election. It only came to court because four electors petitioned. Most seats where this happens, nobody petitions. The court never convenes. The count stands. The winner takes their seat. And it happens again at the next election.

The Police Already Had Practice

These are the same police forces that looked away from grooming gangs in the same towns at the same time. Bradford. Rochdale. Oldham. Rotherham. The same calculation was made by the same people. Acting meant confronting the same communities, the same councillors, the same political relationships. So they did nothing, wrote it up as no further action, and called it proportionate.

Returning officers are the Chief Executives that work for the council. The people they are supposed to investigate run the council. Work the independence of that out for yourself.

This Is Not Ignorance

This is not incompetence. Incompetence is random. This is consistent, across decades, across parties, across every institution that was supposed to stop it.

They were not short of material.

Mawrey's Birmingham judgment in 2004 described the postal voting system as a recipe for fraud and put it on the permanent public record.
A Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust report in 2008 documented voting factories and was submitted to Parliament.
Tower Hamlets produced another election court judgment in 2015, another mayor removed, another detailed indictment of the same mechanisms by the same judge.

The following year the government appointed Sir Eric Pickles as its Anti-Corruption Champion and asked him to review electoral fraud.

He spent a year gathering evidence from councils, police forces, academics and election experts and produced fifty recommendations. The government welcomed many of them. The majority were ignored.

Six years later they passed the Elections Act 2022. Voter ID at the polling station. That is what eighteen years of judgments, reports and reviews produced.

Voter ID Changes Nothing

Parliament eventually acted. The Elections Act 2022. Voter ID at the polling station. Everything I have described in this piece happens before anyone gets near a polling station. It happens in postal votes, in homes, in mosques, in community meetings weeks before polling day. And on the rare occasions it does happen at the station, the ID check makes no difference. They walk in with you. They watch where you put the cross. Or they wait outside and you show them the screenshot on the way out. Parliament aimed at the wrong target, called it a solution, and moved on.

The state does not just look away from this fraud. The state enables it. In some cases, the state is part of it. Gorton and Denton on Thursday. May elections next. The people who could have stopped this thirty years ago will be convening a working group.

10 Reform Should Know Better

Matt Goodwin and Reform were shocked on Friday morning. They should not have been. What played out is normal practice. And they know it.

Why do you think so many White working class people in these constituencies do not bother voting? They know it is rigged. They have always known. Nobody in power has ever thought that worth investigating.

Why do you think there is not one word of complaint from within the Pakistani communities? They know nothing will be done. They also know what will happen to them if they speak.

More Than Just Sectarianism

Calling this sectarianism is shallow. It does not explain the depth of what is taking place. It does not explain the state's role in allowing it to continue. Sectarianism does not run Operation Gripe. Sectarianism does not ignore fifty recommendations. Sectarianism does not stand at a dispatch box and tell the country the system works.

The state does.

If Reform want to govern, they need to develop a policy to end this. If Reform want to restore hope in the communities that have been abandoned to the politics of Pakistan, they need a strategy to contest elections in these areas and defeat this. If Reform want to help facilitate integration, they need to help those within these communities who are blackmailed and victims of this.

Reform have my number. The Conservatives have my number. Advance and Restore have it. None of them have called. I have been documenting this longer than I have been documenting the rape gangs. I was saying it before it was safe to say. I was saying it when it cost me everything to say it.

I am not interested in lazy finger pointing or in being the person who helped you make a speech. Democracy does not work if the vote is stolen before it is cast. Democracy does not work if coercion and blackmail determines who stands, who votes, and who wins. I want to help fix it. We must fix this. That is a different conversation from the one most politicians want to have.

For the past seven years, I led the campaign that exposed how Labour Party politicians protected the rape gangs. For most of this time, both politicians and the police have tried and failed to have me imprisoned.

I will never work again because I refused to look the other way to the gang rape of children.

Before that, I spent over twenty years protecting children and safeguarding communities from extremists. Queen Elizabeth II put a medal on my chest for the work I did.

My work is free because truth must circulate. But truth without scale is easy to ignore. Power fears numbers. If you believe in accountability, please stand with me. The work I do is only possible with your support. The campaign will only succeed with us working in the open.

Subscribe Now

This is why there are no paywalls to access any of my work. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands that regularly take value from my content, and can afford to do so, please support me with a paid subscription.

A few supporters can be ignored. Thousands cannot.This is how this campaign survive. This is how we see this through. This is how voices like ours stops being managed and starts being feared.

Prefer a one-off contribution?

http://BuyMeACoffee.com/recusantnine

http://paypal.me/RecusantNine

No sponsors. No parties. No institutions to lean on. Just numbers. Growing fast enough that shutting this down becomes impossible.

We don’t need everyone. We need enough. We need you.

Raja 🙏