Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Labour Party Selection Fraud in St Ann's
After it was discovered at the St Ann's Labour Party selection candidate selection meeting that there were people present and voting who should not have been, I came home from the pub (where I'd heard about it) and wrote this article. It has subsequently been edited by site admins to remove the names of people who were embarrassed or in the final case where a journalist said it was potentially libellous. Well here I will attempt to summarise what we have subsequently found out and hopefully take people's attention away from my original appalling rant.
Back in May (The Ward AGM):
- The St Ann's Ward AGM was convened on Thursday the 23rd of May instead of the usual first Wednesday of June by the then Ward Secretary, Barbara Blake.
- Protests were made by members about this but they were rebuffed by the Ward Chairman.
- At this meeting The current Ward Secretary resigned and there was bloc voting to decide the new Ward Secretary.
- A person in the bloc opposing John Blake turned up late and was prevented from voting despite there being nothing about this in the Labour Party rules.
- John Blake was elected Ward Secretary by one vote.
The Selection Meeting:
- The meeting was run by The Secretary of the St Ann's Labour Party , and Steve Hart from Hornsey & Wood Green.
- A candidate who arrived early noticed the five members arrive with Ali Gul Ozbek, sensed that something was up and mentioned it to Barbara Blake. When the other candidate seemed unhelpful they mentioned it to Steve Hart. Then the candidate went looking for the five people but was barred from entering the room (3o minutes before the selection) by the Ward Secretary.
- By the time one member I have spoken to arrived, the five members were seated at the back of the room. Four men and one woman (who works in Ali Ozbek's Pharmacy).
- A blonde woman turned up before anyone had started speaking but was barred from entering the room by the Ward Secretary, despite remonstrating with him.
- Barbara Blake won in the first round (to select a female candidate) against Zena Brabazon and Emine Ibrahim by two votes. It was 11/1/14. Everybody voted.
- It is alleged that one candidate knew the questions in advance and had prepared answers.
- At the appropriate point in the meeting the secretary asked if everyone was OK with the others in the room and everybody laughed.
- There were various factions voting together in the room; the five new members, Charles Adje's family, Zena and David's people and the Ward Secretary's people.
- In the final round Ali Ozbek and Peter Morton were selected, beating Zena by one vote.
- Ali is a local chemist and businessman on Green Lanes who seemed very passionate about what should be done with St Ann's and spoke eloquently about the need to reduce business rates. He is also a property developer.
- At the time Peter worked as head of press for the Labour Party.
- Barbara is a trade union official and ex Ward Secretary.
After the Selection Meeting
- A fellow councillor calls David to commiserate with him.
- David Browne and Zena Brabazon did some investigation using the St Ann's Labour Party membership list and the electoral roll.
- They discovered that nineteen new members signed up that year did not actually live in St Ann's and that they had either given Green Lanes business addresses when they signed up or claimed addresses in the ward.
- Not one of these new members, many of whom were recruited on the 8th of July gave an address in the ward at which they are eligible to vote, which is required by party rules.
- Five of these members were "eligible" to vote because they signed up before the cut off date of the 30th of April, however they should have been barred from voting because they do not actually live in the ward.
- Zena and David wrote to their local Labour Party officials who sent their evidence on to the London Labour Party.
- Nobody can tell me for sure where Ali Ozbek lives but he claims an address in Finsbury Park Avenue.
- Ali Ozbek has donated money to the Labour Party.
- According to a twitter exchange with a Labour councillor in another ward, the membership list should have been gone through before the meeting by the person running it to make sure this kind of thing did not happen, it was certainly done in their ward.
- When one of the five members who voted was called at his home his partner informed the caller that he had been in Turkey for a while and was not due back yet.
- In Harringay several new Labour Party members were registered using Green Lanes business addresses but not before the cut off date.
- Barbara Blake has told local traders that it is OK to register as a member in the Labour Party from a business address (it is definitely not) and the Tottenham Membership Secretary has expressed a similar view in a meeting, only to be corrected.
The "Corruption in Haringey Labour" article.
- After I wrote the original article, in which I also made some allegations against Claire Kober, the only phone call to site admins was to remove the Secretary of the St Ann's Labour party's name from the discussion.
- There was a lot of comment on the original thread and as of Saturday the 12th of October it appears to have been viewed more than 7000 times, although I dispute that as a useful metric (I think the actual figure is much lower).
- After some badgering it was picked up by an overworked Stephen Moore at the Tottenham Journal, here.
Trying to get a re-run
- I have pushed the councillor who commiserated David on his loss on Twitter to join calls asking for a re-run of the election but they have resolutely refused, to the point where it's all a bit weird and "la la la, I can't hear you".
- As it stands the London Labour Party have agreed that the five people were not eligible to vote but they say that this was not picked up before or during the meeting so the result stands. Their investigation consisted of speaking to the Ward Secretary and Steve Hart. Steve Hart lied because someone did speak to him before the meeting.
- The London Labour Party have the attendance list and will not release it, presumably because it shows that people were not identified correctly and that at least two of the five were imposters.
- Appeals to the NEC have all been rebuffed, even with the full acknowledgement of what went on.
The Labour doorstep in Harringay
- The St Ann's Labour Party have a great deal of trouble getting members to help them out with canvassing. A photograph has been tweeted showing more than 20 people out in Harringay Ward above the same session in St Ann's, with just two.
- When David Lammy, after a lot of badgering apparently, stepped out in St Ann's for the Labour doorstep he was met by a picket of local men calling on him not to support the St Ann's fraudsters. As I understand it he will not be going out with them again.
The Police are involved
- On Monday the 10th of February Haringey MPS made a visit to me on behalf of the secretary of the St Ann's Labour Party and his partner.
- It was alleged that I had called him filth on Twitter (which I have not, that was someone else) and that I said "I know I'm hassling you but...". I was served with a Notice of Harassment Letter which will now appear in extended CRB checks.
*An individual has asked that their name be replaced with their function in this post on the grounds that they are not seeking public office. This has been done.
Tags for Forum Posts: election2014, labour, st ann's labour, stanns
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Given the closeness of the selection and the bloc voting I don't think you can say anyone is legitimate. Without the five fraudulent members the blocs would have been 10 and 8 with 3 "impartials". All the same, is this any basis for effectively choosing who will be the councillors in St Ann's next year? If it hadn't been Ali's people it could have been anyone else. These things are just not safe unless you have more real members.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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But that's just how it's always done, minus the five blow-ins. Not just for LP selections, for any selection. Real members, hard to define. The self-selected ones who are prepared to spend hours of their lives in bleak meeting rooms earn the right to vote, but there are many legit reasons to be absent. Where's the creche, for example? At Tottnm Green I did not recognise about two-thirds of those who turned up, but I'm sure they had all been assiduously reading the minutes and watching what was happening.
The ability to pack a meeting is of course part of the person spec for any wannabee politico. Who can persuade the most people in the relevant catchment area to sign up, in time to legally cast their vote for you?
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Local politics is not party based in New Zealand but you do tend to find that it's mostly local businessmen who have the resources to get elected. So if you live in a ward in Haringey east of the railway you should join the Labour Party so that you can have a vote that counts.
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....only needs to be for six months every four years... just make sure you get the form in in time, and have chosen the most useful address.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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What, I wonder, did the Labour Party apparatchiks make of the leaked result — the day before Polling Day — of Azerbaijan's Presidential election
Maybe, to practice their skills, they combed through Azerbaijan's Constitution to find a rule which completely justified the result?
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Look to be slightly fairer Alan, The Labour Party in Britain cannot afford to rerun every single selection meeting where the losing candidates have been able to object to someone AFTER the fact. Every other meeting may need to be rerun if this was allowed.
They encourage both candidates and the Ward Secretary to be vigilant and on the look out for entryism. Joe Goldberg did this in Seven Sisters and he's cagey about who the other person was who helped him but I presume it was his Ward Secretary. In Harringay, Gina Adamou and the Ward Secretary Jon Vellapah spotted entryism from business addresses on Green Lanes and kicked them out.
The problem Zena and David had is that their Ward Secretary was at best, not doing this. For the record, it is obvious from the voting that both the Ward Secretary and his partner voted for the winning candidates.
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Permalink Reply by Keith Waterhouse on
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John-this is how you find the home address of any pharmacist- contact the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and ask for the serial number for the pharmacy you require. When the number is put in the societies search engine you will get the home address. It is a statutory requirement that the pharmacist registers their true and proper home address as a business address only is considered transient. Good luck John.
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Well I don't see how to do this now. They are split into the Royal Pharmaceutical Societey and PharmacyRegulation.org...
This is what I got:
http://pharmacyregulation.org/registers/pharmacist/registrationnumb...
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John, I'm sure there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of very disappointed councillors who've not been chosen as candidates by their parties. Some may be complaining how unfair this is. I agree that the parties can't investigate every one .
Nor should they. In my own experience local Labour Party branches have legitimate reasons for deselecting councillors. And they should probably do this far more often. For example, the bed-blockers; the lazy; the no longer capable; and those uninterested in much except the allowance. Some councillors are even tolerated although one morning, they woke from troubled dreams, to find themselves transformed in their beds into Tories.
But there's a key difference in the case of the St Ann's selection. It seems to me that the basic idea of a ward branch ballot is that people are judged by their peers. In the room are people who live in the ward and know something of its issues and problems. They try to make an honest judgement about the potential candidates' qualities and ability to represent all the people of that ward.
But in St Ann's, Labour Party apparatchiks are colluding with a selection process distorted by votes of people who live somewhere else. If ordinary members - and other Labour candidates - go along with this, they are complicit in the rule-breaking.
Some members and candidates do have principles and spines; they've spoken-out.
Others haven't even bothered to ask what's gone on. For them, I assume that standing-up and speaking-up about abuses of an electoral system only applies to other countries.
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But if you have a cabinet system like Haringey does then you need some superstar performers who can knuckle down and do what the cabinet leader wants. So this is Peter Morton perhaps. Is Barbara Blake there as reward for giving up the Ward Secretary job? And Ali...? Well, just those five votes got him a councillorship.
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Claire Kober has been Council Leader since November 2008. She took over when Cllrs George Mehan and Liz Santry ("cabinet" councillor for Children) were finally forced to resign following the death of Peter Connelly ("Baby P"). Kober was an adequate Chief Whip. But it was like asking a school secretary to take over when the Headteacher has to leave in a hurry.
"In a high percentage of the moribund institutions so far examined the final state of coma is something gained of set purpose and after prolonged effort. It is the result, admittedly, of a disease, but of a disease that is largely self-induced. From the first signs of the condition, the progress of the disease has been encouraged, the causes aggravated, and the symptoms welcomed. It is the disease of induced inferiority, called Injelititis ..."
"... The injelitant individual is easily recognizable ... from the persistence with which he/she struggles to eject all those abler than him/herself, as also from his/her resistance to the appointment or promotion of anyone who might prove abler in course of time. He/she dare not say, "Mr. Asterisk is too able," so he/she says, "Asterisk? Clever perhaps--but is he sound? I incline to prefer Mr. Cypher." He/she dare not say, "Mr. Asterisk makes me feel small".
... If the head of the organization is second-rate, he/she will see to it that his/her immediate staff are all third-rate".
I blame myself. When Claire Kober became Council Leader I suggested she read C.Northcote Parkinson's Injelititis. I recommended it as a light-hearted but broadly accurate analysis of the Haringey disease - what was going wrong with Haringey Council at the time.
It never occurred to me that she would totally misunderstand Parkinson's little sketch. Taking it instead as a model of how to run her "cabinet" and relationships with other councillors.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Just so that people know where we are with this. Fewer and fewer Labour Politicians are prepared to give me straight answers, some have even changed what they were saying before and are "on message". You know what that means? They think they have gotten away with it. People are picking winners. I think I ended up a lone looney voice that they could ignore.
Ali will move into one of the properties he owns in Haringey in time for the election (and no doubt move out again once elected). He will scrape in by a small margin, St Ann's will return the three Labour candidates that they have selected. Apart from getting a kick out of people going out of their way to play "la la la, I can't hear you!" with me on Twitter, this has been sad, sobering and at times scary.
Thanks of course to those individuals who have tracked me down in bars in Harringay to buy me beers and those that have voiced their concern on here but I'm afraid the tide looks like it has turned.
Should I keep going?
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