NIGEL FARAGE: How Britain’s democracy is rotting from within

Great Britain has boasted for years about the legitimacy and fairness of our elections. Our political overlords like to boast that, unlike many other countries, we have the gold standard in their electoral systems.

But take a long look under the hood of our collapsed democracy and you will soon discover that such lofty sentiments are in fact complete nonsense.

Far from being a sign of civility and honesty, the system is riddled with corruption, intimidation, bribery and abuse on a massive scale.

I have been arguing for some time that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way British elections are run.

In fact, since 2015, it has become clear to me that election fraud is rampant in many of our cities, especially those with large Pakistani and Kashmiri communities. The Election Commission, which was supposed to be responsible for monitoring these, did not pay much attention. The police are even less.

Naturally, my political opponents accused me of sour grapes. Meanwhile, voters remained largely indifferent.

This was until last month’s Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester; here election fraud was so widespread and so blatant that the evidence of wrongdoing in our system is now completely irrefutable.

The Green Party’s victory over Reform UK by 4,000 votes has exposed numerous glaring flaws in our procedures that, if not urgently addressed, threaten to turn our elections into a worldwide laughing stock and a national disgrace.

The first was comprehensive evidence of ‘family voting’, which until last month most British public had never even heard of. This cute phrase may sound harmless enough, but it is actually a perversion of our democracy.

This disgusting practice is when someone (usually a dominant male) escorts a woman to the voting booth to make sure she votes the right way; This is a clear violation of the Ballot Paper Act of 1872.

According to Volunteers for Democracy, an independent group that oversees the conduct of the Gorton and Denton byelections, family voting was conducted at 68 percent of the polling stations they visited.

Democracy Volunteers found that families voted in 116 of the 204 electoral districts it observed in the 2024 General Elections. I’m sorry, but this is not democracy. This is a collective pressure.

Moreover, this event will have occurred in front of the eyes of the returning officials at the polling stations. Why none of them immediately called the police to ensure that the electoral law was approved remains a matter of deep concern.

But rather than confront this disturbing development head-on, the Westminster establishment, as usual, shrugged its shoulders and looked the other way for fear of being called a racist. This is despicable.

We saw the same attitude in northern cities, where Asian grooming gangs were not paraded every year for fear of disturbing the Muslim community. Thousands of British girls have suffered indescribably as a result.

But despite overwhelming evidence of families voting in Gorton and Denton, Greater Manchester Police announced yesterday that it had ‘found no evidence of any intention to influence or prevent any person from voting’.

So there you are. The authorities investigate once again, making a lot of noise and—surprise, surprise—finding nothing to see. I’m sorry but it stinks.

But family voting only scratches the surface of the problem with our elections.

Mass mail voting has led to a complete change in the way we conduct elections in this country.

The practice that Blair initiated 25 years ago under the guise of increasing turnout rather than increasing voter turnout has now turned into a farce.

Where once you needed a good reason to apply for a postal vote, such as illness, disability or being away from home for work or holiday, now anyone can apply to vote with very little control, thanks to ‘postal votes on demand’ introduced by the Labor Party in 2001. Needless to say, this has now drastically changed the way people vote.

Before 2001, proxy and mail voting accounted for about 2 percent of total turnout in elections. But 34 per cent of overall participation in the UK county council elections in 2025 was by post; That means more than a third of the vote was decided weeks before election day.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand how ripe such a system is for abuse. The opportunity for undue influence, whether from family members, community figures, or campaign activists, is dazzlingly clear. The secrecy of the once sacred vote is now a thing of the past.

Over the years, we have heard of cases where forged signatures were used on ballot papers, where people who had left the country years ago (or even those who were long dead) somehow still managed to vote.

At a by-election in Peterborough in 2019, which Labor won by 683 votes, witnesses saw a man brazenly arriving at the central ward count with more than 1,000 postal votes stuffed into a supermarket shopping bag.

And having personally witnessed an incident at another by-election in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, a few years ago, I think I can make a reasonable guess as to where he got them from.

There I saw someone following a postman delivering vote-by-mail letters down a street, knocking on doors after the postman made his delivery, and claiming he was there to collect their votes. The man in question, I later discovered, was a union official who supported the Labor Party.

Now, for the sake of argument, imagine 84-year-old Mrs. Smith, who is frail and living alone. The postal ballot had just been delivered and a few minutes later there was a knock on the door and a man stood there claiming to be there to pick up the ballot.

It’s easy to see how manipulation, intimidation, and outright cheating can come into play.

Another memorable incident was the 2015 mayoral election in Tower Hamlets that turned into a postal vote fraud circus and it was obvious the courts had to intervene.

Britain’s first elected Muslim mayor, Lutfur Rahman, has been sacked after a specialist tribunal found he was guilty of vote rigging, vote buying and religious intimidation.

Almost 11 years after that embarrassment, Mr Rahman – surprisingly – once again became the all-powerful mayor of Tower Hamlets and was re-elected in 2022 after serving a five-year ban from public office, the maximum possible penalty. And yet nothing has fundamentally changed.

No election procedure in the world has a mass early mail-in voting system that is completely open to intimidation and fraud. For this reason, I believe that registration to vote by mail should be canceled in its current form. Yes, of course, I understand that there will be arguments that voting by mail is a necessity for some.

Allowances can be given to people who go on holiday, are sick or work abroad. But on-demand, no-questions-asked mail-in voting? He has to go.

This will also make election day a special event again. After all, the right to vote is something our ancestors fought and died to protect. Voting in person at the local polling station should be a source of pride for every Brit.

This brings me to my next point. The third worrying development in the Gorton and Denton by-elections was the role played by the Commonwealth vote.

I think this will come as a shock to some Daily Mail readers, but citizens of Commonwealth nations currently resident in our country are allowed to vote in our elections.

This means that people who may have only recently arrived on these shores, often with little knowledge of English and with completely different priorities and interests, are given a direct say in choosing the British government, while retaining all their political rights in their own country.

This cannot be true. Yes, we have historically close ties with the Commonwealth. And once upon a time, that history meant we could feel comfortable allowing its citizens to vote in our elections.

But today’s Commonwealth is a diverse and often loosely connected association of nations with political systems, interests and values ​​very different from our own.

Allowing citizens to vote seems like a strange anachronism, especially in this time of mass immigration. Other countries must think we’re crazy.

Does it make any difference? I am sure. Check out the stats on Gorton and Denton. About 10 percent of the population was born in Pakistan. If this byelection were only open to people born in this country, UK Reform candidate Matt Goodwin would easily win. This is a fact.

That’s why we can’t let the Commonwealth vote go ahead. As well as being unfair on grounds of fairness, it exacerbates Britain’s crisis of sectarianism, the deep divisions in our politics and the growing alienation of our Jewish communities across the country.

So, in short, the Gorton and Denton byelection should serve as a wake-up call to the political class and, more importantly, the country at large.

No longer can our leaders bury their heads in the sand and claim that election fraud is a myth or something that only happens in distant banana republics.

What is needed now is serious and unapologetic pressure. This means families will no longer vote at the polls. No more mass voting by mail. No more Commonwealth voting.

Maybe then we would return to a time when there would be no fights or lawsuits when votes were made.

For a long time it was primarily the Labor Party that was accused of engaging in various acts of election fraud.

But despite their 14 years in power, the Conservatives have made almost no attempt to close the cracks; because they were undoubtedly in a position to benefit from it. Even the holier-than-thou Liberal Democrats have been accused of trying to game the system.

Anyway, that’s enough. It is time for a fundamental change in our system and I will campaign on this until it is successful.

Britain’s proud democratic tradition is based on a simple and powerful principle: that every citizen should vote freely, safely and confidentially. It is a principle gained through centuries of struggle and reforms.

It was the period when we set the standard for clean elections around the world. It’s time for us to take back this standard.

Because if we don’t, we run the risk of completely poisoning confidence in our democracy.

• Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK