ELECTION NEWS: FARAGE FAILS AT PETERBOROUGH - BORIS BOUNCE OR MUSLIM BLOC VOTE?

Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party, which has been topping the polls since winning the European Parliamentary Elections last month, was widely expected to take an actual Westminster Parliamentary seat on Thursday at a by-election in the town of Peterborough. 

The by-election was being held because the town's previous Black woman Labour MP had been arrested for a criminal conviction.

The thing is the Brexit Party failed, letting a fat, ugly, female Labour politician get elected instead. 

Here are the full results:

Labour: 10,474 - 30.9%

Brexit Party: 9,801 - 28.9%

Conservative: 7,243 - 21.4%

Lib Dem: 4,159 - 12.3%

Green: 1,035 - 3.1%

UKIP: 400 - 1.2%

Christian: 162 - 0.5%

English Democrats: 153 - 0.5%

SDP: 135 - 0.4%

Monster Raving Loony: 112 - 0.3%

Independent: 101 - 0.3%

Common Good: 60 - 0.2%

Renew: 46 - 0.1%

UK EU: 25 - 0.1%

Independent: 5 - 0.0%

Turnout 48.3%

So, what happened here?

The most noticeable thing is that the Conservative vote held up. 

This could be because the Tories have moved beyond the highly unpopular Theresa May, who stepped down as Party leader today, and are now choosing a new leader who is expected to be much more pro-Brexit. 

The favourite to win is Boris Johnson, so maybe the Tories enjoyed a "Boris bounce" that enabled them to do much better in this by-election than they did in the European elections last month.

Comparing the results of the two elections is pretty interesting. In the Peterborough City Council area, which is over twice as big as the Westminster constituency, the vote was as follows:

The Brexit Party: 16,196 - 38.3%

Labour: 7,272 - 17.2%

Lib Dem: 6,491 - 15.4%

Conservative: 4,594 - 10.9%

Green: 4,563 - 10.8%

UKIP: 1,537 - 3.6%

Change UK: 1,277 - 3.0%

English Democrats - 284 - 0.7%

Independent: 65 - 0.2%

Turnout 35.2%

So, taking into account the larger turnout but the smaller area in the by-election, the Conservative vote actually recovered quite a lot, while the Brexit party lost a lot of votes. As for Labour, they got an extra 3,000 votes. A lot of that may have been Lib Dems and Greens voting tactically. 

In addition to the pro-Brexit and ethnically English vote being split between the Conservative and Brexit parties, another factor seems to have been unity of the Asian bloc vote, practically all of which went to the Labour Party.

A 2017 estimate of the town's demographics show that around 12% of the population is Asian, or around 23,000 people -- twice the number of votes that Labour won by. Also, it seems that Labour benefited from the unusually large number of postal votes, around 6,000. This is often a sign of voter fraud or at least a racial or ethnic bloc vote.

It is no surprise then that Labour had an actual convicted Asian vote-rigger on their election team, as revealed by Politicalite:

A key Labour campaign team organiser previously sent to prison for helping to rig an election in Peterborough, has been hired AGAIN by the Labour party and today is out ‘influencing’ votes in the Peterborough by-election.

In 2018, Tariq Mahmood, now 51, was convicted alongside fellow Labour members Maqbool Hussein and former Peterborough Mayor Mohammed Choudhary for forgery over a devious scheme to fabricate votes for the Peterborough City Council election of June 2004.

The four-month case that saw Mahmood (a Labour Party Secretary) sentenced to a 15-month porridge stint cost the taxpayer a whopping £850,000.

“They were able to get hold of postal votes and proxy votes which belonged to voters in the Central Ward,” Prosecuting QC Anthony Leonard said. “They arranged for postal votes and ballot papers to be sent not to the voter but to addresses which each defendant was connected.”

So, Boris Bounce, Third World-style fraud, or a combination of both? Take your pick. 

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