For Wisbech

There has been a great deal of huffing and puffing on social media about alleged electoral fraud in Wisbech local elections. There have been anecdotal evidence of people carriers drawing up outside polling booths not long after the end of the afternoon shift in local factories, and Eastern European residents being decanted into the polling booth, clutching electoral leaflets published by one of the parties. Perhaps the great conspiracy imagined by the writers of posts on Facebook and Twitter goes something like this: Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Bulgarian (you take your pick) residents shown how to register to vote. On the day, friendly local taxi drivers and political activists collect the voters from the factory gates and drive them to the polling station. So far, so good . Party workers offering transport to polling stations has been going on, if not for ever, then for as long as cars have been available to save people's legs. All within the bounds of accepted elec...

“Ahhhh – I love the smell of electoral outrage in the morning..” Yes, like the immortal Lt Colonel Kilgore’s beloved Napalm, there’s a smell wafting in the Wisbech breeze. The particular nasty niff in the air is the result of pre-election friction between the usual suspects – and one or two new ones. The election is on 2 nd May and is a double one. The first is entirely of no consequence as it   involves only the seats on Wisbech Town Council which, as far as I am aware, has a Mission Statement which largely consists of: (1) Playing silly buggers with the seating arrangements at Council meetings to ensure that anyone remotely critical of The Gang of Four who run things, has to sit in the naughty chair. (2) Making sure that nothing of any consequence is ever decided at said meetings, especially if it might interfere with the real power-broking which goes on in a local pub. (3) Promoting its own highly popular and successful version of BT’s Friends & Famil...