As we have been reminded recently, casting doubt on the integrity of elections is very central to the playbook of authoritarians who want to take away our democratic freedoms. The reality is our voting processes are very robust and any fraud is too vanishingly small to have any impact on the result. People who don't like the result and start talking about 'tribal' voting and skulduggery are going down a dangerous road.
The sad reality is that there seems to be a high degree of ignorance about the history of the borough and our near neighbours in the west. The Southall Labour party was at one point the biggest in the country. This is in part due to that we are unusual in having a large part of our local workforce who are unionised - particularly those working at the airport. There is also an historic affinity to the party across Asian communities due to Labour's support during the racial tension of the seventies and eighties.
You might not like that some people vote differently than you but, in a democracy, you should respect their choice. Labour won in Ealing because a majority of voters believed that they were doing a sufficiently good job to deserve another term. |