David Cameron’s Partisan Gerrymandering of the British Democracy

1 Introduction

In the local elections of 4th May 2017, the Conservatives seem to have won a great victory on a democratic basis.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that David Cameron rigged the 7 May 2015 election and planned to gerrymander the constituency boundaries in 2016 on the basis of a vastly reduced British electorate – and the great majority of the voters who were removed from the rolls were non-Conservative voters.

The evidence for this Conservative policy is overwhelming and the British media have not adequately covered this issue, although there are many articles about it in various sources. To put it as its mildest, the British media have a limited agenda and hardly any locus of interest in the transmission of political truth. None of the reported stories connect the dots to provide an overall picture showing what has happened, and the relationship of apparently isolated actions to the overall policy. That’s what this article attempts to do.

The presentation and discussion of the outcome of general and local elections on British TV and the newspapers is completely uninformed. That should change.

2 Cameron’s Policy of Voter Reduction and Gerrymandering

There were three stages to David Cameron’s plan to fix future elections in the favour of the Conservative Party for decades. These were:

a) Get the Liberal Democrats to sponsor, support and vote into law, the 2013 Individual Registration and Administration Act (2013 IER Act) so as to implicate that Party in the greatest disenfranchisement of voters that has ever occurred in Britain. (The first run of the new system disenfranchised 13.4% of previous voters).

b) Take over the processes of voter registration and administration under that Act, so the Government had the right to set out further challenges to the registration of voters and prevent the updating of the revised 2013 IER Act Parliamentary Electoral Rolls using other means – for example, by challenging the right of seven million voters to remain on the Parliamentary Electoral Register and requiring their response by end of December 2014, and if they did not respond, remove their right to vote; and cancelling the updating of the Rolls by refusing to run the previous system of Household Electoral Registration in 2014, so as to allow a defective register with millions of missing voters to determine the outcome of the 7 May 2015 general election.

c) Use the much reduced voters’ roll (resulting from the 2013 IER Act) as the basic ward data to gerrymander the constituency boundaries using a Conservative-Party-Seat-maximising computer programme, by “cracking” and “packing”. Wikipedia usefully defines these processes as

([“Cracking” is] diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts) and “packing” (is concentrating the opposing party’s voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

The electoral wards are meant to be distributed on a random basis.

Using a computer programme to deliberately benefit one party with the intention of “locking Labour out of power for decades* is not democracy. See the Telegraph article at Section 3 which sets this intention out.

Theresa May’s 2016 review of the British Constituency boundaries has now done that.

Six Articles Referring to the Media Coverage of Voter De-registration Leading Up To Theresa May’s 2016 Gerrymandering

See the following six articles and a petition, all published and accessible on the internet, and which deal extensively with this topic:

2.1 An initial article by Bryan Gould and me called “A Gerryman-dered Election and a Flawed Mandate” at

http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/2205/a-gerrymandered-election-and-a-flawed-mandate

2.2 My article asking “Is Britain Too Gerrymandered To Be A Genuine Democracy?” at

http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/2195/is-britain-now-too-gerrymandered-to-be-a-genuine-democracy

2.3 A response to Frankie Boyle’s 1st June 2015 article in the “Comment is Free” section of the Guardian asking the question “What if David Cameron is an Evil Genius?” to which I have responded “What if David Cameron is a Gerry-mandering PM?” at

https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/what-if-david-cameron-is-a-gerrymandering-idiot-a2aa15377fe

2.4 An article pointing out that “If David Cameron Were An American President, He Would Have Been Impeached By Now” because the US Constitution legally forbids gerrymandering partisan reductions in voter registration that Cameron has implemented.

See https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/if-david-cameron-were-an-american-president-he-would-have-been-impeached-by-now-22789441bf03

2.5 An article listing the ten major junctions at which David Cameron could have chosen to improve voter registration, and how he chose at every such point to disenfranchise voters who were unlikely to vote Conservative.

See https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/how-david-cameron-s-govern-ment-stole-the-2015-general-election-a1ca0d9c1658

2.6 An article asking “Has David Cameron Committed Misconduct in Public Office?” at

https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/has-david-cameron-committed-misconduct-while-in-public-office-8542a018fbe8

2.7 A petition suggesting that ”David Cameron should be impeached for Misconduct in Public Office” at

https://www.change.org/p/first-minister-of-scotland?re-cruiter=462731898&utm_medium=copylink&utm_source=share_petition

Given that we live in an elective dictatorship which has ignored petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, I had no high hopes this petition could succeed. And there appears to be no public appetite to highlight the appalling misbehaviour of the previous Prime Minister.

I have called this petition ”The People’s Charter 2016” in honour of the 1838 Chartist Petition which proposed solutions to a similar problem at that time.

The parallels between 1838 and 2016 are considerable. I believe that whatever the media do, ultimately the academics will pick up on Cameron’s gerrymandering.

This is the biggest historic change which disables voting rights and determines general election outcomes and is the biggest story which the media have almost completely ignored.

Cameron has successfully reversed the historical extensions to the right to vote by disabling the hard-won voting rights of millions of women, tenants, the Black and Middle East Community, students and the young – all largely non-Conservative voters. In the long run he cannot possibly succeed in reversing one of the major progressive trends in British history, but for decades we might have a succession of Conservative Governments which lack democratic legitimacy.

3 Telegraph Article At 5.36 pm on 8 May 2015 by James Kirkup and Ashley Kirk

This article was entitled “New Commons boundaries top Conservative government agenda” and subtitled “Senior Tories say new government will implement many policies the Lib Dems blocked”. You can see this article at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11593496/New-Commons-bounda-ries-top-Conservative-government-agenda.html

The article begins “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government, senior Tories have said.”

That source also shows an interesting map of how the Tories would have gained 314 seats if these changes had been in place before the 2015 general election.

4 Conclusion on these articles and the Telegraph Story on 8 May 2015

It is essential to stamp David Cameron’s moniker as “Cameron the Gerrymander” and to place him in his rightful place in British history.

He was responsible for the introduction of both the 2013 IER and 2014 voter-reduction leading up to May’s 2016 gerrymandering constituencies, as well as preventing actions which could have assisted voter re-registration, and his role in progressing that project needs to be widely recognised.

That removal of millions of non-Conservative voting rights and the subsequent gerrymandering of constituency boundaries are now historic facts which are of supreme significance in understanding both Cameron’s victory in the post-2013-IER-Act 2015 general election, the outcome of the 2017 Local elections and the likely outcome of the May 2017 General Election based upon the new gerrymandered-constituencies.

The proper operation of British democracy has been subverted by the 2013 IER Act, which has removed the vote from millions of women, tenants, the Black and Middle East Community, students, and the young. The disenfranchisement of millions of mainly non-Conservative voters was followed by the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries by Theresa May’s Government in 2016.

These actions are an absolute disgrace which has been deliberately implemented by the Cameron and May Governments for the partisan purpose of winning elections the Conservatives would otherwise have lost.

No democratic government should behave like that.

The benefits-reducing attack upon the disenfranchised voters is particularly appalling, as is government control (and resulting absence of information) on the extent of that gerrymandering.

David Cameron probably lost the “Remain” vote because he had disabled so many voters who might have voted to stay in the EU and the polls could not take account of that. And he relied on the EU poll predictions which he had disabled. See

https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/the-effect-of-david-cameron-on-the-brexit-referendum-17d0dda064e8

My book “How David Cameron Fixed the 2010 Election, and Much Else” covers this entire subject, and is available at:

You can ”look inside” that book at that location.

5 Overarching Conclusion

5.1 A Personal Result

I had worked out on 3rd May 2015, part way through a seven day holiday In Edinburgh, that the Conservatives, due to the 2013 IER removal of non-Conservative voters, were going to have an absolute majority after the 7 May 2015 General Election.

I returned home on 4th May and in the light of that calculation I and my family went to the nearest betting shop on the 6th May 2015 and bet £350 at odds of 7-1 on the idea that the Conservatives would have an absolute majority.

We collected £2,800 on the day after the election.

5.2 Advice to the Pollsters

The pollsters and the polls will NEVER predict the election results more accurately unless they ask the following two questions

“How do you intend to vote?” and “Are you registered to vote?”

Unless the second answer is actually “yes” (and a lot of UK voters think they are registered and no longer are) then how an individual intends to vote is not relevant to a voting outcome.

If you take the trouble to read the evidence, you will see how the vote was “rigged” by the Cameron-led Coalition Government acting against the interests of the people and destroying part of the foundations of British democracy for partisan purposes.

More follows!

© George Tait Edwards 2017

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This post was written by George Tait Edwards