Saturday, 1 May 2010

A comment on yesterday's piece in The Independent on the increase in voter registration:

For no reason my name was removed from the electoral register in a London labour area, to rectify this I visited the local council with all the necessary paperwork to re-register. The officer at the council showed me his computer screen to validate my details, what was then immediately noticeable that some moderate sized houses on my road had 40-50 registered voters registered to them which were at most able to accommodate 8 people.

I pointed this discrepancy out to the officer, and he shrugged his shoulders. Because of this and the various cases of voter fraud in the past few decades, I no longer have faith in the electoral system.
Like they say ... a fraud a day keeps democracy away. Can we shoot them now?

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD


Contrary to the predictions of the doomsayers, it could just be that the Greeks have got away with it, and that the euro is off the hook - for the time being.

The reckoning, though, has yet to come. "Greeks face tax, pensions and pay misery in austerity plan," is what The Times is writing, thus announcing the "austerity package" that is going to have to be swallowed in return for its financial bail-out.

The crisis is given a human face by The Daily Mail and it would be hard not to have sympathy with the people who have been caught up in this. There but for the grace of God go we ... and, even then, it may be our turn soon enough.

As you would expect, the Wall Street Journal gets down to business, telling us that Greece is "very close" to an agreement with its European "partners" and the IMF, having accepted a three-year austerity program which is a precondition for the aid.

The final deal expected to be announced Sunday, by which time the cash buffer will have grown to €120 billion, spread over three years. The package must, however, be accepted by the Greek parliament and, all importantly, by the German legislature (with a possible court challenge in the wings). Despite this, the brief details so far emerging have been enough to quieten the markets. Talk of default is receding.

However, today is May Day and a sharp reaction is expected on the streets of Athens. The Guardian is reporting that the trade unions have pledged to turn traditional the celebrations into "raucous protests." Furthermore, a general strike – the third this year – has been called for Wednesday.

This, I suppose, is going to be the test – whether the deals between the eurozone leaders are going to stand against "popular" dissent, or whether there is enough pressure on the streets to bring the government down and blow the whole thing wide open.

GREEK THREAD

German police and tax officials have raided offices of Deutsche Bank and RWE in an investigation of an €180million fraud involving carbon credits. Both firms,we are told, insist they are not the target of the probe which has so far led to 230 offices and homes being raided, with up to 150 suspects at 50 companies being targeted.

The investigation is the largest carbon market probe to date and follows a series of raids across Europe designed to tackle our old friend carousel fraud. In this particular version, carbon traders collect VAT on traded carbon credits before disappearing without handing the tax revenue to the exchequer.

To that extent, the fact that carbon credits are involved is an irrelevance. In recent times, mobile phones and computer chips have been the vehicles for the fraud. With special rules now applying to these products, it was inevitable that fraudsters would find another target – and carbon credits are it.

Current estimates of losses to this fraud for last year stand at €5bn (£4.3bn) and, as I keep pointing out, this is real money, and on a scale far greater than your common-or-garden bank raid.

Henry Derwent, chief executive of the International Emissions Trading Association, has welcomed the investigation and urged the authorities to come down hard on anyone found guilty of carbon fraud. He is worried that this fraud has "quite unfairly damaged the perception of the European emissions trading scheme and potentially carbon trading as a whole."

There is no reason why this should be the case, though – any more than the fraud has damaged mobile phones or computer chips or, for that matter, the reputation of VAT which is so inherently prone to fraud that it should have been ditched long ago.

However, perhaps the real reason for the sloth of the authorities is that the fraud is providing plenty of "green jobs". That the "workers" are the German police, who coincidentally wear green uniforms, is neither here nor there.

COMMENT THREAD

For all the hype, and it would have been difficult for the media to have invested much more energy into promoting the event, it would appear that audience figures were down, compared with the first debate – an average of 7.4 million viewers as against 9.4 million.

These figures, as indicated, areaverages. What we never get to know is how many people watched the whole debates, start to finish. I have to admit that I was one of those wathcing last night's, although halfway through I also had a card game up on the laptop, to relieve the boredom.

If declining viewing figures equate to lack of general interest in the Cleggerown show, The Independent reports on what may be a conflicting signal.

The paper has "discovered" that there has been an "unprecedented" surge in the number of people registering to vote in next Thursday's election. From the south coast of England to central Scotland, local authorities are reporting increases of up to 17 percent, with a consistent trend across major cities, suburban constituencies and rural seats. The surge is apparently at its most pronounced in areas with crucial marginal seats.

The London Borough of Islington said 135,769 people had registered to vote on 6 May, compared with 116,176 at the time of the last election in 2005, a rise of 17 percent. In neighbouring Hackney, registrations have gone up 15 percent.

The number of voters on the electoral roll has increased by 8 percent in Leeds, equivalent to an extra 18,000 voters. It also went up by 6 percent in Newcastle and by 4 per cent in both Sheffield and Manchester. A call centre set up by Manchester City Council received more than 1,000 calls a day after the first leaders' debate on 15 April. The authority reported an "unprecedented" 7,000 people registering to vote during this month.

Returning officers, we are told, attribute the "remarkable" increase to the interest generated by the three televised leaders' debate and the three-horse nature of the contest. That may or may not be the case, but does not fit with the declining viewing figures. But it is an intriguing nugget of information, which is possibly at odds with indications of increasing voter apathy.

This further adds to the ambiguous signals that make this election impossible to call, even if the media luvvies think that Cameron "winning" the debate last night gives him the keys to Number 10. If that is the case, it is not reflected in the latest YouGov poll which has the Tories on 34 percent (no change), the Lib-Dims on 28 (down three) and Labour on 27 (no change). The "Others", incidentally, are up three on 11 percent.

There remains the possibility of a last-minute surge for the Tories, even right up to polling day, but then, to borrow from Star Trek, one could say: "prediction is futile".

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD