Results tagged “Aston” from Birmingham Post - News Blog

Local government elections in Birmingham wouldn't be proper elections without allegations of dirty tricks flying around between veterans of the 2004 Aston postal vote trial.
Four years on from that seminal moment, when a judge likened corruption in the city to a banana republic, senior figures in both Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are doing their best to land damaging blows on each other.
The Lib Dems clearly won the first round, by securing the sacking of two Labour councillors who were caught by police in a warehouse at midnight surrounded by several hundred postal vote forms. Their protestations of innocence did not convince the Elections Commissioner, who described the warehouse as a postal vote forging factory.
Round two went solidly to Labour, when the Commissioner threw out an election petition in Aston and in doing so accused a Lib Dem candidate of "dishonestly" filling in disability benefit application forms and Lib Dem councillor Ayoub Khan of taking part in a "scurrilous" plot to accuse a Labour councillor of witness intimidation.

Even given the long and tortured history of political shenanigans in Aston, the latest turn of events takes some explaining. There must be something in the water calculated to ignite trouble in the weeks leading up to city council elections.
Six years ago, the then Labour candidate Saeed Aehmed was sacked hours before nominations closed after failing to give party officials satisfactory answers about allegations of benefit fraud. Aehmed defected to the Liberal Demcorats and that set off a chain of events culminating in the infamous "banana republic" election court hearing of 2005, which destroyed Labour's reputation, and the 2007 election petition, judgement of which will be released next week.
There was perhaps a certain inevitability that attempts would be made to wreck Labour's selection process for this year's council elections on May 1. So, right on cue, serious allegations were filed against Amjad Hussain, the front runner to get the Labour nomination in Aston.