Political

In other news… electoral reform, bribery, sexy IT and paperwork problems

Will Straw has rightly taken the Conservative Party’s Baroness Warsi to task for not only trying to whip up fake scares about AV benefiting the BNP (who are actually against AV) but also for claiming that AV may make politicians try to appeal to the supporters of extremist parties when in fact her very own election literature did just that.

Ken Clarke is pushing on with implementing the Bribery Act – despite claims from Labour earlier in the year that the government could be about to delay implementing the Act indefinitely.

A Whitehall IT chief has admitted that, “Labour ministers ordered expensive computer projects because they wanted their policies to “sound sexy”.” It certainly helped explain Labour’s sudden conversion to having an e-enabled general election (plans since dropped). This was an announcement suddenly rolled out by Robin Cook despite completely cutting across the electronic counting and voting pilots the government was funding at the time and despite the lack of evidence from those trials that an e-election would be cost-effective or produce higher turnout.

And finally, news from Scotland – a last minute error with the paperwork meant that the nomination for one of the Liberal Democrat Scottish Parliament constituency candidates did not go through.