Election leaflets

[norbert]

Just read the conscience clause, going to be a tough one if your personal safety is at risk, the Manager would have to put your health and safety first, regardless of your opinion on the contents.

Has this been tested ? if BNP have paid for this leaflet and RM don't deliver it, would we be breaking the Law ?

The BNP or any other political party wont be paying for the delivery of their canidate election leaflet, The Ministry of Justice will be.

Any other postings over and above this done by a political party are paid by the party and not the MoJ.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... l-election" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


"Censorship extends far beyond that. A traditional feature of British elections is the electoral communication, under which each candidate can send out a copy of their electoral address, delivered to every voter free by Royal Mail. Under another bit of Kafka-esque New Labour legislation, the Royal Mail now vets the content of every electoral address. The text must be seen and approved by a central Post Office unit before the leaflet can be printed and prepared for delivery.

So much for freedom of speech. The New Labour rationale for this is that the Royal Mail is checking the candidates' election address does not fall foul of Britain's notorious libel laws – the harshest and most restrictive of any western country. It also has to be cleared for many other laws restricting free speech, many of them introduced by New Labour – for example, that it does not "glorify" terrorism, or incite racism or homophobia.

So, if a candidate were to say in their election address that they believe Tony Blair and Jack Straw are war criminals, or (to take a topical example) that Christian bed and breakfast owners ought to be allowed to refuse gay couples, then their election address would be locked by the Royal Mail.

This is crazy. The Royal Mail delivers millions of letters every day. Some of them doubtless contain libellous and even racist statements. The Royal Mail does not open them all and check they are "legal".

Actually, whisper that softly, we don't want to give New Labour ideas.

Furthermore, in this case, it is not a court that decides if a statement is libellous, it is the Royal Mail. This is censorship of candidates during an election and without any court injunction. It says yet more about the cosy establishment clique that governs us that none of the major parties is up in arms about this.

Now, we come to the most fundamentally undemocratic aspect of British elections: the electoral system. It delivers massively disproportionate results with minority parties virtually unrepresented in parliament. At the last election, it delivered a good majority to an unpopular Tony Blair, even though New Labour received only 36% of votes cast – which represented just 22% of those entitled to vote.

But it does not favour the big parties evenly. New Labour can get a working majority with 34% of votes cast, while the Tories need 39%. If New Labour and the Tories both got 36%, New Labour would probably have almost 50 more seats. The Lib Dems could get 34%, yet win under half the seats that New Labour would get with the same percentage.

On top of which, we will see the irony of politicians rejected by the electorate being given comfy, paying seats in the House of Lords.

So, there we have British elections today: an unfair electoral system, censorship of candidates' electoral addresses, little real political choice for voters, widespread postal ballot-rigging and elections administered by partisan council officials in a corrupt political climate.

Don't be surprised if New Labour do that little bit better, when the votes are counted, than you might expect. As Joseph Stalin said, it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.

So are British elections still free and fair? If this were a foreign election I was observing, I have no doubt that my answer would be no. "


" Uncle Joe " would be proud of New Liebour - no wonder Brown & co have the p*** taken out of them , something chronic in "Private Eye " , one party stabs you in the back , the other would cut your throat ; given half an opportunity .

[norbert]

In the Euro election, the BNP leaflet came out the same week we had our Northants Police 'Home Beat' D2D newspapers; so we all put the election crap inside the 'Home Beat'. The OB weren't too impressed at having BNP leaflets inside their paper. Surely they weren't worried that people would make a connection between the two?!! Anyway, the story made the local rag!

like the Postman Plod Avatar - I think ? you could get a T shirt once , with him dumping all this mail in a post box - saying " The lazy b***tards can wait for their giros " - FAO Hellmail - only joking !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postman_Plod" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[golfgod]

we had some labour leaflets and got 5p a item had 563 in total so not to bad

[MinisterofCucumber]

Norbert wrote:

"As Joseph Stalin said, it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes."

I didn't realise RM have the power to censor.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

In the Euro election, the BNP leaflet came out the same week we had our Northants Police 'Home Beat' D2D newspapers; so we all put the election crap inside the 'Home Beat'. The OB weren't too impressed at having BNP leaflets inside their paper. Surely they weren't worried that people would make a connection between the two?!! Anyway, the story made the local rag!

and on here as well

http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/communit ... 'Home+Beat'" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Throgg]

Can somebody post me a link to the agreement that states we have 3 days to deliver addressed election material and 7 days for unaddressed material?

TIA

[Big Daz]

Just read the conscience clause, going to be a tough one if your personal safety is at risk, the Manager would have to put your health and safety first, regardless of your opinion on the contents.

Has this been tested ? if BNP have paid for this leaflet and RM don't deliver it, would we be breaking the Law ?

The BNP or any other political party wont be paying for the delivery of their canidate election leaflet, The Ministry of Justice will be.

Any other postings over and above this done by a political party are paid by the party and not the MoJ.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... l-election" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


"Censorship extends far beyond that. A traditional feature of British elections is the electoral communication, under which each candidate can send out a copy of their electoral address, delivered to every voter free by Royal Mail.

The author has worded that badly, RM dont deliver for free, they are paid by the MoJ to deliver canidate leaflets.

As our election material money is taxed and NI i wonder how much goes back to the government .

RML say the MOJ contract is worth millions of pounds. RML also say if we do a poor job we could loose this work to a rival in future.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Can somebody post me a link to the agreement that states we have 3 days to deliver addressed election material and 7 days for unaddressed material?

TIA

http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/communit ... 99#p159299" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[norbert]

I'll put my tin hat on here but I don't buy that RM line about if you do a poor job , the election bumpf will go to someone else .

Who would want to go tramping round all those sh**y estates or round the middle of nowhere ? .....If the competition took the job on , it'd be Baz with all the bumpf in his garage and his white van job and the people delivering them would be people topping their giros up for £2/3 per hour or economic migrants .

Those firms have to have their margins and they'll cut corners .

If people got their leaflets , they'd be thrown over the hedge or more likely they'd be dumped in a bin . This is what these stupid Tories don't realise or what the likes of Hellmail don't get .

[fishtank]

norbert wrote
it'd be Baz with all the bumpf in his garage and his white van job and the people delivering them would be people topping their giros up for £2/3 per hour or economic migrants .

Baz already delivers in my area,the van is white(no MOT) and the occupants are eastern european and they work for TNT.
Not directly obviously....sub-contracted and last week they were delevering amongst other things a bnp leaflet.

[lazyjack]

Bin the f***ing lot

[number one]

Bin the f***ing lot

Then go job centre??

[norbert]

norbert wrote
it'd be Baz with all the bumpf in his garage and his white van job and the people delivering them would be people topping their giros up for £2/3 per hour or economic migrants .

Baz already delivers in my area,the van is white(no MOT) and the occupants are eastern european and they work for TNT.
Not directly obviously....sub-contracted and last week they were delevering amongst other things a bnp leaflet.

RM have had a Black Casual delivering BNP leaflets - the sort of guy that the BNP would put on the first plane to Montiego Bay

Baz's white van would probably be belching black smoke from using red diesel - all good race to the bottom stuff

[DH73]

Our manager handed out the election material payment forms this morning. Liebour were first off the mark with some addressed D2D stuff.

[Throgg]

Throgg wrote:
Can somebody post me a link to the agreement that states we have 3 days to deliver addressed election material and 7 days for unaddressed material?

TIA
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=16155&p=159299#p159299

Thank you TBT