Ok, so if John Hemming, Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, thrice-failed Parliamentary candidate and indefatigable self-publicist, has his way the whole General Election shooting match could be called off while a judicial review is held on the legality of postal votes.

On the face of it, two of Hemming’s main ‘demands’ – counting postal votes seperately from those cast in the traditional manner and an increase in the time limit for petitions where there is evidence of fraud from 21 days to two months – seem eminently reasonable from the standpoint of openness and transparency, even if I do have distinct reservations about his motives in putting forward the former at this point in time given the comments of Brian Mawrey QC, judge in the recent electoral fraud case in Birmingham, who described Hemming as a ‘dreadful witness’ and noted that:

“His evidence was largely inadmissible hearsay. He possesses an inability to give a straight answer to a straight question which would be the envy of a national politician appearing on the Today programme.”

One of his others, allowing political parties to scrutinise applications for postal votes smacks of high farce. What is he suggesting here, that he and his party be accorded the right to challenge the validity of applications for postal ballots and if so in what circumstances?

In the event of actual complaints? In which case why would it fall to the political parties, themselves, to act as scrutineers when this could be done quite adequately and without risk of bias or conflict of interest by the Returning Officer.

No. I think it far more likely that his pretext for suggesting inserting political parties into what should, what must be a non-partisan process can only be to look for what he would no doubt describe as ‘anomalies’ and ‘patterns’ in applications – find too many, in his opinion, applications from a particular street or estate and next thing you know he’ll be filing complaints, and press releases all over the place, in an effort to have those applications turned down. Of course, what constitutes an anomaly or pattern is something that’s very much open to interpretation and it take no genuine powers of prescience to predict that under such a rule the kind of patterns and anomalies that get spotted with invariably coincide with areas in which one particular party is known to be well supported.

It doesn’t take a political genius to work out the consequences of allowing political parties to scrutinise applications for postal votes. Within a given district or ward, political parties are well aware of the likely levels of support both for themselves and for their opponents and equally that, if denied a postal vote, a proportion of those applicants will ultimately not vote at all. Far from scrutinising applications in the interests of preventing fraud, which is of course in the public interest, its inevitable that political parties will use the scrutiny process in their own interests by seeking, wherever possible, to depress the turnout in areas where they know their opponents are strong. It’s a system that’s intrinsically open to abuse and, frankly, crying out to be ‘worked’ for every political advantage it could possibly yield which mean, inevitably, that that is exactly what will happen.

Cllr Hemming was, ultimately, right in crying foul over the results in the Aston and Bordesley Green ward, as Brian Mawrey QC quite correctly conceded, however its also true that for all his bluster and self-promotion in evidence he contributed little or nothing to the case. As an article I’m working on for publication here in a day or two will show, that’s not so unusual for Cllr Hemming. When it comes to unsubstantiated allegations and hearsay, he’s got more a bit of previous form.