WILLIAM Gladstone’s statue stands just yards from the entrance to King George’s Hall, Blackburn.

The tribute to the 19th Century Prime Minister — who ensured everyone got a secret vote — overlooked the venue where ballots from a rigged council election were counted in 2001.

The irony is not lost on some of the candidates in next month’s polls.

Thanks to postal voting, some parties claim the transparency of Britain’s proud system is being corrupted.

Former Labour councillor Mohammed Hussain is now in prison for three years and seven months for the part he played in an election fraud in Blackburn in 2002.

He won Bastwell by a 600-plus majority but a police probe — triggered by complaints by the local Conservative Association — found more than 200 votes delivered to people in the post had been filled in on behalf of Hussain.

Such abuse has only been made possible since the Government relaxed rules on postal voting in 2001, allowing anyone to use the method instead of visiting a polling station. Previously, people had to have a legitimate reason, such as working abroad.

The Government’s postal voting experiments continued last year in the local and European elections, doing away with the ballot box entirely in East Lancashire for the first time.

“The thing to remember in 2004 is that everyone had a postal vote for two elections, we did checks and no problems were reported,” said Blackburn returning officer, Phil Watson. “In 2002, just a small percentage opted for the postal vote and while what happened was unacceptable, there is no proof it is rife in the system.”

Mr Watson, like returning officers across East Lancashire, is working to safeguard the system and is reluctant to discuss whether police will again accompany postmen once postal votes start to be sent out a week on Monday.

When a postal vote is delivered, it comes with a declaration form which must be signed by the voter and countersigned by a friend or relative. The completed ballot paper is then mailed back in a numbered envelope placed in another envelope.

When it arrives at the council, the ballot and declaration number is checked to ensure they match and are then split — protecting the secrecy of the ballot until polling day.

Declarations are checked for irregularities, such as large numbers countersigned by one person, with around 1,000 looked over in Blackburn at the last election.

Mr Watson said: “I am confident we will spot anything amiss but I can’t guarantee it will be fraud-free. There is a need for this election to be seen as watertight, though.”

In 2002, Hussain’s case was described as an ‘isolated one’ — but a probe is now under way over similar claims in Burnley and high court judge, Richard Mawrey, last week quashed the results of two elections in Birmingham after deciding there had been large-scale vote rigging.

Sitting in a special election court, he slammed the current system, pointing out that postal votes are easy to steal as they are sent in striking envelopes.

He said: “Short of writing ‘Steal me’ on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands.”

And there is now a real danger of the postal voting row becoming political, too, with the Tories and Lib Dems pointing the finger at Labour.

But all three parties have been urged by the Association of Electoral Administrators and Electoral Reform Society to ensure members stay out of the postal voting system, putting an end to candidates offering to deliver completed votes for people.

Paul Browne, a Lib Dem from Darwen, said: “On polling day, I might drive people to vote at a polling station but I’ll have no idea how they voted.”

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has defended the system, as had Local Government Minister Nick Raynsford. And a spokesman for the Department for Constitutional Affairs said: “The voting system works, and works well.”

But Jack Straw disagreed: “What has been exposed is serious weaknesses in the system, which will have to be dealt with. If the electoral process is corrupted, everybody suffers.”

And Craig Murray, his independent Parliamentary rival, said: “People have come to me to say they are under pressure to get postal votes and hand them over. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

I argued but he wasn’t listening. ‘I’m not voting for him, anyway’, he said; ‘I’m voting for that Craig Murray’. I tried to persuade him not to, though I don’t think I got through to him who I was. This politics stuff is pretty confusing.

Luckily I have a witness to this next incident, or you wouldn’t believe it. I was being interviewed by Deborah Haynes of AFP, a journalist so beautiful I have only just recovered the power to breathe normally. As she was interviewing me, two old ladies came in. They looked like saintlier versions of the Queen Mum, with their white hair, twin sets and handbags.

Ada was 82 and Mabel 83. They had come to offer their support. My gratitude suddenly froze. ‘That Jack Straw, his wife’s a Paki’ said Mabel. Ada backed her up. ‘She wears a lot of makeup and keeps her face covered. But I once saw her hand, sticking out of her sleeve’. Ada managed to say this as if sticking out of a sleeve was a particularly sinister place to find a hand. ‘And’, Ada concluded triumphantly, ‘Her hand were black’.

Mabel than added that she intended to go buy a hammer and kill all the Pakis with it.

I had thought that I had lived an unusually full and varied life, but nothing had prepared me for the sight of these two grannies full of hate. I asked them why. The results were interesting. The immediate grievance was that Mabel’s Asian neighbour had built a massive home extension, blocking the sunlight from Mabel’s garden, which was her pride and joy. The workmen building the extension, which came right to the boundary, had trampled and destroyed it, leaving it strewn with concrete and rubble.

They had been to the Council to complain and discovered that there was no planning permission; but, Mabel alleged, the neighbour’s father was a ‘Big man at the mosque’ so the Council had done nothing.

Probing further the story gets more interesting. The neighbour the other side of the new extension, a Mr Khan, had also had his garden destroyed and had complained to the Council, without avail.

‘So you like Mr Khan.?’

‘Oh, yes, Mr Khan’s a real gentleman, very polite.’

‘And he’s Asian?’

Mabel conceded this, reluctantly. I suggested that the problem was not the colour of people’s skin, but this was a question of rich, influential people trampling on the rights of the poor and vulnerable. The challenge to their way of thinking was too much for Mabel and Ada, who left. ‘We’re still buying that hammer’ said Ada.

Race relations in Blackburn are at worst dreadful and at best non-existent. I have yet to see a single mixed race social group just chatting together on the street. People work together and transact business, but they don’t mix. I met a pleasant lady of Tanzanian origin who told me she has white friends and Asian friends, but not together. Both sides say to her ‘You don’t mix with them do you?’

The big story of this election is vote-rigging. A Blackburn councillor was last week jailed for three and a half years for vote-rigging in the council elections. There are an astonishing 16,000 postal votes registered in Blackburn, and still rising by two hundred a day. One feature of this fraud mechanism I find most sinister. Postal ballots are mixed in with other ballots before they are counted, so there is no way you can tell if it is rigged. If one candidate loses the main ballot but gets in on eighty per cent of the postal ballot, there is no way you could know. I strongly suspect this might happen in Blackburn now.

I have had, to date, nine people come separately to see me, all from the Asian community, to complain about intimidation in the current election. One shopkeeper told me that he had been visited by the local Labour councillor who had demanded that all eight of his family must apply for postal ballots, and must show them to the councillor before they are posted. In a rotten borough like Blackburn the council can do a lot of harm to a small shopkeeper.

The Green Goddess is up and running as my campaign bus. It is an alarming vehicle. We have it plastered in posters and going round town blasting out our campaign song ‘Hit the road Jack Straw’ by The Rub. Martin Bell took a ride in it and declared it scarier than anything he had done as a war reporter.

Martin did a campaign launch for us. About ninety people attended, which for an election meeting nowadays is quite good. The local paper said fifty, and devoted three times as much space to Jack Straw’s refutation than to what I said. Some nuts are tougher to crack than others. But I am now ready to make a prediction; Jack Straw’s vote will be down to 15,000. He is looking very beatable.