UK/General election

UK/General election (Nation/Election)
Subpage(s)	•UK/General election/1964 •UK/General election/1979 •UK/General election/1997 •UK/General election/2010 •UK/General election/2015 •UK/General election/2017 •UK/General election/2019 •UK/General election/2024
UK General elections happen every 4-5 years, or sometimes more often. They are the official method whereby a political party is chosen to constitute "democratic" government.

Secret vote

Gordon Winter, a former BOSS agent and author of the 1981 book Inside BOSS wrote how British elections are not secret:

Let's examine one claim I made in that book, that British Intelligence breaches the secrecy of the ballot box by monitoring all votes cast for British Communists. On p. 419 I explained that most people in Britain believe that their vote is sacrosanct, that nobody can possibly discover how you voted. Not so. When you enter a polling station your name is automatically checked on the voters' roll. This gives your home address. Then, so you can register your vote, you are given a numbered counterfoil and the person who gives you that counterfoil writes down your voters' roll number on the counterfoil stub which bears the same number. Whatever they may tell you, this means that after you have marked your voting slip and popped it into the ballot box that slip can later be identified, by relating it to that (numbered) counterfoil stub which gives your number on the voter's roll. And this in turn gives your name and address.
When my book mentioned this fact, you simply would not have believed the nonsense some newspapers published in order to knock it flat. One newspaper said my claim was ridiculous because all voting slips are destroyed after the election. Not true. After an election these voting slips are boxed and stored in buildings belonging to the Lord Chancellor's department in west London, where they are stored for one year before being destroyed. Most newspapers stressed that the boxes containing the voting slips are 'sealed'. So what? I remember BOSS telling me (in the late sixties) that they had stopped using their (heavily sealed) diplomatic pouches to send top-secret material to Pretoria by air from London. Why? Because a British Intelligence operative (an extreme right-winger who admired South Africa) had tipped us off that the back-room boys in Whitehall had found a way of opening our (and all other) 'dip' pouches. The much simpler seals on the voting boxes would hardly cause them a problem. Another newspaper said that it would be a ridiculously difficult task for 'any person' to scrutinise the voting slips. This is a clever misuse and deliberate twisting of words. Of course it would be difficult for 'one person' to do. But I never stated that one person monitored the voting slips. I said British Intelligence did it. Another newspaper said it would be impossible for anyone to get these voting slips because there were 'locked up'. You have to laugh. Your voting slips are not even locked in modern safes. They are kept in boxes, in a locked room.

Winter also wrote that the names of all who voted communist were passed on to South Africa.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
UK/General election/1964	1964 UK election
UK/General election/1979	The elections that saw Brian Crozier's Shield successfully install Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister.
UK/General election/1997
UK/General election/2010	National elections to the UK parliament.
UK/General election/2015	National elections to the UK parliament.
UK/General election/2017
UK/General election/2019
UK/General election/2024	UK's 2024 election.

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References

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