LAUSR

In February 2017 it was reported that anonymous text messages had been sent to Muslim voters in the Stoke parliamentary by-election urging them to vote Labour in order to defeat the UKIP candidate, and asking whether those who ‘helped the enemies of Islam’ would ‘be able to answer for this in the Grave and on the Final Day?’. The Guardian stated that the message ‘suggested that recipients “could go to hell”’ if they did not vote Labour, and a UKIP blogsite, which attributed the text to a named Labour Party activist on the basis of an apparent misreading of an article in the Sun, alleged that the text amounted to spiritual influence and ‘grounds to annul the election’, citing the 2015 Lutfur Rahman case in which it was asserted that the ‘Tower Hamlets First Party told voters they would go to hell if they didn’t vote for their man’. Then-mayor of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman had been found guilty in April 2015 of a number of corrupt and illegal practices in connection with his re-election to that office in 2014. These practices included making false statements of fact about another candidate’s personal conduct or character, electoral bribery; and (by his agents) personation, postal vote fraud, fraudulent registration of voters and the illegal payment of canvassers. They also included undue spiritual influence, a corrupt practice of which it appears that no one had been found guilty in the previous 120 years or so (and in respect of which there had been only nine successful election challenges, all in Ireland between 1852 and 1893). The 2014 election was declared void; Rahman was removed from office, was ordered to pay £250,000 in interim costs and was barred from standing for elected office until 2021; he declared himself bankrupt in 2015.