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Interesting articles.

This Thursday's by-election at Oldham seems to be a straight shoot out between Labour and UKIP.

Labour had a 14,000 majority in May, but many pundits believe that figure will be dramatically slashed tomorrow and there is a good chance UKIP could take the seat.

There could be tactical voting by the Tory supporters as well as those Labour voters disillusioned with Corbyn and the lurch to the left.

I imagine a lot of senior disgruntled Labour MP's will be secretly hoping this by-election goes t1ts up for them as it hastens Corbyn's demise.

Labour did quite well apparently... Erm, no one in the press said that would happen did they?

The guy who stood for the Green Party is deaf and an associate of mine ... Simeon Hart ... Bit of a knob!

They say hard work never hurt anyone ... but why take a chance?

I wouldn't go that far yet. Corbyn has hardly covered himself in glory this week.

For me, Labour had an excellent candidate in Oldham and that was a big contributor towards the result. He looks like he will be a good MP as he does care about local issues.

"That was fun and to round off the day, I am off to steal a charity collection box and then desecrate a place of worship.” - Smokey, The Selhurst Arms, 26/02/02

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Farage claims the vote was rigged and will make a formal complaint about the process - particularly postal votes.

He spoke on R4's Today Programme and said his observers witnessed a "huge bundle" of postal votes arriving at one Polling Station - this is illegal (if true) as postal votes must be placed in a letter box and sent to the town hall for verification before the voting slips are put into the count.

He also said one ballot box had a 99% result for Labour - which in itself defied the odds of probability, so that box must have been tampered with.

He also said that a lot of the Asian voters were coerced into voting Labour by community leaders, many of whom were councillors, or mosque imams. They were able to do this more easily to non-english speaking voters but others felt intimidated because they lived in council homes and were worried about going against councillors "recommendations".

Strong words/accusations... but we saw this happen in Tower Hamlets and constituencies in Birmingham where the election was deemed null and void and another election called.

Ignoring this development, the turnout was very low, favouring Labour and Oldham does have a large Asian community who are/were never likely to vote UKIP and if they do decide to run it again I doubt that UKIP could win that seat.

It would be nice though to see proper Parliamentary process observed and not allegations of corruption of postal voting once again.

Edited by Hoof Hearted (04 Dec 2015 10.20am)

Asians not voting for UKIP shocker! I wonder why...