For years, Great Britain has prided itself on the legitimacy and fairness of our elections. Our political masters love to bleat that we boast the gold standard of electoral systems, unlike so many other countries.

But take a long hard look under the ­bonnet of our clapped-out democracy and pretty soon you will discover such lofty ­sentiments are in fact utter nonsense.

Far from a beacon of decency and integrity, the system is instead rife with corruption, intimidation, bribery and abuse on a quite epic scale.

For some time now I have argued there is something fundamentally wrong about the way British elections are conducted.

Ever since 2015, in fact, it became clear to me that electoral fraud was commonplace in many of our cities, especially prevalent among those with large Pakistani and Kashmiri communities. The Electoral Commission, which is supposed to be in charge of monitoring these things, paid little attention. The police even less.

Naturally, my political opponents accused me of sour grapes. Voters, meanwhile, remained largely indifferent.

That was until last month’s Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, where electoral cheating was so prevalent and so flagrant that evidence of wrong-doing in our system has now become utterly irrefutable.

The Green Party’s victory, beating Reform UK by 4,000 votes, exposed several gaping flaws in our procedures which unless urgently addressed threaten to turn our elections into a worldwide laughing stock and a national disgrace.

First was the extensive evidence of ‘family voting’, which until last month was something most of the British public had never even heard of. The cuddly expression might sound innocuous enough but in reality it is a perversion of our democracy.

This revolting practice is when someone (usually a dominant male) accompanies a woman into the polling booth to make sure they vote the right way, a clear breach of the 1872 ­Ballot Act.

According to Democracy Volunteers, an independent group that oversaw the conduct of the Gorton and Denton by-election, family voting took place in a staggering 68 per cent of the polling stations they visited.

In the 2024 General Election, Democracy Volunteers detected family voting in 116 of the 204 constituencies it monitored. I’m sorry but that isn’t democracy. It’s ­collective coercion.

What’s more, it will have happened right in front of the eyes of returning officers present in the polling stations. Why none of them didn’t immediately call the police to make sure that electoral law was being upheld remains a matter of deep concern.

But rather than confront this disturbing development head-on, as usual the Westminster establishment simply shrugged their shoulders and looked the other way for fear of being called racist. That is contemptible.

We’ve seen the same sort of attitude in northern cities where year after year, Asian grooming gangs were not exposed for fear of giving offence to the Muslim community. Thousands upon thousands of English girls have suffered unspeakably as a result.

Yet despite the overwhelming evidence of family voting in Gorton and Denton, Greater Manchester Police yesterday announced they found ‘no evidence of any intent to influence or refrain any person from voting’.

So there you have it. Once again, the authorities investigate, make a lot of noise and – surprise, surprise – find absolutely nothing to see. I’m sorry but it stinks.

But family voting merely scratches the surface of the problem in our elections.

Mass postal voting has led to a complete change in the way that we carry out elections in this country.

Introduced by Blair 25 years ago under the guise of increasing turnout, rather than enhance voter engagement the practice has become a farce.

Where once you needed good reason to apply for postal vote such as ill health, a disability, or being away from home for work or holiday, thanks to Labour’s introduction in 2001 of ‘postal voting on demand’ anyone and everyone can nowadays apply for one with minimal checks. Needless to say, this has ­drastically changed the way people now cast their vote.

Before 2001, proxy and postal voting accounted for about 2 per cent of the overall turnout at elections. But in the English county council elections of 2025, 34 per cent of the overall turnout was carried out by post, meaning over a third of votes were decided weeks before polling day itself.

You hardly need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce how such a system is ripe for abuse. The opportunity for undue influence, whether from family members, community figures or campaign activists, is glaringly obvious. The secrecy of the ballot, once sacrosanct, immediately becomes a thing of the past.

Over the years, we’ve heard cases of signatures being forged on ballot papers, of people who had left the ­country years earlier – even those who had long since died – somehow still managing to cast their votes.

At one by-election in Peterborough back in 2019, which Labour won by 683 votes, witnesses saw an individual brazenly turn up at the central ward count with over 1,000 postal votes stuffed inside a supermarket shopping bag.

And having personally witnessed an incident at another by-election some years previously in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, I think I can probably hazard a decent guess where he got them from.

It was there that I watched someone follow a postman who was delivering postal vote letters up a street, knocking on doors after the postman had made his delivery, claiming he was there to collect their vote. The man in question I later discovered just so happened to be a trade union official supporting the Labour Party.

Now just imagine, for argument’s sake, 84-year-old Mrs Smith, who’s frail and lives alone. Her postal vote has just been delivered and minutes later there’s a knock at the door and a man is standing there claiming he’s there to collect her ballot paper.

It’s all too easy to see how manipulation and intimidation and straightforward cheating can come into play.

On another memorable occasion, the 2015 mayoral election in Tower Hamlets descended into a circus of postal vote fraud so blatant the courts had to step in.

Lutfur Rahman, Britain’s first elected Muslim mayor, was kicked out of office after a specialist court concluded that he was guilty of vote-­rigging, buying votes and ­religious intimidation.

Almost 11 years after his disgrace, Mr Rahman is – astonishingly – once again the all-powerful mayor of Tower Hamlets, having been re-elected in 2022 after serving a five-year ban from holding public office, the maximum penalty possible. And yet still nothing fundamental changes.

No electoral procedure in the world has a system of mass early postal voting that isn’t wide open to intimidation and fraud. Which is why I believe that the postal voting register should be scrapped in its current form. Yes, of course, I understand there’ll be arguments about how postal votes are a necessity for some.

Allowances could be made for people going away on holiday, or they’re infirm or working overseas. But the blanket, no- questions-asked postal vote on demand? It’s got to go.

This would also make election day a special event again. After all, the right to vote is something that our ancestors fought and died to preserve. Casting a vote in person at the local polling station should be a source of pride for every British person.

Which brings me to my next point. The third alarming revelation in the Gorton and Denton by-election was the role Commonwealth voting played.

I suspect this will come as a shock to some Daily Mail readers but at present, citizens of ­Commonwealth nations who are resident in our country are allowed to vote in our elections.

This means that individuals who may have only recently arrived on these shores, often with little grasp of English and with utterly different priorities and interests, are granted a direct say in choosing the British government while retaining full political rights in their own countries.

That cannot be right. Yes, we have historically close links with the Commonwealth. And once upon a time that history meant we might have felt comfortable about its citizens voting in our elections.

But the Commonwealth today is a diverse and often loosely connected association of nations with vastly different political systems, interests and values from our own.

Allowing its citizens the vote, particularly in this era of mass immigration, feels like a bizarre anachronism. Other countries must think we are mad.

Does it make any difference? You bet. Just look at the statistics in Gorton and Denton. As much 10 per cent of the population there were born in Pakistan. If that by-election was only open to people who were actually born in this country, the Reform UK candidate, Matt Goodwin, would have won comfortably. That is a fact.

Which is why we cannot allow Commonwealth voting to continue. As well as being unjustifiable on the grounds of fairness, it is worsening Britain’s crisis of sectarianism, the deep divisions taking hold in our politics, and, I regret to say, the increasing alienation of our Jewish communities right across the country.

So, in short, the Gorton and Denton by-election should serve as a wake-up call to the political class – and more importantly to the country at large.

No more can our leaders bury their heads in the sand and ­pretend electoral fraud is a myth or something that only occurs in distant banana republics.

What is needed now is a serious, unapologetic crackdown. That means no more family voting in the polling booths. No more mass postal votes. No more Commonwealth voting.

Perhaps then we would return to a time where there would be no more rows or court cases whenever a vote is held.

For a long time, it was primarily the Labour Party which stood accused of engaging in various acts of electoral skulduggery.

Yet despite 14 years in government, the Conservatives made barely any attempt to seal the cracks, doubtless because they too stood to benefit from them. Even the holier-than-thou Liberal Democrats have been accused of attempting to game the system.

Well, enough is enough. It is time for fundamental change to our system and I will campaign on this until I am successful.

Britain’s proud democratic tradition rests on a simple, powerful principle: That every citizen casts their vote freely, securely and in secret. It is a principle won through centuries of struggle and reform.

Time was when we set the standard for clean elections across the world. It is high time we took that standard back.

Because if we don’t, we risk poisoning trust in our democracy for good.

• Nigel Farage is leader of Reform UK