I did provide that information to the police in 2004, and they had an operation called Operation Gripe, in which they basically did nothing. We have now moved on. We are eight years down the track. I do not think that it would be reasonable to prosecute people for things they did eight years ago. Let me quote again from the judgment:
“The reaction of the police can be best summed up by drawing attention to the code name they gave to complaints of malpractice—Operation Gripe. This indicated better than anything else their view that the whole business was a complete waste of time and that Mr Hemming and the other complainants were a tiresome nuisance.”
I gave all the evidence to the police, who piled it in a box, called it Operation Gripe and did nothing. At the same time, we have to be realistic. We have moved on eight years and I am not going to spend all my time trying to get a particular woman prosecuted for handing poll cards to the Labour party. What I said to the returning officer, the chief executive of the council, was that I wanted her to stop doing it, not get her imprisoned. There are questions about the objectives. My objective in the campaigning I have done on election fraud over a number of years is to stop it. To do that, we must have systems to monitor and detect things. That is where these particular probing amendments come in. They would give the Government a facility to make changes. I happen to think that the proposal for video recording of what goes on in the polling station would be one of the best solutions.