A FORMER Labour Party chairman has hit out over members of other parties not being gracious towards Mohammad Ali after winning a year-long, arduous battle to expose fraud.

John Pitt said to the News & Mail: “Your paper rightly leads with the High Court decision to remove the Liberal Democrat Councillor Mohammed Bashir because of vote fixing in 2012.

“This is an important moment, an opportunity perhaps to eliminate electoral corruption from Woking politics for good.

“We have reached this point because Mohammed Ali, the ‘defeated’ Labour candidate, has given a large part of his life for more than a year to the difficult task of ferreting out the evidence. He had nothing whatever to gain from it. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do.

“When you asked the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties for their comments on the judgement, neither of them saw fit to express any gratitude to Mohammad Ali. I found that disappointing. Surely we are all against fraud?

“The High Court has made it clear that the law must be changed radically because at present it encourages and rewards fraud.

“That is an issue for national politics, but I hope we shall be able to agree on the detail, at the same time as making sure that our own practice is beyond reproach.”