Scandals arising from Tony Blair’s strategy to improve turnouts by giving everybody the right to vote by post risk placing Britain in the same league as newly toppled dictatorships.

Bridget Prentice, the Constitutional Affairs Minister who has just steered an anti-fraud Bill through Parliament, reacted angrily, saying that the move was unnecessary, unwarranted and unfair.

The Council of Europe was created in 1949 as a postwar bulwark against communism, with Britain among the ten founders. Today it brings together 46 nations from Iceland to Russia. Much of its work involves supporting ex-communist states to introduce democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The fact-finding team will begin by visiting London to meet officials and may tour voterigging hotspots such as Birmingham and Coventry.

Herta Däubler-Gmelin, a former German Justice Minister and socialist MP, and Urszula Gacek, a centre-right Polish senator, have been appointed to conduct the inquiry. They are expected to arrive in December ready for a decision in the spring.

Holding free elections is an obligation for council members. The final straw for Britain was the decision by a judge last year that widespread voterigging by Labour in Birmingham’s local elections “would disgrace a banana republic”.

David Wilshire, a Tory MP on the council’s assembly, persuaded centre-right and liberal parliamentarians from across Europe to demand an inquiry.

In a motion they complained of “the growing body of evidence that widespread absent vote fraud is taking place in the UK”. Such cheating would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires nations to “hold free elections . . . which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature”.

Mr Wilshire, a former Home Office ministerial aide, said yesterday: “As we spend a lot of time telling other people they have to keep the conventions, it is important we should do so as well. It would be quite something if the UK found itself in the company of places like Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Ukraine, which have been severely criticised.”

The team hopes to meet the Government, political parties, the independent Electoral Commission, Electoral Reform Society and Hansard Society.

The council can require Britain to take action to protect human rights and the country may be placed under constant monitoring. Italy is under similar investigation because of Silvio Berlusconi’s control of electronic media.

Chris Ruane, the Labour MP for Vale of Clwyd, urged the team to look also at the voters missing from the roll. “Postal voting fraud is totally unacceptable but it is also totally unacceptable to have up to 3 million people missing off the register,” he said.

dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk

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