Labour’s Asian base crumbles
Labour’s entire team of councillors in the Lancashire borough of Pendle has quit, exposing the extent to which Keir Starmer’s party has become dependent on Asian communities in some areas of Britain.
The resignations were timed just days before close of nominations in the English local council elections, which will make it difficult for Labour to find new candidates and prepare campaigns.
All ten incumbent Labour councillors in Pendle (nine of them Asians) resigned, in protest at the party leadership’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza and its handling of ‘anti-semitism’ allegations. Ten parish councillors from the Pendle area also resigned – some of them were due to be borough council candidates next month.
Not coincidentally, one of the main victims of this purge of ‘anti-semites’ was Azhar Ali – Labour’s candidate at the Rochdale parliamentary by-election – who was thrown out of the party after secret recordings emerged of Ali expressing conspiracy theories about Israel.
Ali was for years the main Labour power-broker in Pendle. He was leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council until the ‘anti-semitism’ scandal destroyed him, after which he was replaced by the veteran Jewish councillor Jennifer Mein (against whom H&D editor Mark Cotterill stood at the last county council elections).
These resignations reveal two contradictory facts about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
The first is that in several areas of Britain, Labour has effectively been taken over by Asians – very similar to the way in which some inner-city Labour parties were taken over by Trotskyists and other far-left sects during the 1970s. This isn’t just because of the influx of immigrants. It’s because in parallel with their arrival, traditional industries collapsed – which meant that trade unions that had been Labour’s backbone also collapsed.
But the second fact is that however powerful Asians might be in some local areas, they count for nothing at the top of the Labour Party.
Keir Starmer is absolutely determined to position his party as a close ally of Israel. The only reason he might now venture some limited criticisms of Netanyahu is that Israeli brutality has become so extreme that they are increasingly criticised by well-informed Conservatives and veteran establishment figures, such as the retired diplomat Lord Ricketts.
Starmer will very timidly echo some of these criticisms.
H&D readers should be under no illusions. Keir Starmer will at some point within the next nine months become Prime Minister and Labour will win a landslide parliamentary majority.
But the fault lines within his party – not only over Gaza but over socially liberal attitudes, feminism, and ‘trans’ rights – will continue to raise difficult questions about Labour’s identity.
Labour’s impending victory will simply expose its ideological vacuity.
It will be up to racial nationalists to frame a coherent response.
H&D will as always carry full reports on the local council elections, both here and in the print edition of our magazine.
Galloway victory exposes the fake left’s crisis over ‘multiracialism’
A few minutes ago the former Labour MP George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election, in a stunning exposé of Muslim voters‘ disillusionment with Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Galloway polled 39.7% of the vote, and won a majority of 5,697, ahead of local independent David Tully, who surprised the media by taking 21.3%.
Though I reject many of Galloway’s views (especially his Putinism and his support for the terrorist IRA’s political front Sinn Fein), I welcome his election to Westminster where he will be an eloquent (if unprincipled) voice in support of Palestine, against the lavishly financed Zionist lobby that dominates all the major UK parties.
Labour thought they had chosen a perfect careerist candidate: Azhar Ali, an Asian councillor in nearby Nelson who led the Labour group on Lancashire County Council. Ali had made all the right noises to obtain promotion in Labour’s ranks – regarded as a reliable ‘moderate’ and endorsed by leading Jewish activists in Starmer’s party.
But as should have been obvious, careerism involves saying different things to different audiences. At the start of the campaign, a secretly recorded tape was leaked of Ali speaking to Asian community leaders in Accrington (less than 20 miles from Rochdale). As anyone outside Starmer’s circle of deluded wokeists might have predicted, Ali’s words to this audience were very different from when he was speaking to liberals and Jews!
The leak quickly led to Labour disowning Ali, and because he has always depended on careerist grovelling rather than principle, he completely failed to maintain any sort of campaign on his own. Ali remained on the ballot paper as Labour candidate, because the relevant deadlines had passed, and his feeble 7.7% vote came from that section of the electorate who would vote for a donkey if it had a Labour label.
The Rochdale campaign was absolutely made for George Galloway. Though he will be 70 later this year, Galloway has lost none of his ability to play populist political cards. In this case most of his pitch was to Rochdale’s Asians (who amount to around 30% of the constituency, according to the 2021 census). The Gaza issue has highlighted a broader perception among such people that they have been let down by their ‘community leaders’ in a series of cynical deals with the Labour Party. A reckoning was overdue, irrespective of the Azhar Ali fiasco.
Galloway also made a pitch to disillusioned White voters, but a large number of these opted for local independent David Tully, whose energetic campaign received little attention from mainstream journalists until ballot boxes were opened.
Mr Tully is not a racial nationalist, but his commendable campaign and focus on local concerns (including the threatened bankruptcy of Rochdale Football Club, where he is a season ticket holder) will have won him a lot of support from our type of voters.
And that brings us to the elephant in the room: the total absence of any credible nationalist party from this campaign.
Reform UK, just two weeks after an excellent result in Wellingborough, suffered a well-deserved embarrassment in Rochdale after their inexplicable selection of Simon Danczuk as their candidate. Mr Danczuk is another shallow careerist who was Labour MP for Rochdale until he was disgraced after sending inappropriate sexual messages to a teenager.
Danzuk and his party leader Richard Tice tried to distract from their poor result (only 6.3% and sixth place) by whining about “racism”, “intimidation” and “anti-semitism”. Their desperation in playing the victim card merely reflected the utter bankruptcy of “civic nationalism”. Galloway himself has now revealed that a short while ago Tice asked him to be a Reform UK candidate: that’s how shallow and unprincipled Reform UK’s leader is.
In the 1990s I repeatedly experienced political violence in Rochdale, including being pelted with half-bricks by “anti-fascists” outside Rochdale Town Hall after an election count. But anyone who is serious about nationalist politics doesn’t whine about such things, they just get on with the task, however long and arduous.
Britain First raised funds from their supporters with the promise that they would fight this by-election, even after the close of nominations showed that they did not in fact have a candidate. The sad truth is that Britain First is just another con aimed at gullible nationalist donors – just like the BNP became in later years, and just like the various enterprises run by Nick Griffin.
Billy Howarth, a local campaigner against the scandal of Rochdale Pakistanis “grooming” teenage girls, stood as an independent candidate but failed to make any impact, polling only 1.7%. It needs to be recognised that there are some people like Mr Howarth who are honest and have sound instincts on some issues, but who come nowhere near the calibre required of a parliamentary election candidate or spokesman for the broader nationalist cause.
Considering the unusual circumstances, the 39.7% turnout was high – and was likely to have been especially high in Asian areas.
But many White voters will have abstained in despair. Rochdale again shows the political vacuum in the UK, especially in northern towns that have experienced the worst effects of multiracialism.
A credible challenge is long overdue – whether it comes from the British Democrats, the newly registered Homeland Party, organisations not yet registered such as Patriotic Alternative, or some united front of racial nationalists.
H&D will continue to report on a non-partisan basis, and we shall give support to any and every genuine nationalist campaign.
Labour’s Muslim problem revealed as Rochdale candidate dropped
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party (which seems almost certain to return to government at a general election some time within the next twelve months) is yet again caught in a ‘scandal’ over ‘anti-semitism’. The party’s candidate at the forthcoming parliamentary by-election in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, has been disowned by the party after recordings were leaked of Ali expressing conspiracy theories about last year’s Hamas attack on Israel.
Azhar Ali – a 55-year-old businessman of Pakistani origin – has been leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council since 2021. Having failed several times to obtain selection as a parliamentary candidate, he was chosen to contest this by-election after the death of long-serving MP Sir Tony Lloyd.
Nominations have already closed, which means that Labour cannot replace Ali and cannot prevent him appearing on ballot papers as the Labour candidate. If Ali wins then he is expected to sit in the House of Commons as an independent.
Labour hoped that by opting for a very swift contest after Lloyd’s death – the by-election will be held on 29th February – they would stop any rival party building momentum. They were especially concerned that either a “right-wing” party would gain traction among White working-class voters, or the populist left-winger George Galloway would exploit anti-Zionist views among Rochdale’s large Muslim population.
2021 census figures show that Rochdale’s population is 29.6% Asian (predominantly Pakistani – 22% – and Bangladeshi – 4.2%).
Asians are far more likely than White working class voters to turn out at elections, and have traditionally been solidly Labour, but this loyalty has been tested by Starmer’s transformation of the party since he replaced Jeremy Corbyn in 2020.
Starmer (whose wife is Jewish) seems to be obsessed with wiping out any trace of his predecessor’s anti-Zionist views. Even after Israel’s exceptionally brutal response to the Hamas incursion, Starmer has resisted suggestions by many Labour colleagues that he should join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
His stance led to the resignation of many Labour councillors across the country, with Lancashire being especially badly hit. Several of Azhar Ali’s colleagues quit, including the leader of Burnley borough council and two county councillors who represent areas of Burnley and had been part of Ali’s Lancashire team.
It was in this context that Azhar Ali spoke at what he thought was a private meeting of Lancashire Labour activists last October. What he didn’t know was that someone (presumably a factional opponent within the party) was recording his comments. The tape was passed to the Mail on Sunday and reported yesterday.
Though Ali didn’t express explicitly anti-semitic views, he endorsed one of the many conspiracy theories that are widely believed within the UK’s Asian community. He told the meeting:
“The Egyptians are saying that they warned Israel ten days earlier… Americans warned them a day before [that] there’s something happening… They deliberately took the security off, they allowed… that massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want.”
For 36 hours after the story broke, Labour tried to defend Ali, but leading figures in the Jewish community demanded he must be dropped, and Labour has now complied.
It’s too early to say whether Ali will be capable of fighting an independent campaign. If not, it seems likely that the beneficiary will be George Galloway who, although he opposes almost everything H&D readers stand for, is undoubtedly an able campaigner.
The tragedy is that no racial nationalist party is presently capable of fighting a serious parliamentary election campaign. Indigenous Britons in Rochdale have been thoroughly betrayed by all mainstream political parties and by the consequences of the multiracial society. They were never consulted about the demographic transformation of our country, which is more visible in Rochdale than in almost any other town in Britain.
Rochdale was the scene of one of the most infamous cases of the “grooming” of White teenage girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin. In 2016 eight such men (together with a White heroin addict who committed similar bestial crimes as part of a “grooming” ring) were sentenced to a total of 125 years in prison for offences that took place between 2004 and 2008.
(A few days before the Ali scandal, the Green Party’s candidate in the Rochdale by-election, Guy Otten, was also forced to withdraw from the campaign due to anti-Islamic posts on Twitter several years ago. Though Otten would have polled a negligible vote in any case, his case is another example of the perils of politics in the internet age, especially in the treacherous political waters of a constituency which is one-third non-White. It seems that candidates can be disqualified nowadays for being either anti-Israel or anti-Muslim, when what we would ideally like to see are candidates who are pro-British!)
What can H&D readers learn from the events of the past two days that have rocked British politics, both in Rochdale and nationwide?
(1) Ali’s swift defenestration shows which racial/religious minority has real influence in UK politics, and it’s not UK Muslims. Although there are hardly any Jews in Rochdale, the Labour Party decided to obey the demands of the Jewish community, while continuing to ignore the views of UK Muslims.
(2) Although this is the situation at national level (and certainly where foreign policy is concerned), Labour at local level in many parts of the UK is disproportionately influenced by Asians, who are now likely to split, with one group (often local businessman) pragmatically unconcerned by the fate of their co-religionists in Gaza, while others will break away and support independent candidates.
(3) Gaza is just the latest (though the most serious) of the issues that split Muslim voters. Where Labour is concerned there are also longstanding factional divisions between Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (especially serious in Oldham); bitter personal rivalries; and splits between traditional “community leaders” and younger activists on social issues such as feminism and gay/lesbian/trans questions. Many of those who are most radical on Gaza are also opposed to their own community leaders on issues involving the role of women. For example, one of the Lancashire county councillors who quit Labour over Gaza is a Westernised Pakistani woman.
(4) While some H&D readers will strongly agree with criticisms of Labour policy on Gaza, the sad thing is that the Palestinian cause has been tainted by childish conspiracy theories. Events have shown that Jews do indeed have disproportionate power in UK politics, including within the Labour Party. But it is frankly ludicrous to argue that Israel allowed the Hamas attack to happen, or that Hamas is in some sense part of a Zionist conspiracy. On a wide range of issues, real conspiracies are allowed to happen because political dissidents (both within the Muslim community and among White racial nationalists) are too paranoid and quick to jump on online bandwagons without thinking seriously about the issues involved.
(5) One consequence of this is that the anti-Zionist cause is represented by charlatans such as George Galloway. If he wins the by-election on 29th February and becomes MP for Rochdale, the loudest pro-Palestinian voice in Parliament will also be an ultra-leftist and an ally of Vladimir Putin, further discrediting the Palestinian cause in the eyes of most White Britons.
(6) Yet again, the cause of truth and justice – whether for the Palestinians or (more relevantly) for the victims of Rochdale grooming gangs and other crimes in our dysfunctional multiracial society – is ill-served by the choices available to voters at the ballot box. As racial nationalist activists, we all bear a heavy share of responsibility for the collapse of our movement during the first quarter of the 21st century. Do we have the courage and determination to change course?
The mystery of the disappearing candidate
On Saturday the anti-Muslim party Britain First shared a “Huge Announcement” with their members and supporters on social media, even sending out a special fundraising email.
Party chairman Ashlea Simon was to be the party’s candidate at the forthcoming Rochdale parliamentary by-election, following the death of Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd. Her leader Paul Golding rightly pointed out that Rochdale is notorious for the “grooming” scandal, involving the abuse of young girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin.
As recently as 15th January, yet another official report documented the failure of Greater Manchester Police, social services and Rochdale Council – all of whom betrayed these girls and their families.
Golding told his followers that Ashlea Simon would be an ideal candidate who would prove “a staunch voice for the victims in the town”. He predicted there was a “strong chance” that she could defeat the established parties and be elected MP for Rochdale.
Britain First’s leader confirmed that he and other party officials were already “organising behind the scenes to get the campaign launched, including designing the banners, leaflets, placards, postal voter letters etc.”
When we read this announcement at H&D, it’s fair to say we were surprised – because the official list of candidates for this by-election had already been published the previous day, and Ms Simon was not among them.
In other words Paul Golding was soliciting donations for a non-existent campaign. Meanwhile he was sitting down with the notorious grifter ‘Tommy Robinson’ to make yet another video for his gullible followers.
We don’t know how Mr Golding intends to spend the money raised by these fundraising emails and social media posts, but one thing’s for sure. It can’t be spent on a parliamentary election campaign in Rochdale – because Britain First and Ashlea Simon are not contesting this Rochdale by-election!
Raising money for a non-existent campaign is tragic enough, but at this same Rochdale by-election Britain First’s rivals in the civic nationalist party Reform UK have dragged politics into the realms of farce.
Reform UK’s candidate in this by-election (where allegations of “grooming” are bound to become a central campaign issue) is Simon Danczuk, who was Labour MP for Rochdale from 2010 to 2017.
Mr Danczuk was suspended from the Labour Party in 2015 for sending “inappropriate” texts to a teenage girl. He shamelessly contested Rochdale as an independent in 2017 but lost his deposit with a mere 1.8% of the vote.
The ex-MP has recently married an African beauty therapist whom he met on a “business trip” to Rwanda: the happy couple plan to adopt a Rwandan baby, and doubtless if he returns to Parliament they will be able to adopt an entire houseful of happy African infants.
In other words, while the Tory government is trying (but dismally failing) to export illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda, Reform UK’s latest parliamentary candidate is eagerly importing Rwandans to England.
You really couldn’t make it up: but this is entirely consistent with the “civic nationalism” espoused by Richard Tice, Nigel Farage and the fake patriots of Reform UK.
Rochdale voters deserve better. Whether the racial nationalist alternative comes from the British Democrats, the recently launched Homeland Party, from Patriotic Alternative (once they are registered as a political party), or from some electoral alliance between them, it has never been more obvious that the UK needs a movement prepared to defend our islands and our people.
Another Reform UK lost deposit: when will the Farage-Tice party achieve anything?
Within the past hour the result of yesterday’s parliamentary by-election in West Lancashire was declared.
Predictably it was an easy victory for Labour, and the swing between the two main parties was broadly in line with trends in other recent by-elections and national opinion polls, confirming that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party are on a path to defeat at the next General Election, which must be held within the next two years.
But for H&D readers a lot of attention will have focused on Reform UK, the rebranded version of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, led by Farage’s close ally Richard Tice.
Reform UK’s candidate Jonathan Kay polled 994 votes (4.4%): the party’s seventh successive lost deposit in parliamentary by-elections, despite months of hype from their allies at GB News and from academics such as Dr Matthew Goodwin, who continue to insist that the party’s brand of post-Thatcherite populism will achieve significant support from British voters.
On this occasion (unlike many of those earlier by-elections) Reform UK had no competition from any other candidate to the ‘right’ of the Tories. There was no candidate from UKIP or any of its many splinters, other than Reform UK.
This West Lancashire constituency is very divided socially, including some very poor areas in Skelmersdale but also some affluent and traditionally Tory-voting villages. In 2015 UKIP candidate Jack Sen (who became a very controversial figure within nationalism and has since disappeared from politics) polled 12.2% here (6,058 votes), despite having been expelled and denounced by his own party before polling day for ‘anti-semitism’!
Yet this week UKIP’s successor party Reform UK polled only 994 votes (4.4%), despite the Tory vote having collapsed to a record low for this area. Most of the previous Tory voters (and pro-Brexit voters) stayed at home rather than backing Reform UK, even at a by-election. This suggests that the party needs a fundamental rethink if it is to pose any significant challenge at the next general election.
The truth is that Farage, Tice and Reform UK have little of any relevance or interest to offer to the voters of West Lancashire, or to other Britons (especially those in impoverished areas).
The Farage-Tice agenda of a US-style largely privatised economy, with ‘free markets’ (i.e. global capitalism) very much dominant, is a recipe for internationalism, mass immigration and continued impoverishment for the White British working class.
Farage and his fellow City spivs always intended Brexit to turn London into Singapore-on-Thames, with other British towns and cities as its satellites in a small-state, low tax, low spending, ultra-capitalist, Disunited Kingdom.
The only serious challenge to that vision will come when racial nationalists abandon their recent cranky obsessions and factionalism, and unite with a clear and credible vision for national and racial renaissance. There are some signs that such a renaissance will not be too long delayed, and H&D looks forward to reporting more positive news later this year.
Conservative Future?
England’s most racially divided borough might soon see the first niqab-wearing Conservative councillor.
Fajila Patel is contesting the Bastwell & Daisyfield ward of Blackburn with Darwen borough council in North West England. In 2011’s census the equivalent ward was 85.3% Muslim. Its inhabitants are from varying backgrounds in the Indian sub-continent, some originating in Pakistan but others in India.
According to that 2011 Census, 7.1% of households in the borough had no-one who spoke English “as a main language” – and in Bastwell ward this figure was 26.1%. The main languages spoken in Bastwell other than English are Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu.
Last year Mrs Patel’s husband – taxi driver ‘Tiger’ Patel – won the neighbouring and similarly Asian-dominated Audley ward, after the campaign video below. These two wards form the core of Blackburn’s Asian population which has expanded into numerous other areas of the town during the decades since Asians first arrived in the borough in the 1960s.
As with many other old industrial towns in the region, including Oldham and Preston, Asians first arrived to work in the declining cotton mills and other manufacturing industry, whose owners liked these immigrants because they would work for low wages and were happy with unpopular shifts such as night work.
When most of this industry disappeared, the Asian communities typically moved into taxi-driving and the retail and food industries, but also experienced high unemployment and crime.
Politically they were exploited by the Labour Party, who treated them as clients who were dependent on the state’s largesse and would therefore have to accept Labour’s ultra-liberal ideas on social issues, many of which are anathema to conservative Muslims.
Typically Labour chose to promote very Westernised, ‘feminist’ Asian women who were in no way representative of their communities, and this led to a backlash. ‘Tiger’ Patel defeated one such very ‘modern’ Muslim Labour woman in Audley ward last year.
The Conservative Party has cynically struck a deal with hardline Muslims in these areas. There could be two defeats for Labour in their former Asian heartland: Mrs Patel stands a good chance of repeating her husband’s victory, while in Audley ward there could be a second shock. Incumbent councillor Yusuf-Jan Virmani is standing for re-election as an independent, after being expelled from Labour last year for alleged ‘anti-semitism’.
What’s certain is that neither Labour nor the Conservatives will speak for Blackburn’s indigenous British. H&D‘s editor Mark Cotterill was elected as a councillor in the mainly White Meadowhead ward of Blackburn in 2006, but since he left the area and moved to Preston, no racial nationalist candidate has come close to being elected.
The Conservative Party’s adoption of an extreme Muslim agenda in Blackburn highlights the desperate need for a party that will address the concerns of the indigenous British. Across the whole of England this year there are very few such candidates. H&D will report on their campaigns, on the results achieved, and on the prospects for a long-overdue realignment of pro-British politics.
County council updates
Following his 16% vote in yesterday’s Preston City Council election, H&D editor Mark Cotterill today polled 8.8% in the Lancashire County Council for Preston South-East division.
Due to redrawing of council boundaries, this was always going to be a lower vote for a racial nationalist independent. Preston SE includes a very large Asian community which tends to vote as a block for Labour candidates – even Jewish ones! (Jenny Mein has held the seat for Labour for many years, and was part of an unusual tradition of Jewish female leaders of Lancashire county council, following Louise Ellman and Ruth Henig.)
Many of the White voters in Preston SE are in a very depressed council estate, where turnout is traditionally low (exacerbated by Covid restrictions on polling stations and campaigning).
In the circumstances 8.8% was a respectable result, especially as once again (in line with a nationwide trend this year) pro-Brexit voters leaned towards Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
We await further results during the day from nationalist candidates nationwide including Dr Jim Lewthwaite of the British Democratic Party, contesting Wyke ward, Bradford.
And of course there will be a full analysis and results service on this site and in the forthcoming May-June edition of H&D.
full result – Preston SE division, Lancashire County Council
Mein (Labour) 67.9%
Walmsley (Conservative) 18.3%
Cotterill (Independent) 8.8%
Duke (Liberal Democrat) 4.9%
Labour councillor resigns after porn charges
A Labour councillor for the Hollinwood ward of Oldham Council has resigned and last week appeared in court facing charges of downloading child pornography.
Martin Judd, 25, entered not guilty pleas at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court to three charges that between February 2018 and Febriary 2020 he had downloaded fifteen Category A (the most serious) images of children, twenty-three Category B, and 48 Category C.
Judd was committed for trial in Manchester next January.
Born in New Zealand, Judd was elected as a Hollinwood ward councillor in 2018. A year earlier he had been elected in Manchester as the youngest every President of a Rotary Club. (He worked for Waitrose in Manchester city centre.)
Some H&D readers will remember Hollinwood ward from the early 2000s: Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy polled 24% in the ward at the 2002 elections.
Since those days of curse Oldham BNP has ceased to exist, and in any case there can be no by-elections for the time being due to Covid-19.
Lib Dems drop mayoral candidate in ‘anti-semitism scandal’
The Liberal Democrats, struggling to hold on to their status as the UK’s third largest political party, have run into a storm over ‘anti-semitism’ as they attempt to select a candidate for next May’s London mayoral election to take on Labour’s Sadiq Khan, arguably the most powerful Muslim politician in the Western world.
London Lib Dem members were set to choose between two potential candidates in a postal ballot this month, but one of those candidates has today been suspended after discovery of a video from more than twenty years ago where she made an ‘anti-semitic’ attack on senior Labour politician Jack Straw.
Straw is an Anglican Christian of partly Jewish ancestry, who served in several prominent roles under Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, most famously as Foreign Secretary during the Iraq war.
At the 1997 general election Geeta Sidhu-Robb was the Conservative candidate against Straw in his Blackburn constituency. Malawi-born Ms Sidhu-Robb tried to stir up Pakistani voters in Blackburn’s Asian ghetto, telling them via megaphone: “Don’t vote for a Jew, Jack Straw is a Jew. If you vote for him, you’re voting for a Jew. Jews are the enemies of Muslims.”
As a committed Europhile, former corporate lawyer Sidhu-Robb later defected from the Tories to the anti-Brexit Lib Dems, and ended up on the shortlist to become London mayoral candidate, until her ‘anti-semitic’ record was discovered this week.
What surprises H&D is that alarm bells hadn’t rung sooner among the Lib Dem leadership. It was reasonably well known during the Straw years that several Blackburn Tories encouraged antisemitic anti-Labour campaigns in Asian areas of Blackburn, and Ms Sidhu-Robb’s remarks were actually broadcast in a Channel 5 documentary more than 20 years ago!
Perhaps the Lib Dems were so pleased to tick three political boxes with Ms Sidhu-Robb – ex-Tory defector, non-White, and female – that they didn’t engage their brains. Moreover some concerned activists, including former mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita, have alleged that Ms Sidhu-Robb was being courted by the party because of her wealthy connections and her role in the anti-Brexit pressure group Open Britain and its new campaign ‘Democracy Unleashed’, formerly known as the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign.
Today Ms Sidhu-Robb issued a grovelling apology in an effort to save her rapidly sinking political career:
“I am deeply ashamed of the ignorant and abusive language I used on one occasion in the 1997 General Election campaign. As shown in the footage, I instantly regretted my appalling behaviour, which I continue to do.
“Those words are entirely inconsistent with my views and values, and though there are no excuses for my actions, there is some context; that is, that I was under a great deal of strain and retaliated to the racial abuse I was receiving in Blackburn ‘like for like’.”
Councils obfuscate Covid-19 statistics
Last week H&D reported detailed statistics behind the headlines about Covid-19 in Oldham, the Lancashire town that is on the brink of lockdown following a renewed surge in cases of the pandemic virus.
It is now clear that as we suggested last week, Oldham council deputy leader Arooj Shah was being disingenuous in suggesting that the virus had spread “in all areas, in all age groups, and in all communities”. (Paradoxically, as we reported last week, Cllr Shah is not on good terms with local Muslim ‘community leaders’ and is a an example of the way the Labour Party is in many areas at war with conservative Islam.)
While it is true that there has been a scattering of Covid-19 in different parts of Oldham, there is a very marked concentration in certain parts of the town with an especially high Asian population. (There is also some slight evidence to suggest that Pakistani areas are seeing more Covid than Bangladeshi areas, but the jury is still out on that.)
For the period 7th-13th August (the most recent detailed statistics) the main Covid hotspot was the Alexandra Park census area with 48 cases (having had 55 the previous week). Local reports suggest that as many as 30 of these cases are from just one extended family and their immediate neighbours. The Manchester Evening News reports this but is too cowardly to state that Alexandra Park is a predominantly Pakistani area, containing the Glodwick ghetto that was at the centre of riots in 2001.
The other main Covid area in Oldham is Werneth, with 34 cases this week and 42 last week. At least 15 cases are understood to involve workers at the Park Cakes factory, a major local employer situated on the main road that separates Werneth and Alexandra Park. There is no suggestion that Park Cakes has been at fault in any respect.
The Salem area which borders Alexandra Park and also contains part of the extended Glodwick ghetto is the third-highest Oldham Covid area with 25 cases this week and 12 last week; while the original Bangladeshi area known as Busk, on the edge of the town centre and close to Oldham Athletic’s football stadium Boundary Park, had 15 cases this week and 12 last week.
While politically correct media have highlighted poverty as a contributory factor, the equally poor or in many cases poorer White areas of central Oldham have seen smaller (and in some cases negligible) rates of Covid. These include Alt with 12 cases; Lime Side & Garden Suburb with 11 cases; Derker with only 3 cases; and Moorside & Sholver with no registered cases at all.
The relatively affluent and White villages comprising Saddleworth to the east of Oldham are divided into four different census areas. Three of these reported three Covid cases each this week, while a fourth had none.
Mossley, a former cotton town turned commuter village on the borders of Oldham and Saddleworth, similarly had no Covid cases; neither did the adjacent Micklehurst & Carrbrook census area.
A smaller-scale version of a similar pattern can be seen in Blackburn (where H&D‘s editor used to be a borough councillor).
In Blackburn the highest incidences of Covid this week were again in the mainly Asian areas: 29 in Little Harwood; 22 in Central Blackburn; 19 in Bastwell; 14 in Roe Lee, Brownhill & Sunnybower; and 13 in Audley.
By contrast the mainly White area Meadowhead, where our editor was elected to Blackburn-with-Darwen Council in 2006, had no reported cases.
