Conservative Future?
Posted by admin978 on April 16, 2022 · Leave a Comment
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.
