Tabloids target Hackney

News of the World says Hackney social services returned kids to a squalid home hours after their mother was arrested by the The Met's Child Abuse Investigation Command who stumbled on the Hackney flat by accident:

This week the youngsters were taken into police protection and the mother arrested. On Tuesday she was cautioned for neglect and the case handed to social services. Within hours they RETURNED the children to the flat, which they said had been cleaned up.

Figures given in the story from East London's Child Abuse Investigation Command show that its case load is up by 2/3 on last year.

Last week the east London cop squad, covering Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets, were dealing with 300 live cases. This time last year it was around 180.

But how likely is it that the quality of East London parenting has become 70% worse in the space of a year? Is this Baby P panic? Next week Hackney's Cabinet Agenda reports pack includes a financial update showing that childrens' services are still feeling the pressure.

Page 137: In summary, the service is experiencing caseload pressures in both Access and
Assessment (A&A) and Children in Need (CIN) resulting in increased levels of agency staff.
The former relates to increased anxiety in the partnership following the recent high-profile case in a neighbouring borough.

The Mail on Sunday savages funding won by Arcola Theatre's dance troupe - claiming that £240k has been spent on the project which should have gone to the third world.

Other news:

This may be old news but Hackney Council is looking for construction managers to take on Haggerston Baths with a 21 Sept deadline for bids.

An old book on Hackney (sordid and dull)

This is the Hackney and Stoke Newington section of The Fascination of London which was contributed by the University of California.

It includes items such as this: THE way from London to Hackney was, during the last century, a way of terror. The newspaper- cuttings of the period show innumerable highway
robberies committed, particularly about Cambridge Heath. Dick Turpin, whose favourite resort was the White Horse in Hackney Marshes, must have found this a happy hunting-ground, as numerous coaches passed from London northward and back
again.

The part of the ward to the west of Mare Street is sordid and dull. The Cat and Mutton
Bridge over the canal forms the extreme boundary of the parish, and what is now the Broadway used to be called Mutton Lane. On the east side of this stood a bun house, which once rivalled that of Chelsea.

Al-Qaeda history on Chatsworth Road

Today this piece on the Telegraph website says: "The al-Qaeda recruiting offices were two Islamic shops on Chatsworth Road in Hackney, east London. The first, the al-Koran Islamic bookshop, was run by Mohammed Hamid, who used the nickname Osama bin London and recruited and trained the failed suicide bombers for the attacks of July 21 2005.

"Hamid, who was later jailed for life for soliciting to murder and providing training for terrorism, met Yassin Omar, one of the leaders of the July 21 plot, at his bookshop in 2003. Opposite the bookshop was an unregistered charity called the Islamic Medical Association (Kosovar) run by Mohammed Patel which was used by the airline bombers as cover for their travel to Afghanistan from January 2003."

Back in June The Sun reported: Ali said he helped the Islamic Medical Association for up to two years after he was given a leaflet at his mosque.
He said he was joined at its office in Chatsworth Road, Hackney, east London, by co-defendants Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Waheed Khan and Tanvir Hussain.
He added: "They needed volunteers to go to Pakistan and deliver some of this aid and administer it and I volunteered to do that."
The jury was told that Ali travelled to Chaman, close to Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, for several months in January 2003.
Ali said two more co-defendants, Assad Sarwar and Umar Islam, also travelled to Pakistan at this time to help the charity.
He said the camps were "mucky and smelly", with desperate people living in "appalling conditions."

Chatsworth terror hub?

This is the Islamic Medical Association Kosova on Chatsworth Road. Is it the same Hackney-based Islamic Medical Association mentioned in news reports about the recently convicted airline bomb plotters? It was reported that one of the would-be bombers put most of his energies "into a charity called the Islamic Medical Association, based in Hackney, which he used as cover to travel to Afghanistan, where he drove an ambulance in refugee camps."

Back in June Bucks Free Press reported: "Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, from Walthamstow was introduced to Assad Sarwar, from Walton Drive, High Wycombe, and Umar Islam, formerly of High Wycombe, through the Islamic Medical Association."

Ali told the court he had previously met Sarwar at one of IMA's charity shops in Hackney, London, where "he used to help out bagging up clothes before he went to Pakistan."

Neighbours of a charity shop with a similar name at 19 Chatsworth Road said that it opened at odd times. No one was there to say whether it was or had ever been a meeting place for would-be terrorists.

The Charity Commission said there is only one Islamic Medical Association on the register which has some outstanding accounts. However it is listed is in Great Yarmouth - link here for more details.

For a debate Harry's Place.

4000 newts move to Hackney?

This piece in the Builder and Engineer said the Olympic project included an: "An ecologic action plan to protect habitats and wildlife including translocating 4,000 smooth newts, 100 toads, 300 common lizards and create over 1 hectare of new wildlife habitat on Hackney Marshes."

So, apparently, all of these newts are being moved to Hackney to the new wildlife habitat - or have they been sent somewhere else? And why so many of them compared to toads and lizards?

Jobcentre reorganised - can it cope?

When I last signed on at Hackney's Jobcentre Plus it had just been through a major upheaval (the change happened on August 17) and it now segregates job seekers who have been on the dole for more than three months from those who have come in more recently. The longer-term unemployed are now sent upstairs to face deeper scrutiny.

Meanwhile the new arrivals are given specific five minute time slots which they cannot miss. At my last signing-on, my adviser didn't have time to take down the evidence on my attempts to get back into work. Is this just streamlining or have numbers of claimants gone up significantly?

On Thursday the Hackney Gazette reported that an employment charity had lost its funding and would have to close down - the story was posted on the Gazette's website yesterday. The charity's head said that job centres in Hackney "can't cope".

20-year backlash for recession unemployed... and other happy news

Don't stick with your next new job!

Hackney resident and Undercover Economist Tim Harford (a recent biog) says a study of "those hurled into unemployment by mass layoffs in the 1982 US recession... discovered horrendously long-lasting effects."

He said that a recession-proof career path is only for the lucky ones: The (1982) recession itself – one often compared with today’s downturn – was savage, but it was over in less than two years. Yet von Wachter and his colleagues discovered that those who lost their jobs had incomes about 20 per cent lower than would otherwise be expected, even two decades later.

Hackney has 761 police officers.

This is nearly 200 more than neighbouring Waltham Forest (562) and seems to make the difference between rising and falling crime (although crime looks more likely to rise in Hackney).

According to the Guardian: Because Waltham Forest is classed as outer London, the borough currently has just 562 police officers, compared to 768 in neighbouring Newham, 761 in Hackney and 778 in Tower Hamlets – this is despite similar populations and crime profiles.

Reported crime rose in Waltham Forest by 3.9 per cent last year, an extra 1,012 crimes, compared to a drop in reported crime in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.

Mental Health in Schools

A piece in Nursing Times describes mental health project in Hackney that encourages pupils at special schools and pupil referral units to use mental health services. Over half of those dealt with have been referred but never used these services.

A case study describes how one pupil's disruptive behaviour in class was related to not being able to see his coat.

One key observation is that over half the SMHT (school mental health team) caseload is made up of young people and families who had previously been referred to the child and family consultation service but not engaged with it.

Who lives in Queensbridge Quarter?

A piece in Building.co.uk interviews an 87-year-old resident Betty Spinks... “Not like any other council house I’ve been to. The place looks so tidy"
Not like the old days: “It was the worst estate in England. You’d see rats in the gutters, cockroaches everywhere, and you couldn’t step out your front door at night. Here I feel safe.”

Hackney - a worklessness miracle?

Earlier this month the Office of National Statistics published Hackney's worklessness figures.

They weren't too bad - the unexplained miracle continues. The workless of Hackney still seem to be finding their way back to work at a surprising speed.

All this during a period when the rest of the country was on the brink of financial collapse with jobs being lost. In contrast, figures show that, in Hackney the population of economically inactive residents shrank. It fell by about 2,900 people (from 28.7% of the working population to 26.6%).

The recession, it seems, has had the opposite effect in Hackney as it has in most other parts of the UK. This seemed to be further confirmed by the publication, yesterday, of the workless households figures ( Work and worklessness among households Statistical Bulletin - August 2009 and 26/08/09 News Release - Half a million more working-age people in workless households).

These show that the North East has over-taken Inner London as the place with the highest rate of worklessness - it now has 23% of homes with all employment age residents out of work. Meanwhile Inner London's level of workless households is 22.9%, the second most concentrated are of household worklessness in the UK. This is down on the same time last year (Work and worklessness among households - August 2007 ) when 23.9% of Inner London homes were workless.

Nationally, the ONS figures for workless homes are the worst they have been - possibly since records began - showing that one in six UK households is unemployed - at least that's according to this interpretation provided by the BBC yesterday.

But not in Inner London, and it can only be supposed that Hackney has bucked the trend here too. Back in 2007 Hackney had the second worst level of workless households of all inner London Boroughs (26%). Worse than Newham (27%) and equal to Tower Hamlets (26%) and, unexpectedly, the next worst was Kensington and Chelsea (23%) - (That's according to (Table 2(iii) Working-age people by region and combined economic activity status of household)

So is Hackney like China? Powering ahead and "decoupling" from the rest of the developed world? Not according to Cllr Guy Nicholson, cabinet member for regeneration and the Olympic Games:

"In terms of Hackney’s economic development strategy, the borough has not ‘decoupled’ from the UK’s, and specifically London’s economic direction of travel. Hackney Council will continue to ensure the growth and dynamism of a range of economic sectors within the borough. Key sector are: Servicing for the City, High Value Manufacturing, Retail, Hospitality and Entertainment,Creative Sectors."

He said: "The recession has impacted upon Hackney in terms of an increase in JSA claimants. However, the borough has not been affected any more than the UK as a whole. Since September 2008, the proportion of the population of Hackney claiming JSA increased by 1.7%, compared to an increase of 1.6% in Britain as a whole. However, Hackney started from a considerably higher baseline in terms of the proportion of the population already claiming JSA.

"As discussed above, Hackney’s employment rate has increased significantly over the past few years. The gap between London’s and Hackney’s employment rate has decreased from 15.1% in Q4 05/06 to 3.4% in Q3 08/09. This is a significant achievement in the context of the high levels of multiple deprivation which continue to exist in Hackney. Due to the time-lag in the employment rate data, it is as yet unclear how the increase in JSA claimants will impact upon the employment rate in the borough."

Yellow spider alert in Hackney

Normal-looking brown spiders are all over my garden. If this year is anything like last year, they will soon look like rotten strawberries hanging in mid-air. I generally don't notice them until it's too late.

They are bad enough.

Then this small yellow poisonous-looking creature turned up yesterday.

It was the colour of a banana so I thought it must be some exotic killer of some kind. But it probably isn't exotic or dangerous. I didn't squash it. Hopefully it'll deal with those green shiny beetles that, I suspect, ate my rosemary plant.

£600k council cash disappears... so what?

Hackney Council payed £610,000 to Hackney charity boss Dr Adu Aezick Seray-Wurie in 2000.

According to a report by the Charity Commission: "The statements for Dr Seray-Wurie’s account and those for the Charities, as well as the Charity’s annual accounts, all showed that none of the funds were passed to either Charity."

However the same report says the Charity Commission will not pursue the case. In 2006 the police said they would not be investigating the case either.

Dr Adu Aezick Seray-Wurie, chair of Hackney-based African Development Agencies and Hackney African Organisation , won a legal claim for £610,000 in unpaid grants from Hackney Council in 2000. The money was paid into Seray-Wurie's personal account.

Last year Seray-Wurie tried to prevent the publication of a Charity Commission report into the East End Citizens Advice Bureau on the grounds that it was defamatory last year.

The 2008 report of the Charity Commission's chief executive said:

The use of our regulatory powers has come under external scrutiny recently with two separate court hearings.

These were two separate legal cases brought against the Commission by Dr. Adu Seray-Wurie (the applicant) in which the Commission was successful. In the first, on 23 April the High Court struck out claims brought by the applicant for defamation, and on other grounds, relating to our published inquiry report into East End Citizens Advice Bureau.

The claim for defamation was struck out on the basis that the report was covered by qualified privilege, and that there was no evidence of malice.....

In the second case, on 25 April the High Court dismissed an appeal brought by the applicant against our decision to remove him as a trustee of African Development Agencies Ltd. The Court decided that we were right to make the removal order on the basis that there had been misconduct or mismanagement in the administration of the charity, and it was necessary or desirable to remove the applicant for the purpose of protecting property of the charity or its proper application, the removal being a proportionate step to take in all the circumstances.

Are there enough detectives in Hackney?

The Evening Standard wrote a story to highlight the anniversary of the unsolved death of a Hackney boy who died after falling 60 feet. The police believe he was being chased by a gang.

Detective Chief Inspector Phil Rickells told the Standard: "I am trying to establish whether he was pushed or whether he fell. We know some people entered the block."

Hopefully DCI Rickells is not affected by the shortage of detectives reported by the BBC - apparently there are 5,000 fewer than there should be. Meanwhile is most of the serious crime in Hackney being dealt with by cops from outside the borough like Operation Trident?

According to its website, Operation Trident has 350 police officers and 86 support staff. It was set up in 1998 because 75% of London's gun crime involved the victim and suspect both coming from the capital's black communities. All good, but what happens if Operation Trident gets over-stretched?

Libel and Leabank

Leabank Square blog hit the headlines yesterday with a story that has now been followed-up elsewhere.

Evening Standard: Olympic chiefs threaten to sue 'noise and dirt' blog

The offending material has been removed but blogger Sona Abantu-Choudhury insists: "...down here in the East End of London – it’s called a lie. The person telling the lie – is called a liar. Simple as!"

Good luck!

Hackney crime figures: The only way is up

In this week’s Hackney Gazette there is an interview with the new borough commander, Steve Bending. He said that the crime levels in Hackney were low and it would be difficult to push them down further.

“There are some boroughs in London which have almost the same number of burglaries in a day which boroughs like Hackney have in a week" and he added that “There comes a point where – unless you have a borough with a field and two sheep in it – there’s a point where crime will stop decreasing.”

Recession and the rise of crime

The Gazette asked if crime reduction will become harder as the recession kicks in, Bending's answer was: “Logic says at some point if you have lots of people who have not got jobs, then there’s a risk that those people will go into crime to fund their life style… but whether we are at that point now is a moot point.”

What is the “informal economy” - how much of it is criminal in Hackney?

Most analysis of the informal economy – all the stuff that goes on behind the tax man’s back – is done with a view to clawing tax back. Most of the initiatives related to the informal economy are related to how much money the Treasury will save or retrieve.

This 2007 Hackney Council economic paper suggested that there was nothing much to worry about from the informal economy – at least not in terms of crime:

Informal / illegal economy: Anecdotal evidence suggests that a small number of Hackney residents are involved within the informal sector and in some cases with illegal activities. For many people, the financial returns of informal activities exceed those that they could potentially achieve in the formal employment market. As such, it is thought that a number of people are choosing this route as an alternative to employment. The informal economy is thought to include a wide range of activities, from childcare provision to criminal drugs and burglary activity sometimes associated with gangs in Hackney.

Much more recently (April 2009), the council admitted that it didn’t know a great deal about the informal economy because it was not an easy area to investigate. In its Report of the Community Safety and Social Inclusion Scrutiny Commission Tackling Worklessness Review 08/09 (367KB), the council said:

One aspect proved particularly elusive and that was the issue of how individuals and businesses in the informal economy can be supported to move into the formal economy. Any analysis of the broad subject of worklessness in Hackney will need to address the prevalence of the informal economy and indeed the likelihood of its expansion during the economic downturn. Engaging with those in the informal economy is no mean feat and we would recommend that perhaps innovative approaches to evidence gathering might be employed… it would certainly aid policy development if local data and research on the topic could be captured.”

The report cited Lord Garbinder’s report from 2000 which excluded the overtly criminal element of the informal economy. It was more interested in the ‘minor’ crimes such as benefit fraud – a problem often described as a victimless crime. The report’s chief aim was to work out how to easily claw back tax from the informal economy.

“Sometimes there are other illegal aspects to the business, such as work by illegal immigrants. And most large-scale crime, such as drugs trafficking and money laundering, is also part of the hidden economy. Apart from illegal immigration, which is touched on in Chapter 4, these issues are not covered in this report.”

The fact that the council, in 2009, is talking about “how individuals and businesses in the informal economy can be supported to move into the formal economy” is a clear sign that it is not looking at issues like prostitution and drug dealing – which are potentially devastating to local communities - but not interesting to the tax man.

It seems that these are not explored because the treasury would probably not be able to claw-back tax from these businesses – even if the criminals were caught. Benefit fraudsters are more profitable to pursue.

The question is whether there is a coherent picture, anywhere, of how many people in Hackney make their livings from crime, how many supplement their incomes with crime, and whether this number is increasing.

Unfortunately looking at the existing data will not tell you this. Even if reported crime is down, to what extent does this mean that drug dealing or prostitution are decreasing?

Hackney has highest rate of youth unemployment

It may be old news to some but 2008 figures show Hackney had the highest level of youth unemployment in the country - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8199269.stm

Also, Hackney is the only London borough to win a government grant to help it do something useful with empty shops. According to this article in Regen.net, communities minister John Denham said councils in receipt of the grants would be able to use the money as they saw fit on ideas to boost town centres and transform boarded up shops into something useful, such as a meeting place, a learning centre or a showroom for local artists.

He said: "There is no need to see unused shops on our high streets going to waste, especially when we know that it doesn't take a lot to turn a vacant shop into something beneficial for the community."

Recent unemployment stories on Blood and Property here:
http://bloodandproperty.blogspot.com/search/label/unemployment

In the Guardian:

Council's are not prepared for the next wave of the recession - according to the Audit Commission.

Unemployed in Hackney: The lull before the storm

Hackney women losing jobs faster than men

Last month saw the number of people in Hackney claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) fall for the first time since September 2008. Today's figures - which cover July - show significant rises. The group that has added the most to Hackney's JSA claimant count in June and July is women.

Today's figures - which cover July - show that 9550 people in Hackney are now claiming, an increase of 242 claimants from last month.

In June the number of claimants in Hackney actually fell to 9308 - from 9350 in May, a fall of 42 claimants.

The July figures show that 144 new people in South Hackney lost their jobs. (Increasing from 5190 to 5334). As such the majority of the new unemployed this month are in South Hackney (144) compared to North Hackney (98)

While the level of JSA claimants in Hackney North and Stoke Newington is lower than in Hackney South the rises are more consistent.

Hackney North
May - 4,081
June - 4,118
July - 4206
A total of 125 jobs lost over the period

Hackney South
May - 5,296
June - 5,190
July - 5,344
A total of 48 jobs lost over the period.

However the largest divide is not geographical, it is gender-based. Far more women appear to be losing their jobs than men.

Hackney South and Shoreditch
May figures - 3,612 men and 1,684 women
June figures - 3,531 men and 1,659 women
August figures - 3,564 men and 1,780 women.

The number of men on JSA in South Hackney has fallen by 48. The number of women has increased by 96. That's near a 6% increase in the number of women JSA claimants compared to a 1% decrease in the number of male claimants.

This compares to Hackney North:
May: 2,780 men and 1,301 women
June: 2,796 men and 1,322 women
July: 2,840 men and 1,366 women

In Hackney North the number female JSA claimants has risen faster - 60 new male claimants (an increase of 2%) compared to 65 new female claimants (and increase of nearly 5%).


Hackney women earn more per hour than Hackney men

This is according to figures from 2007 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. According to Hackney Council's 2008 Economic Profile of Hackney:

Average hourly, weekly and annual earnings are lower in Hackney than across London, but are higher than the British average. However, this hides an interesting disparity between male and female workers. Male workers in Hackney earn on average £2.46 per hour less than the London male average, and only 39 pence more per hour than the male average for Britain. In terms of annual earnings, this means male workers in Hackney earn £5145.00 less per year than the London average.

Unusually, Hackney’s female residents earn 70 pence per hour more than male residents, and for full-time workers, this earnings gap increases to £1.65 per hour. Hackney’s female full-time workers also earn higher weekly wages, averaging £29.20 more per week than full-time working men.

This goes against the pattern found in London and Britain as a whole, where men earn more than women, with the result that Hackney women earn more than either the regional or national median. However, this does not translate into women earning more than men on an annual basis.

Hackney’s female workers earn on average £1,449 per annum less than their male counterparts. Women are more likely to work part-time than men, and hourly rates of pay are lower for part-time workers than for full-time, both regionally and nationally.




The 9550 people in the borough as a whole is 6.7% of the working population.

Recent unemployment stories on Blood and Property here:
http://bloodandproperty.blogspot.com/search/label/unemployment

In the Guardian:

Council's are not prepared for the next wave of the recession - according to the Audit Commission.

Unemployed in Hackney: The lull before the storm

Can local authorities learn from history?

Can Pipe push the police?

The TV series The Wire provided a glimpse of how police and politicians might deal with each other behind closed doors. It didn't look like a happy relationship in Baltimore where the show was set.

In this week's Hackney Gazette Mayor Pipe writes: "I met Chief Supt Steve Bending, Hackney's new borough commander, this week to discuss how we can drive down crime in Hackney still further and, in particular, how we can do more to tackle the problem of gang and knife crime that still affects parts of our community."

Pipe also said he was "particularly pleased with the new borough commander's commitment to the policing pledge - a way of ensuring that Hackney residents get the high standard of policing they deserve."

According to the few policemen who dare to complain publicly - but still anonymously - targets set by bureaucrats are the main source of their misery. This example appears to deal with the policing pledge. It is from a book written by an anonymous police inspector and blogger Inspector Gadget (I haven't read it but found this excerpt on the blog Monday Books which is worth a look).

In his book, Perverting the Course of Justice, Inspector Gadget says:

We now have the ‘public reassurance agenda’ thoroughly embedded in our ‘tactical delivery plans’ and ‘control strategies’.

There’s a major ongoing scheme called the ‘Citizens’ Focus Agenda’, which involves a lot of cold-calling, often by agency staff or civilian call centres, with people being asked a number of questions for a variety of different surveys.

Don’t be fooled by the title – the ‘agenda’ is not one of actually ‘focusing’ on what ‘citizens’ want, it’s about honing media responses and assessing the reassurance gap and producing justifications for things like PCSOs and Neighbourhood Policing – and making sure we stay one step ahead of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Some of the people we contact have recently been victims of crime. We will select a certain crime type and call everyone who has suffered from it 24 days after the report was logged.

I was given the job of overseeing this. A few things about it puzzled me.

‘How do we decide which crimes we’re going to call people about?’ I said.

The answer was, we find out which crimes the HMIC are focusing on and follow their lead.

‘Right… why 24 days?’ I said.

Because HMIC phones victims at 30 days, and the first HMIC question is, ‘Have you had any contact with the police in the last 30 days?'

Mayor Pipe would probably like to see the 'reassurance gap' closed in Hackney. In the Gazette he wrote: "Crime in Hackney is falling at a record level, with 10,000 fewer victims than there were five years ago."

This is not a view that is shared by Hackney residents. The Place Survey England - Headline Table Results 2008 (which came out last month) shows that only 26% of Hackney residents agree that the police and local authorities have done a good job in the borough. (It also found that 56.4% of respondents "think that drug use or drug dealing is a problem in their local areas" - exceeded only by Newham and Tower Hamlets 60.7% and 60.5% respectively.)

With a 'reassurance gap' like this will the Mayor be tempted to push Hackney police into PR rather than crime solving and prevention?

The possibility that this is happening already appears to be illustrated by another statistic in Place Survey of England. When it asked Hackney residents if they agreed "that the police and other local public services seek people's views about anti-social behaviour?", the answer was that 28% of Hackney residents knew that their views on crimes were being sought.

This sits uncomfortably next to the 26% figure for Hackney residents who think that the police and the council are doing a good job. The fact that more people aware of the effort to communicate than of a good job being done must be frustrating - if it is correct. But it seems unlikely that people will change their views unless the 'seeking of views' transforms into the 'forming of views'.

With 56.4% of Hackney residents thinking "that drug use or drug dealing is a problem in their local areas" only a change on the ground sounds like it will make a difference and that won't be helped by PR.

If Gadget's allegations about surreal bureaucratic tail chasing are even half true then may be it would be a good thing to know exactly what demands - if any - Mayor Pipe can lumber on Hackney cops.

Under the influence

I've used this quote before but only because it's so disturbing. It is from Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey's judgement following Birmingham's notorious 2004 electoral fraud epidemic:

"This (the failure of the police to investigate electoral fraud) is not helped by the invidious position in which a police force is put when investigating electoral fraud in a local authority context.

"The alleged fraudsters may, after all, be members of the political authority to which the force is answerable. The noble cop who fights corruption at City Hall at risk of his career may well be a staple of Hollywood movies but he is much rarer in real life."

I am not suggesting that Hackney Council is corrupt or under investigation - the point is that a respected judge believes that the police are subject to influence by local politicians. That however professional or knowledgeable a police force may be, their task can be made more difficult by the demands of politicians. Mawrey's quote is just demonstrates that the power exists.

The question is how is this power used and what kinds of influence does someone like Jules Pipe have over the way the borough is policed? If the political agenda is as far removed from the requirements of good policing as it was in The Wire, may be we should be worried. But it would be good to know.

BLYDA funding details

If you've never heard of this organisation don't bother reading this. Just because I asked Tower Hamlets Council for the last five years of funding for BLYDA - the Brick Lane Youth Development Agency - here is the council response in full:

Question: “Can I have an annual breakdown of how much money the council has given BLYDA over the last five years to run its services and whether the council's funding is match funded from other sources?”























Council reply: "Funding provided by the council was not necessarily from one specific department. It has been funded by number of departments to deliver different initiatives as required by the local authority time to time. For example:

· Shaathi Mentoring Programme

· Asha Gang mediation and conflict resolution programme

· Youth work delivery and

· Holiday based programmes

For that reason, I can not confirm what match funding they had in-relation to delivering above initiatives as the Youth Service did not provide funding directly to BLYDA for all above initiatives. but from a check the history of BLYDA’s funding it shows the breakdown as follows through JD One World:

· 2005 – 2006 £111,773

· 2006-2007 £96,155

· 2007-2008 £196,754.32

· 2008-2009 £232,500

· 2009-2010 £232,500

Abu Hasanath - the Business Development Manager and formerly head of Elite Youth before it merged with BLYDA (both organisations have occupied the Osmani Centre on Vallance Road since 2000) - said that the joint organisation, called the Osmani Trust, employed the equivalent of 25-30 people full time (some of them working part time) and had 20 volunteers.

Asked whether the organisation could be considered to have some kind of political influence on leader of Tower Hamlets Council, Lutfur Rahman, Hasanath said that Elite Youth had been in existence in one form or another since 1973 and that BLYDA had been around since the 80s. He said that it was in the interests of the organisation to work with whoever is the Council Leader and had had good relations with Helal Abbas and workable relations with Denise Jones the two predecessors of Lutfur Rahman.

Asked whether BLYDA/Osmani Trust was closely linked to the East London Mosque he said that the organisation sometimes used the facilities and had set up stalls in the Mosque and had a good relationship with it.

Asked whether there was graffiti on the football pitch saying "Kill the Jews" he said there wasn't.

The allegations...

I don't know enough about this organisation to say whether its political connections need closer scrutiny.

The Brick Lane Youth Development Association has been mentioned off-the-record by disgruntled senior Labour figures and in this comment piece on Harry's Place which said: "The Preventing Violent Extremism budget is being diverted to Islami groups and more money has just been voted at a cabinet meeting last month. Half a million quid is being given to a group called BLYDA, Brick Lane Youth Developement Association, which has now received somewhere in the region of six million over the last three years. All it does is run a football team on the wall of whose pitch were painted "kill the jews”.

The comment followed this piece in the Sunday Express (1) Government plans new counter-terrorism strategies (14 June)

One oddity is that a recent (April 2009) Freedom of Information request to Tower Hamlets council for details of all its funding for community organisations said that BLYDA had received a mere £45,000.

How this figure was arrived at when, three months later the figure was given as £232,500, I do not know.

The question of whether politicians make behind the scenes deals with community centres - offering funding in return for blocks of votes - caused me problems when I used to work in Tower Hamlets. If you're bored and have nothing else to do, have a look at this: Believe this conspiracy or be a racist.

For an idea of some of the controversy surrounding the East London Mosque here's a link to Peter Tatchell's piece about a controversial event at the East London Mosque on Tuesday: Anti-Semitic Saudi Chief Imam feted in London

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth?

It is odd that a huge drop in the level of long-term unemployment in Hackney remains largely unexplained. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 the total working population of Hackney was constant at around 140,000. Over the same period the level of long-term unemployment fell from 47,100 in 2005 to 26,900 in 2007 - that is a fall of 43%.

The extraordinary thing about this drop is that the people who appear to have gone back to work were the people who had, for years, not even been looking for a job. This section of the unemployed population has even been rebranded and is now described as suffering from "worklessness".

So, getting 20,000 of these sufferers of "worklessness" back to work in a three year period must have been a huge achievement. But for some reason this feat remains unexplained. This is strange because the blight of "worklessness" was highlighted as the council's top priority earlier this year. As such, a staggering, unprecedented even miraculous fall in the borough's long-term unemployment rate might be worth explaining.

Luckily you don't have to take my word for the significance of the fall in 'worklessness' - it comes from two documents which rely on Office of National Statistic figures (ONS). One is the October 2008 "Economic Profile" of the borough - which I have failed to find online - the other is the earlier May 2008 “Labour Market Statistics Update Briefing" - which I can't find online either.

The May 2008 “Labour Market Statistics Update Briefing" raised questions about the cause of this fall in 'worklessness'. It said: “Hackney now has the highest level of employment and lowest rate of economic inactivity of any year for which data are available, and the improvement is far steeper than anything experienced by any of Hackney’s statistical neighbours.”


And it asked: “So what might have happened in Hackney to explain (or support) the trend shown in the APS figures?"

It emphasised the size and potential significance of the data: “The difficulty is not explaining the direction of the trend, but the scale of it."

And it suggested that the answer may not be straightforward offering demographic changes or "sampling variability" (the figures from the Office of National Statistics were from a narrow survey but ONS said that it stood by the results) as possible explanations for the change.

The May report suggested that it would be sensible to find out what had happened: "Options for carrying out further analysis, including with partners such as Jobcentre Plus to analyse benefits data and trends, could be explored in order to cross-check the trends shown in this paper and to shed more light on what is happening in Hackney’s labour market – particularly if we are to help ensure that the trend continues.”

The later October report made no mention of these questions but pointed out that the trend had not continued. It mentioned that the employment rate had risen to the "highest rate on record (64.3%), significantly closing the gap between Hackney and London" but pointed out that it fell back to 63.1% in December 2007.

At the moment it seems as if this dramatic fall in worklessness and rise in employment - not seen in any other borough - remains a mystery.

The fact that it remains a mystery is odd because, in January 2009, the council said that 'worklessness' was a top priority.

The Community Safety and Social Inclusion Scrutiny Commission’s “Growing a Local Economy” report, approved in January, said:

“The review revealed the key challenge the borough continues to face in tackling the problem of worklessness. We heard evidence on the scale of this problem and on the range of interventions being led by partners such as Job Centre Plus.

“The contribution of enterprise growth to tackling worklessness was explored and we as a Commission have agreed that “Tackling Worklessness” merits greater attention and therefore, it will form the subject of our next review, which will commence in October 2008.”

It is not yet clear whether the mystery of the 43% drop in 'worklessness' has already been answered or if it has been ignored by the council's economics department. Will Hackney Council answer these questions?

Unemployed in Hackney - the lull before the storm

I was made redundant in June and signed on at the Jobcentre Plus on Mare Street last week. It was not an unpleasant experience.

The only disconcerting thing about it was that the unemployed seemed to be outnumbered by Jobcentre staff. There was a friendly gang to usher me in and two members of staff sitting behind every desk.

The silent observant ones, I was told, were the new recruits getting their training. There seemed to be a lot them.

As luck would have it, Derek Harvey, External Relations Manager for Jobcentre Plus across East London, was at the Overview and Scrutiny Board meeting on Thursday (16 July) and I asked him why there were so many new staff at the Jobcentre Plus.

Yes, a daft question, but I thought there was a chance that there might be a happy answer as Derek had just delivered the only real good news to the O&S board – that Hackney’s job seekers allowance (JSA) claimant count had fallen for the first time since September.

(Office of National Statistics Regional Monthly Data - July 2009 show the number of claimants has dropped across the borough from 9350 in May to 9308 in June. The biggest fall is in Hackney South and Shoreditch down from 5296 in May to 5190 in June. The figures were still on the rise in Hackney North, up from 4,081 in May to 4,118 in June. It sounded vaguely optimisic – it was presented as vaguely optimistic.)

So when Derek left the meeting I ran after him to ask if he really thought the news was good and, if so, why Jobcentre Plus had so many new faces. All he could say was that Jobcentre Plus was “gearing up to handle greater volumes” and that I should ask Jobcentre Plus’s press office for details of recruitment in Hackney.

Unfortunately the Jobcentre press office couldn’t provide those figures. Considering the borough’s claimant count fell by just 42 in June, it might have been interesting to see if Jobcentre recruitment helped keep the numbers down (although the new people might well not be from Hackney).

The national figures are pretty interesting though – apologies if everyone knows them already. In November last year Jobcentre Plus was given cash to recruit 6000 new staff and in April it was given cash to recruit another 10,000 - that’s 16,000 jobs.

So far, since the November 2008 cash injection, Jobcentre Plus has employed 9,000 new staff leaving room for another 7,000.

The press officer I spoke to said that, so far, there had been no problems with providing a decent service and that the time it was taking to process claims was within targets.

It seemed fair to ask how bad things might get. But I was told that no one at the Department of Work and Pensions was into the forecasting game – apparently it's none of their business, not even a guess was allowed. We both became a little embarrassed when I kept asking how the government had come up with this 16,000 figure for new staff.

I was too thick to see that there are other ways of doing this - it had something to do with the state of the economy, not how many people might lose their jobs.

Luckily a few economists have had a go at this forecasting lark and none of them were optimistic.

For Hackney though, the hope is that the new Jobcentre recruits will be twiddling their thumbs til I drop in again on Wednesday.

Will Hackney return to 17% unemployment?

Hackney had the biggest rises in employment – should we expect the biggest falls? Socialist candidate says yes.

Believe this conspiracy or be a racist

I was a racist

I was a newspaper reporter in Tower Hamlets between August 2001 and August 2005. During those years I was presented with dozens of corruption allegations made by members of the Bangladeshi community about other members of the Bangladeshi community.

The constant stream of claim and counter claim led me to assume that the Bangladeshi community had a problem with fraud. It didn't cross my mind that this view might be racist.

It wasn't until I read a judgement by Richard Mawrey QC on a massive electoral fraud scandal in Birmingham that I found out that, in the eyes of a judge, I was a racist.

Initially I wanted to justify my views but I gave up. I'm not sure if this was because I didn’t want to be a racist or because I was persuaded my views were wrong. My research was not particularly rigorous or conclusive but I suspect it is more than most others have done.

The evidence that electoral fraud is a problem in these communities appears to be real. The picture below is of the Returning Officers report on the Ocean Estate in 2002 where I believe Tower Hamlets council still requires photo ID from voters because electoral fraud is so rampant.

It is hard to tell if the problem is getting worse, but in 2007 Mawrey was presiding over vote rigging claims in Tower Hamlets and in 2008 it was slough. In these cases the protagonists were Asian Muslims.

For some people it may be easy not to attempt any interpretation of the high incidence of electoral fraud in Muslim Asian communities. I wasn't one of them. This may have been because I had to write about it - which required some kind of interpretation - or it may be because prejudice is my default setting when faced with a confusing information.

However I think anyone attempting to interpret the existing information on electoral fraud is on dangerous territory even if they don't have racist tendencies.

At the moment the cure - the antidote to believing Muslim Asian communities are solely responsible for the high levels of electoral fraud - is little more than a conspiracy theory.

It revolves around the idea that political parties in the UK offer no-questions-asked public funds for community projects in return for blocks of votes. The Ocean Estate won a £56m regeneration grant in 2000, the elections mentioned in the photo above were to the board which distributed this cash.

I believe this theory - that UK political parties are partially responsible - but I don't know how many other people who read press coverage of election fraud will be are aware of it. This means that all they see is that electoral fraud seems to be committed mainly by Asian Muslims.


Private Eye opens can of worms























The leader of Tower Hamlets Council, Lutfur Rahman, has accused Private Eye of printing "Filth. Racist, Islamophobic, homophobic filth" (According to the latest issue of Private Eye (10-23 July 2009))

For three consecutive issues the magazine's Rotten Boroughs page has told readers about the financial rewards received by Labour councillors, mainly Bangladeshis, in the borough: “25 of Tower Hamlets 33 Labour Councillors now have paid positions in addition to their basic allowances.” These paid positions include two committee chairs whose roles have earned one £88 per minute (yes per minute) and the other a staggering £806 per minute.

Why?

The Private Eye pieces hint at an underlying cause: the Labour leadership needs to keep a majority of the fractured Bangladeshi community on side, or its power in the council will disappear. If Private Eye is correct, this is being achieved partly by paying them a wage.

A good place to check out the details of some of these claims is this piece (by former East London Advertiser journalist, Ted Jeory) originally written for the Sunday Express but posted on Harry's Place here where the comments provide some more background.

This comment is of particular interest: "What Lutfor Rahman has been able to do is to bring together a classic south Asian block of votes which are bought and sold by power brokers from the leading villages, Shiramishi, Habigonj, Hashimfatimapur and the others.

"He is now in a position where he doesn’t need the Labour Party to stay in control of the council and could form his own independent block by promising his supporters all sorts of favours in terms of jobs and grants."






















Is cash for votes a real problem?

The idea that blocks of Muslim Asian votes are exchanged for public funds is not confined to some of-the-wall fringe. Government sponsored reports by Ted Cantle (Cantle Report) and David Ritchie (The Ritchie Report) on the 2001 race riots, or Richard Mawrey's judgement on the electoral fraud scandal in Birmingham in 2004, provide various incarnations of the claims that political parties are engaged in this activity.

The Ritchie Report said that electoral irregularities in Oldham “were a source of tension and concern” adding: “There appears to be a clan or client based approach to politics and public life within the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities which does not fit easily with traditional British processes and which has been exploited by white party leaders, to get votes, and Asian Community leaders, to secure influence.”

"It has not been helped by the area-based nature of many recent regeneration initiatives, which have encouraged people to think that there is a block of funding which, if they have the right placemen in the right positions, they can ultimately control."

The Cantle Report said something similar: “In some areas, the Asian community has drawn our attention to a situation where some local political activities, including the selection of candidates, owe more to familial and other inappropriate connections, than to the legitimate and pressing concerns of the local electorate.”

“It was suggested to us that some councillors had either solicited votes in return for support for community projects, or succumbed to undue pressure and representations. All institutions must examine their relationships with the different sections of the local community and ensure that there are no further ‘sweetheart deals’ with self-appointed, and often unrepresentative, community custodians.”

On 31 May 2009, former British Ambassador turned human rights campaigner Craig Murray said in his blog that Lord Patel got his peerage for "enforcing the New Labour vote among the Muslim community of Blackburn" and Baroness Pola Uddin for doing the same thing in Tower Hamlets.

He said: “The ennoblements in fact only symbolise an entire system whereby Muslim communities in the UK are kept dependent upon great streams of public money... Blackburn is soaked in EU regional funds and urban regeneration grants. It bristles with community centres, cultural organisations and community workers. The council is the biggest employer. I could go on and on.”


Why has no one dug into these issues?

An alarming quote from Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey's judgement following Birmingham's notorious 2004 electoral fraud epidemic might explain why so little is said about this: "This (the failure of the police to investigate electoral fraud) is not helped by the invidious position in which a police force is put when investigating electoral fraud in a local authority context.

"The alleged fraudsters may, after all, be members of the political authority to which the force is answerable. The noble cop who fights corruption at City Hall at risk of his career may well be a staple of Hollywood movies but he is much rarer in real life."

So it seems unlikely there will be any conclusive evidence that political parties are engaged in what Ted Cantle calls “sweetheart deals” that lead to communities relying on a political status quo for their jobs to be safe – which in turn leads to electoral fraud whenever there is a threat to this status quo.

The issue is rarely reported in the press. The story in Tower Hamlets has won more than usual interest because the allegations throw the East London Mosque and Saudi fundamentalism into the mix.

The racism problem

Mawrey asks the obvious question. In a section of his judgement called “The Asian Factor” Mawrey said: “Patently, most of the protagonists in these Petitions are members of the Muslim Asian community. Is this relevant?” His answer was ‘No’.

He said: “To suggest that Muslim Asians are prone to frauds of this kind whereas other communities are not, would be racist and moreover would not be justified by any evidence before this court.”

That was his view in 2005 and it was this view which alerted me to the fact that my own ideas about the Bangladeshi community were racist. In 2007 Mawrey was presiding over similar vote rigging claims in Tower Hamlets and in 2008 an electoral fraud case in Slough outlined in this piece from the BBC which resulted in Six jailed for postal vote fraud in May this year, 2009.

None of this changes the fact that it would be racist to say that Asian Muslim communities are more prone to electoral fraud because they are Asian Muslim communities.

So, unless you think there is an academic justification for racism, there must be another explanation.

The conspiracy theory cure

Ritchie, Cantle, Murray and, to some extent, Mawrey, all point to problems beyond the Muslim Asian communities as the causes of their problems. They all suggest that the communities themselves cannot be blamed. However, none of them can offer anything more than anecdotal evidence.

Because their argument lacks evidence, there is a danger that it could be written off as a conspiracy theory. This is made worse by politicians and authorities who deny that any such activity goes on.

In April 2005, Sion Simon, Labour MP for Erdington, was offended by Mawrey’s take on Muslim Asian politics in his constituency and defended his councillors in Parliament: “Will the Minister reassure them that their reputations... will not be sullied by this judgement, whose suggestion that the corruption was city wide went beyond its remit and beyond the available evidence?” Ritchie also faced some criticism: Oldham officials attack riot report. And in 2007 the findings of Mawrey's short-lived investigation in Tower Hamlets into similar vote rigging claims were rubbished by the council.

Unfortunately, if these conspiratorial theories are fantasy, then the only culprits left in the dock are the Muslim Asian communities. At the moment this suits the Labour Party and the politicians who benefit from the deal making. But it also suits the BNP and any one else who wants to interpret the evidence in a racist way.

Is it responsible to believe in conspiracy theories?

In his recent book "Voodoo Histories, The Role of The Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History", David Aaronovitch says: “It is important not to overlook the smaller theories, since if believed, it seems to me, they eventually add up to an idea of the world in which the authorities, including those who we elect, are systematically corrupt and untruthful.” (Page 5)

Aaronovitch is not a fan of the conspiracy theory believing that they have huge potential to do damage. His first chapter describes the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” a false document that whipped up hatred against Jews.

He cites the principle of Occam's Razor: “This can be restated as “Other things being equal, one hypothesis is more plausible than another if it involves fewer numbers of new assumptions. Or, far more vulgarly, “Keep it Simple”.

The question is, if Aaronovitch, or anyone else applied this to electoral fraud in the UK what would they end up with? If they lived in Tower Hamlets, Oldham, Blackburn, or Slough, how would they explain the frequency of electoral fraud in Muslim Asian communities? And would their views be racist?