Reply to Andrew Boff

I posted an article last night which criticised the Hackney Conservative Party for pandering to the needs of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish Community.

Andrew Boff, the Conservative Party's mayoral candidate in Hackney and a member of the London Assembly, replied in the comments section - I'm writing this reply to him as a post because it's easier and people are more likely to read it.

Andrew's first question:

In the article I wrote: "The ideologies of both parties (Lib Dems and Conservatives) can appear submissive to an Ultra Orthodox Jewish agenda."

Andrew Boff asked: "
Is that the agenda in the Protocol of the Elders of Zion or another one?
"

Blood and Property reply: Apparently the "Protocols of the Elders Zion" were a set of ideas stolen from French literature then falsely presented as a transcript of a secret meeting of Jewish elders. And this story ended up being believed by the likes of Henry Ford and Winston Churchill. (I hope that’s correct I got it from David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories).

How does this compare to the “Ultra Orthodox Jewish agenda” that I’m talking about? The agenda I’m talking about is not a secret so I don't think there is much to compare. There is one main issue on it - lobbying to change the borough’s planning rules to allow loft extensions to accommodate large families.

You can read about it here and it is discussed by prominent members of the Jewish community here. It is also reported in the Jewish Chronicle here (Which said: "Ita Symons, chief executive of Agudas Israel Housing Association, which works with the strictly Orthodox population in north London, said Haringey's move was "a real victory for the community. It sets an excellent precedent." She hoped Hackney Council would move similarly to ease the housing problems of local Jewish families.") and there is an interesting piece here, also in the Jewish Chronicle, about the tendency of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish Community to put its own interests above those of neighbouring communities.

I don’t think there’s any controversy in noting that this loft extension policy issue was the main policy objective of the Hackney Conservative group. And is it surprising when the Hackney Conservative group was composed of nine councillors, six them from the Ultra Orthodox Community?

I think Andrew is suggesting that my comments and criticisms are aimed at the Charedi community and might, therefore, be racist. But my criticisms are aimed at the Conservative Party. I think most normal people put their families, communities, religions and ideologies (if they have them), above political parties. So why would an individual temper his or her use of a political party if it is helping with these more important goals?

Andrew's second point:

I wrote: "Now the ideological inconsistencies look a bit raw as the community worst affected by the Con-Lib coalition's policies is the Ultra Orthodox Jewish one."

Andrew Boff asked: "
How so?"

Blood and Property: In Hackney, the coalition government’s decision to cap housing benefit has specifically hit the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community hardest (13% of Hackney benefit cut victims will be Ultra Orthodox Jewish). According to a council document, 213 of Hackney's 1,642 housing benefit claimants - whose rents will no longer be fully covered by benefits if government proposals go through - will be ultra orthodox Jewish (Charedi). The next largest group to be affected by the cuts is white British with 92 claims affected.

Generally the victims of cuts made by the coalition government are discussed in terms of their wealth, location, or age. Not this one, its impact is described in terms of ethnic/cultural identity.

The “ideological inconsistency” being that the Charedi vote was closely associated with the support the Conservative Party seemed to be giving in relation to its housing needs. The friendly support came at a local level and doesn't appear to have had much to do with the aims of the national party.

Some of the ideological inconsistencies are permanent fixtures for any political party dealing with religious communities. Should a member of the Conservative Party – or any party - promote a theocracy above a democracy?

In this old story (Democracy problem in Stamford Hill) the issue of democracy and the Charedi Community was discussed. I'm sure, but I think Andrew would see this kind of story as dangerous and potentially racist because it suggests that democracy is not top of the agenda for Ultra Orthodox Jewish politicians. But I spoke to Ultra Orthodox Jewish councillors from both parties and none of them contradicted the view that Ultra Orthodox politicians avoid standing against each other - which makes democracy a bit of a problem for their constituents - they rarely get a choice. Again, no big secret, just something to try and understand.

£2 bullets and conspiracy theories: Hackney's worst enemies this summer?

Below are some of the issues discussed at a meeting between Hackney residents and Chief Superintendent Bill Tillbrook - head of London's armed police CO19 - organised by Black Parent Community Forum.

The meeting was held between 2-4pm on Saturday 22 May at the Adeline Centre on Belsham Street and was punctuated, at about 3.3opm, by the departure of the Hackney Gazette's chief reporter to cover the shooting on London Fields.

The aim of the meeting was for the CO19 chief to tell Hackney residents what his unit does. Tillbrook said that the 700-strong unit's most impressive statistic is rarely mentioned: that it is called out between 12-13,000 times per year but the average number of times that any weapon is fired is just 2 per year. But a number of more general issues were also discussed:

CHEAP BULLETS:
Has the shortage of bullets - seen as a major curb on gun violence in Hackney - come to an end? Homemade bullets are not uncommon due to the shortage. On April 22 Hackney Borough commander, Steve Bending told the Gazette: "Most firearms are converted, blank-firing guns and most of the ammunition is home made... they are inaccurate weapons with poor ammunition."

Rev Joyce Daley, the meeting organiser, said she had heard that bullets may now be for sale in Hackney for £2 each. (Telegraph piece: “There would be a lot more murders,” says Professor John Pitts, who has studied the phenomenon extensively, “were it not for one factor: the difficulty in obtaining bullets.”)

CONSPIRACY THEORIES:
Are the police selling guns and drugs in Hackney? A minority of Hackney residents appear to believe this. So powerful is this belief that Hackney police has apparently agreed to publicly display 2.5 tonnes of recovered and destroyed weapons.

During the meeting Chief Superintendent Bill Tillbrook pointed out that police corruption had been one of the main areas of concern at a meeting in November - the last time he took part in a Black Parents Forum meeting. He said that some people believed the police had killed people but that these incidents were never reported: "This tells me what a huge gap there is between what's going on and what people believe is going on. For someone in London, in 2010, to think we can shoot someone in the street and it wouldn't get reported... there's an information gap."

Other items discussed during and after the meeting:

Information and educational material about the dangers of gun crime need to be aimed much more at primary schools.

Kids being stopped several times a day on some estates need to be made aware that this will not be the result of random borough-wide powers but will be due to a specific incident or piece of intelligence about the area that they live in (Section 60) (These have been issued almost every week for several months in Hackney.)

The culture of silence surrounding these crimes may be related to what goes on in prison as well as what happens on the streets of Hackney.

The media needs to be more accountable for glorifying gun culture.

Chickenshed theatre group's "Crime of the Century" will be showing at St John's Church, Lower Clapton Road on Saturday June 5, 5pm-7pm, dedicated to Shaquille Smith who was stabbed to death in London Fields in August 2008. For tickets, 020 8292 9222

"What a fabulous hypocrite this ludicrous woman is"

Rod Liddle returns fire on Diane Abbott after she accused him of racism: "What a fabulous hypocrite this ludicrous woman is. In other words she is allowed to make these points, with a sprinkling of shibboleths and platitudes, but not a white person."

In her criticism of Liddle, Abbott said: "It is obviously statistically false to say that the 'overwhelming majority' of the crimes listed by Rod are committed by young black men..."

Liddle points to comments on Abbott's website: “Sadly 80 per cent of gun crime in London is "black on black", often involving boys in their teens. As a black woman and the mother of a teenage son this is frightening and wholly unacceptable."

How to interpret over representation of young black people in the criminal justice system: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmhaff/181/18102.htm

Believe this conspiracy or be a racist...

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?