Brick Lane CURRY 'touts': How to stop it and to find jobs for those who depend on 'touting' - the Muhammad Haque London Report - Part 1

Brick Lane CURRY 'touting': How to stop it and to find jobs for those who depend on 'touting' - the Muhammad Haque London Report - Part 1
[Edited again at] 1841 [1825] Hrs GMT London Sunday 13 March 2011 AADHIKAROnline © Muhammad Haque CAMPAIGN reporting on Curry restaurants and touting in Brick Lane [Linked video Interview filmed 08 March 2011M2U02624] This is a commentary that I am publishing online today Sunday 13 March 2011 along with footage of a series of interview I have recorded with one of the restaurant owners in Brick Lane. I have already published detailed accounts about the views held by this one particular restaurateur, Azmal Hussain. What I am doing here is putting in historical context the whole issue of touting passersby as potential customers for the Curry restaurants. are a total of about fifty such restaurants in Brick Lane going into Osborne Street to the south towards the Whitechapel Road. The estimated number of people working as staff in the restaurants would vary from three to five hundred. Then there are the ‘touts’. All the staff are Bangladeshi. Exceptions are very rare. This is the core of the identity of these restaurants. And their real strength. Without Bangladeshi staff, these restaurants would not be able to function. In latter parts of these reports, I shall examine the history and the current state of staff, training and the prospects of business for these restaurants. Right now, and in view of the deliberate creation of joblessness that is going on under the CONDEM regime in Britain, the issue that I shall be focussing on in the next part after this particular updater is the nEED FOR JOBS and the relevance of those needs of the availability of young people to ‘work’ as touts. I shall then look at the role of each of the following and examine their particular duties and performances:

The local Tower Hamlets Council

The London Metropolitan Police

The London Mayor in the context of the 2012 Hosting

Why I am concerned about the matter of touting in Brick Lane:

I have defended the community in the East End now for forty years, give an take a year or so. However, I have been part of and have in fact founded the Movement for the defence of the East End Community that has now existed for over 50 years. And so to me Brick Lane has been at the metaphoric and the physical heart of the frame of action steps taken by the movement at the start and the ones being still taken today. As I spelt out in my speech to the large gathering of the people who had assembled at the Hanbury Street ‘Brady Centre’ on Sunday 22 January 2006 in support of the KHOODEELAAR! campaign against the Crossrail hole, I had been walking the streets of the East End for years raising awareness on the imminent and the lethal attack on the very existence of Brick Lane that we had known it to be. And the reason why I had paid so much of time and resource to the cause of defending the area was as live then as it is today and as it has always been Apart from housing a whole host of people from all over the rest if the world with their own backgrounds and identities, Brick Lane has been the second home for Bangladeshis outside of Bangladesh. That is general. The more acutely true thing is that Brick Lane is the only place where it feels as if we are at home in Seelot!
At least that is the feeling when we forget about the unease, the nuisance, the hassle and the embarrassment that touting has now brought on the collective and the individual being of the community in the East End of London.

So it was a shock when I was treated as possible ‘customer’ by a stranger who almost blocked my passage as I took the turn left from the Hanbury Street into Brick Lane. That was eleven years ago. In the year 2000. [To be continued]