Muhammad Haque: First comment on the latest piece by the London EVENING STANDARD “against” Ken Livingstone.

1220 Hrs GMT

London

Friday

17 February 2012

By © Muhammad Haque

First comment on the latest piece by the London EVENING STANDARD “against” Ken Livingstone.

[1]

As the London Expert on Ken Livingstone’s careerist opportunistic “politics”, I should welcome anything that appears in the London EVENING STANDARD that claims to be uncovering some shady deeds by the faked newt. But I don’t…Why don’t I? The simple short answer is that the EVENING STANDARD is clueless about Tower Hamlets which is where it appears to be focussing its attention. Secondly because I am not impressed by the pretentious claims that Peter Golds makes or those that are made for him by some very notorious time-servers in and around “Fleet Street”.

Mr Golds is a prejudiced, ignorant man.

If he were honest and fair and unprejudiced then he would have joined me years ago and he could then begin to see that a democratic, ethical campaign was [and still IS] possible in the community.

And we could as a community begin to see the beginning of the end for the cabal of insidious time-servers, opportunists and nest-featherers at the expense of the community who have for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS been in effective control of the key agenda that is promoted via Tower Hamlets Council

Mr Golds is not only a Conman in the sense of being a flag carrier of the arrogant branch of the Thatcherite Conservative Party but he is also a deeply ignorant man. This will shock his un-named but secret line of “friends" in and around the City of London.

It is because of the deep ignorance and even deeper prejudice against Society on Peter Golds' part that the Tories will NEVER make the link with the ordinary people in Tower Hamlets that theoretically they could do.

Peter Golds exposed his ignorance by playing double standards when during the 2010 campaign against an elected mayor system, I witnessed him first saying No to an elected mayor system and then saying YES to the same thing!

His offensively tokenistic and nonsensical “explanation” “justifying” his “conversion” to YES as sent to me as the Honorary Coordinator of the BHANGEELAAR! Campaign against an elected, "executive" mayor system in Tower Hamlets Borough, did not wash at all.

For the above reasons and more, their current, Fleet-Street-linked anti-Ken Livingstone propaganda will not succeed. Not in Tower Hamlets, so far as I can see!

[To be continued]

We cite below the texts of the EVENING STANDARD piece that Muhammad Haque has been commenting on [above]

Ken's friends in the East

Stephen Robinson
16 Feb 2012

On the streets of Tower Hamlets, councillor Peter Golds tends to stick out. For a start, he is a contentedly "out" gay man. In what is now a heavily Asian borough, he is of Jewish origin, and even more unusually, in a neighbourhood where few are proud to be Tory, he is a strident Conservative.

These factors combine so that when Cllr Golds stands up to speak in the council chamber, things can turn very ugly in the public gallery.

"I get the hissing, the calls of 'poofter', they shout 'Zionist scum' at me," he says, sitting in his office at the Town Hall. This sort of treatment can be equally disturbing for a lesbian Labour councillor, who is subjected to other strange heckling.

More shocking still than these eruptions from the public benches is that this behaviour is seemingly tolerated, even though Tower Hamlets's first directly elected mayor, Lutfur Rahman, says he is relentlessly intolerant of sexist and racist bigotry.

As Golds said in a formal complaint to the borough police commander, were white skinheads observed yelling abuse at Muslim east Londoners, it would not be tolerated. The worst of the abuse occurred shortly after Rahman's election in October 2010 but Golds says it continues to this day.

Rahman is a controversial figure. The Labour Party barred him from running as Tower Hamlets mayor, partly over concerns about his links to those around the hardline Islamic Forum of Europe, though he denies any formal contact with the IFE.

Under Ken Livingstone's control of City Hall, hundreds of thousands of pounds of Londoners' money was granted to the East London Mosque, which is strongly under the control of the IFE. Activists linked to the IFE, via their lobby group Muslims 4 Ken, campaigned for Livingstone's re-election against Boris Johnson in 2008.

Two years later, thwarted by Labour in his bid to run as official candidate for the Tower Hamlets executive mayoralty, Rahman changed his designation to Independent, essentially an offshoot of Respect.

He beat the Labour candidate Helal Abbas on a turnout of about 26 per cent, amid allegations of concerted electoral malpractice and mass intimidation at polling stations.

The campaign was exceptionally dirty, with Abbas smeared as a wife-beater and a "racist". But Livingstone travelled into the borough not to bolster the embattled Labour candidate but very publicly to back Rahman.

Ed Miliband, the new Labour leader, failed to follow through on what many activists said should have been Livingstone's automatic expulsion from the Labour Party for disloyalty.

For those in Labour who have always distrusted Livingstone, his alliance with Rahman is proof that Ken remains an undermining force constantly fighting factional battles on the Left of London politics.

But the connection between Rahman and Livingstone runs far deeper. Key loyalists from the days of Livingstone's control of City Hall have been installed in Rahman's expanding executive office as London's mayoral election nears.

Tony Winterbottom, who left Livingstone's London Development Agency on a year's sabbatical followed by a £75,000 pay-off and £160,000 top-up of his pension fund, is now charging Rahman's office £1,000 a day. The council says he is working at this rate for "approximately" three days a month.

Murziline Parchment is head of Rahman's executive office. She was one of Livingstone's tight circle of political appointees on six-figure packages whose finances were further augmented when, as outgoing Mayor in 2008, he changed the rules to allow her to share a severance pot of £1.6 million.

Parchment is now earning for her 30 hours a week less than half of the £126,000 she was paid in City Hall.

Also drafted in is Mark Seddon, an old Livingstone supporter and ex-editor of Tribune, as a one-day-a-week "media adviser".

There are seven other paid contractors in Mayor Rahman's executive office, one of them Axel Landin, an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and Livingstone youth supporter, who is paid £8.39 an hour to advise on "boundary review matters".

"A prototype cabinet for the next Livingstone administration in City Hall has been created inside the mayor of Tower Hamlets' private office, at public expense, built around Livingstone's cronies," says Golds. "It is a vision of what they hope to be the next phase of Livingstone's rule."

The Jewish Chronicle believes "Ken has calculated that backing Mr Rahman's brand of Islamism-lite will win him enough support to justify sacrificing the votes of Jewish, gay or more moderate Muslim Londoners".

In his memoir You Can't Say That, published last year, Livingstone suggests that his "campaigns against racism and homophobia and for women's rights" made him a hate figure in the Eighties. Many on the Left wonder why he is now allying himself in Tower Hamlets with forces that wish to see women veiled and are hostile to Israel and Jews in general.

When Livingstone last week suggested the Tory Party was "riddled" with closet homosexuals, few who know him well suggested that he is at heart a gay-basher. But why is he so close to groups hostile to the causes he espouses?

The White Swan, a gay pub in Limehouse, is being targeted by the Rahman administration. Hundreds of regulars have signed a petition to stop the council closing down the regular Wednesday night drag queen strip event, which they say is a harmless camp show that could be blamelessly attended in any city centre in Britain.

Sections of the gay press worry that the targeting of the White Swan is part of a wider concession to the homophobic impulses of core supporters of Rahman and Livingstone.

A spokeswoman for Tower Hamlets, echoing Livingstone's position, emphasises that the council "has an innovative and proactive approach to tackling inequality and strengthening community cohesion".

Yet despite the rage of many London Labour activists over the original Livingstone switch to support Rahman, most of them now suggest they will support him nonetheless.

MP Rushanara Ali, who won Bethnal Green and Bow from George Galloway of Respect in May 2010, says of Livingstone's backing of Rahman later that year: "He should know better. He is a leading member of the Labour party with a high profile and coming into my constituency and the borough of Tower Hamlets and playing divisive politics, essentially, and not backing up your party at a very difficult time was a low point in his recent political activity."

Nevertheless, she says she will be turning out with much of the rest of the Tower Hamlets Labour base to campaign to re-elect Livingstone in May because "he stands for a set of ideas to improve people's lives in London that's better than what Boris Johnson's about."

Councillor Shiria Khatun, spokeswoman for the Labour group, is equally adamant that she will support his mayoralty bid. "Ken is a living legend down here in Tower Hamlets, where people are more interested in issues that affect them on a daily basis, such as housing and fares," she says.

A generation after Livingstone first turned on colleagues at the old GLC, he still has the capacity to enrage, confound, yet win over sections of his party, despite the unlikely allies, some with rather dubious links, he finds along the way.

Boris Johnson has probably learned the same lesson, that the more he embarrasses David Cameron and George Osborne, the better he does with the wider electorate.

Both candidates seem to understand that to run for London, you have to run against your party.

The question is whether voters will be as forgiving of Livingstone's disloyalty as his Labour allies in east London seem to be.