Whole Lotta Lutfur: Ethnocracy vs Democracy in Brave New Britain
Britain needs a new national anthem. I suggest Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Just look at the vibrancy here, for example:
. . .An investigation is not IslamophobiaLutfur Rahman is Britain’s first directly elected [West] Asian mayor. On 22 May [2014], he seeks re-election. He says he aspires to the highest standards of transparency and probity and that he welcomes scrutiny.Two weeks ago, on [the BBC programme] Panorama, we scrutinised the way he’s run this most diverse of boroughs [Tower Hamlets]. Instead of welcoming this, the mayor employed a major City law firm and a PR company at huge public expense to try to get the programme stopped.Tower Hamlets is home to the largest Bangladeshi population in Britain. The mayor says he seeks only to promote harmony; his Gandhi-like watchword is “No Place for Hate”. Yet before even a frame had been transmitted, a fusillade of hate-filled tweets screamed from his closest supporters: the [television] licence fee had been “used to preach hate”, to “demonise Muslims” and to “peddle racism and Islamophobia”.The mayor launched an inflammatory 26-minute counter-documentary, weeks in the making. Fat was poured on this fire by a young Bengali researcher, who made increasingly fantastical claims that we were “Islamophobic bullies” and handed confidential research material from our production, including source notes, to the mayor’s office. Because of concerns about her reliability, we had asked her to leave the team after five days. …In the run-up to the election, there have been widespread and persistent allegations by opposition councillors that Mr Rahman skewed the award of nearly £9m of grants in favour of Bengali- and Somali-run organisations to help him get out the vote on 22 May. The mayor categorically denies this, insisting that he awarded the grants solely on the basis of need. …The upshot of this 70 per cent cash “churn” was that the mayor increased funding to Bengali and Somali organisations by 139.5 per cent from £1.5m to £3.6m. He cut what was left for other organisations by 25 per cent overall. (An investigation is not Islamophobia, The Independent, 13th April 2014)
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/04/whole-lotta-lutfur-ethnocracy-vs-democracy-in-brave-new-britain/#more-23077