“That ‘later’ rhymes with ‘alligator’
Is not poetry — just prose —
Cloaked in beat and melody
It seems any damn thing goes”
From Mock Around the Clock by Bachchoo
The UK Electoral Commission has launched an investigation to “ascertain the vulnerability of Asian communities to electoral fraud.” It names 16 local authorities — Municipal Corporations — with substantial-enough populations of “Asians” to affect the results of a public election.
The list, in alphabetical order names Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford, Burnley, Calderdale, Coventry, Derby, Hyndburn, Kirklees, Oldham, Pendle, Peterborough, Slough, Tower Hamlets, Walsall and Woking.
The list, dear reader, poses a question of conscience for this writer, especially as having been in India the last few weeks I was shocked by the news that in my hometown of Pune a young man was murdered for no other reason than that he was an identifiable Muslim.
So what’s that got to do with electoral fraud in Britain? As I write, two people have been arrested in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets charged with crimes of electoral fraud. It is also alleged that in the recent mayoral elections in this same Borough there were incidents of voter intimidation, of coercive “canvassing” inside the electoral booths, of fraudulent postal ballots and disorder and intimidation during the count.
The winner of this mayoral race was the incumbent, one Lutfur Rahman, a former Labour councillor who was expelled from the Labour Party and contested as an Independent. He defeated his Labour rival John Biggs by 3,000 votes.
Rahman himself is under investigation for handing out council money in the shape of grants to organisations which were fronts for either cronies and their relatives or were run by fellow Sylhetis in exchange for the delivery of block votes.
It is also alleged that Rahman is connected to extremist Islamic groups, a claim he strongly denies but one which is being rigorously pursued by the investigative press.
The minister for local government, Eric Pickles, sent in a team of investigators to seize files from Tower Hamlets Town Hall in a check on who Lutfur is funding and why.
The reason for circumspection in reporting these events is that the councils under scrutiny seem to have one particular factor in common. Missing from the list of councils being investigated for “vulnerability to electoral fraud” are, to take random examples, Southall or Brent in London or Leicester in the Midlands.
These are boroughs with a considerable number of Sikhs in the case of Southall and Gujaratis in Brent and a fair minority of Gujaratis and Punjabis in Leicester.
What I am trepid about pointing out is the incontestable fact that the 16 named boroughs under scrutiny are undoubtedly “Asian” but happen to be populated, in numbers that have made them the targets of investigation, by either Pakistani Mirpuri populations or Bangladeshis from Sylhet. None of them have an electorate of Hindus or Sikhs.
The hazard of making such an observation is that the observer (me, in this instance) will be immediately characterised and vilified as a “racist” and accused of “Islamophobia” as Mirpuris and Sylhetis are without exception Muslims.
So let me state very bluntly that I do not believe that electoral fraud has anything at all to do with the religious persuasion of the fraudster.
It has everything to do with the history and patterns of immigration to this country from the subcontinent.
The case of Tower Hamlets, a community with which, of the 16, I am most familiar is an exemplary and in some ways a typical case but in other ways radically different.
All the communities mentioned were formed as enclosed immigrant enclaves in the cities through the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties of the last century.
In the north and in the Midlands, the Mirpuris and Bangladeshis came to Britain to take up shift work in textile factories and to man the meaner service industries of large cities.
In the case of Tower Hamlets, the Sylhetis who arrived through those decades took up badly paid labour in the textile and leather manufacturing sweatshops.
These immigrants set-tled in the cheaper and run-down accommodation of the cities, attracted naturally to where relatives or associates from the rural and semi-rural societies of Mirpur and Sylhet had settled before them.
They quite naturally found the environment of shops that catered for their material needs more conducive than the High Streets and super-markets of Britain. The localities, which can in many cases be characterised as ghettoes, grew. They cohered around mosques and the community centres and the projects that grew out of them.
In the Eighties, Britain began importing textiles and leather goods from Asian manufacturers — China, India and ironically Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The mills and sweatshops of Tower Hamlets, unable to compete in British and world markets against cheaper Asian products, closed.
Tower Hamlets wasn’t as hard hit as the northern mill-and-mosque, or indeed closed-mill-and-cohering-mosque communities as it is bang next to the City of London, the financial hub of Europe, and consequently its property values soared.
The density of the Bangladeshi population enabled them to vote as a bloc, one of Britain’s self-defining “votebanks” and a system of village and religious allegiances resulted in people of Bangladeshi origin contesting as candidates for the established British parties and then branching out as Independents and even floating new parties.
Saudi Arabian money sustained the East London Mosque, the largest in London and with the money came the Salafi preachers. Today Tower Hamlets has more mosques per square mile than any other place on earth including Mecca. Some of them run community centres funded by the council.
In these ways and through funding three local Bengali TV and two radio stations, cliques gained control of the borough’s votes. The disillusioned white working class who feel that they have been displaced by an immigrant community didn’t vote at all.
Tch, tch!
The pattern of patronage, intimidation, dirty tricks and rigged postal balloting is finally under investigation and the results are destined, I fear, to fuel Asianophobia.
