Livingstone is now in the Evening Standard, shilling for the RESPECT/Islamic Forum Europe’s candidate, Lutfur Rahman:
Mr Livingstone today said: “I’ve talked to Ed Miliband and the general secretary of the Labour party about this. I’ve been discussing this with virtually everyone in the party. The general consensus is that there is a lot to be said for letting this all calm down and seeing how Lutfur performs.”
Asked whether Mr Rahman could be reinstated, he said: “If he performs as well as I think he will perform, then we will see.”
This is not going to happen.
In fact, the opposite is going to happen.
The Labour Party will not be accommodating or accepting members of or activists in clerical fascist Islamist parties. In fact, the Islamic Forum Europe/Jamaat-e-Islami infiltrated, then took on and defeated, the Labour Party. The Labour Party is not going to let another political party – its rivals – become part of it. It is insane for Ken Livingstone to act as if there is any support for an alliance with the IFE activists in the party.
The Livingstone strategy has failed. It has been exposed. It has been rejected.
The only people within Labour pushing this are the far Left and the Livingstonites. If the time ever comes that Labour accepts their agenda, we’ll be back to the grim days of the 1980s, where the Labour Party was unelectable.
We are not going back there, again.
UPDATE
Andrew Gilligan sets out the reasons why Labour won’t be admitting Lutfur Rahman:
The advantages for the Labour Party, however, are much less clear. If anyone from Mr Miliband’s office comes across this blog, Lutfur:
1. achieved the leadership of Tower Hamlets council in 2008 with thehelp of the IFE, who councillors say threatened them on Lutfur’s behalf.
2. appointed a man closely connected to the IFE. Lutfur Ali, as assistant chief executive of the council (even though he was unqualified for the job and was dismissed as a candidate by the council’s own headhunters), then effectively sacked the council’s secular, white chief executive. Lutfur Ali was present at Rahman’s mayoral campaign launch and is now expected to return to the council.
3. handed large and growing sums of council money to IFE front organisations.
4. moved council funding from secular, multicultural organisations to groups closely connected to the IFE.
5. presided over the stocking of Tower Hamlets libraries with extremist literature, including hundreds of audio tapes of sermons by Awlaki.
6. proposed to “Islamically brand” the multicultural Brick Lane with “hijab arches.”
7. signed up entire families of sham “paper” members to ensure his nomination as Labour mayoral candidate, several of whom told us they do not even support the Labour Party.
8. enjoyed the backing of prominent local racists and anti-Semites, one of whom organised meetings for his campaign and appears to have signed his nomination papers as mayoral candidate.
9. benefited from the close support and patronage of a local millionaire businessman, Shiraj Haque, who has openly stated: “I needed someone to fix [Tower Hamlets politics], so I thought let’s try him [Lutfur].”
10. is currently under police investigation (interviews are currently under way with witnesses) for allegedly failing to declare substantial donations by Mr Haque and others to his campaign, as electoral law requires;
11. won the election after his supporters distributed smear literaturefalsely claiming that Mr Abbas was a racist, a wife-beater and an enemy of Islam.
I should stress that despite reporting all this repeatedly here, on Channel 4’s Dispatches and in the newspaper over the last nine months, we have received no complaint or challenge from Rahman. Complaints made by others against us to Ofcom and the Press Complaints Commission have without exception been dismissed.
Among Tower Hamlets council’s first actions since Lutfur became its head is to hand out CDs in its Town Hall of sermons by an extremist preacher who has said that “Islam is incompatible with democracy” and that men should have the right to beat their wives – the first controversy in a mayoralty which is likely to become a political and media car-crash.
These are the reasons why Lutfur Rahman should not be readmitted to the Labour Party.
