Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Murray through to next round with 12-10 in the 5th set.

ukip have already said that they will target 36 seats or thereabouts
the question is which marginals, and currently held by whom

Well worth a read.....

The Muslim Council of Britain have produced 72 pages of advice to schools designed to ‘promote greater understanding of the faith, religious and cultural needs’ of pupils from an Islamic background. It is entitled "Meeting the needs of Muslim Pupils in State Schools - Information & Guidance for Schools".

The Mail has investigated the man behind the production of this document and they feel it is nothing other than an important part of a masterminded plot by Islamic extremists to take over our schools.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2644322/The-Trojan-Horse-files-On-eve-explosive-report-claims-plot-Islamic-extremists-schools-investigate-man-accused-mastermind.html

The Trojan Horse files: On the eve of an explosive report into claims of a plot by Islamic extremists to take over schools, we investigate the man accused of being the mastermind
May 31, 2014
* Ofsted report on alleged plot to Islamicise students will be released in days
* Tahir Alam is a governor at three Birmingham schools facing criticism
* Alam, 45, can be revealed as author of a controversial 2007 booklet
* Guide to teaching Muslim pupils suggested segregation in state schools
* It also banned relationships, gay or straight, and teaching contraception
* One head claimed he appointed 'allies' as parent governors in 'coup'
* Alam denies plot and calls investigations an Islamophobic 'witch hunt'

SPECIAL REPORT By GUY ADAMS and SUE REID
PUBLISHED: 23:14, 30 May 2014

Filled with endless pictures of smiling children, the ‘information and guidance’ booklet must have looked anodyne when it tumbled off the press a few years ago.

It was produced by the Muslim Council of Britain and contained — in the words of the foreword — 72 pages of advice to schools designed to ‘promote greater understanding of the faith, religious and cultural needs’ of pupils from an Islamic background.

Even the title seemed, on the face of things, uncontroversial. It was called simply: Meeting The Needs Of Muslim Pupils In State Schools.


Controversy: Tahir Alam is the alleged mastermind of a plot by Islamic extremists to take over schools. The 45-year-old can be revealed as the author of a controversial 2007 booklet about teaching Muslim pupils

Appearances can be deceptive, though. For within days of its publication, this outwardly unremarkable booklet had sparked an explosive political controversy.

For, in the eyes of a host of vociferous critics, it amounted to nothing less than a blueprint for the ‘Islamicisation’ of Britain’s entire education system.

To that end, it called for sweeping changes in the way everything from music, art and sports, to biology and religious education were taught in schools.

One passage endorsed a ban on ‘unIslamic’ activities, such as dancing, for Muslim pupils.

Another said swimming lessons should be halted during Ramadan, because ‘the potential for swallowing water [when fasting] is very high’. A third, regarding behavioural codes, declared that ‘girlfriend/boyfriend as well as homosexual relationships’ are ‘not acceptable practices according to Islamic teachings’.

The booklet issued hawkish decrees on everything from architecture — it called for single-sex prayer rooms to be built at every school — to extra-curricular activities. School balls, discos and fashion shows should be avoided so as not to ‘inadvertently exclude’ Muslim parents and pupils, it cautioned.

Divisive: The 2007 booklet co-authored by Tahir Alam faced wide criticism when it was released

So, too, should fund-raising raffles, since gambling is forbidden by the Koran, Islam’s holy book.

At meal-times, meanwhile, it said children should be offered halal food, sourced from animals killed without first being stunned — the most ‘pure’ form of religious slaughter, dubbed cruel by animal welfare campaigners.

During biology lessons, many aspects of sex education, including teaching about contraception and the use of diagrams showing reproductive organs, would be regarded by Muslims as ‘completely inappropriate and encouraging morally unacceptable behaviour’.

In drama, Nativity plays were off-limits for Muslim pupils, while ‘parents may have reservations regarding participation in [any] theatrical plays or acting that involves physical contact between males and females’.

Art teachers, it added, ‘should avoid encouraging Muslim pupils from producing three-dimensional imagery of humans’, since that is also outlawed by the Koran.

‘Some Muslims may hold a very conservative attitude towards music and may seek to avoid it altogether,’ read a passage on music lessons.

‘Most Muslim parents will find little or no educational merit or value in dance or dancing after early childhood and may even find it objectionable.’ As for PE, the booklet said Muslim girls should wear full-length tracksuits and headscarves when taking part in even highly vigorous exercise, while teachers must avoid the ‘objectionable’ practice of allowing mixed-gender groups to play contact sports such as football or basketball.

Mixed-gender swimming sessions, even for primary school children, were ‘unacceptable for reasons of modesty and decency to Muslim parents’.

Finally, the booklet argued that all British children should have the option of studying Arabic, while staff should consider segregating morning assembly, with ‘separate acts of collective worship’ for Muslim and Christian students.

If you think some of that advice sounds divisive and extreme, not to say at odds with traditionally British educational values, you are not alone. For the contents of Meeting The Needs Of Muslim Pupils In State Schools sparked immediate controversy.

Claims: Park View School in Birmingham is one of those at the centre of the current controversy

In the days after its publication in February 2007, front-page newspaper reports savaged its ‘Taliban-style’ decrees. Several MPs and pressure groups attacked the booklet — which ended up being pulled from the Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) website — as dangerous and divisive.

‘The MCB needs to realise it has to move closer to the rest of the community, not away from it,’ said the Conservative MP Greg Hands, who is now a Government whip.

The National Secular Society dubbed the report ‘a recipe for disaster’. And the moderate Sufi Muslim Council, which claims to represent more Muslims than the MCB, said it had misunderstood the nature of Ramadan.

Lost in the noise, however, was the identity of the author behind this report. Perhaps surprisingly, he was neither named nor quoted in any of the mainstream coverage that followed its publication.

During biology lessons, many aspects of sex education, including teaching about contraception and the use of diagrams showing reproductive organs, would be regarded by Muslims as 'completely inappropriate and encouraging morally unacceptable behaviour'

Today, however, this individual — and his apparently-conservative beliefs — seems very relevant indeed.

He is crucial, in fact, to fully understanding a different, but no less chilling scandal that has in recent months raised another pressing set of questions about the relationship between Islam and the state education system.

The man in question is called Tahir Mahmo Alam. He is 45 years old, lives in Birmingham and intriguingly (given the conservative views espoused above) he happens to be the central figure in the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ affair.

The story broke two months ago when a strange but shocking letter was leaked to newspapers.

Typed in italics and apparently unsigned and undated, it described a five-step strategy that Muslim extremists have supposedly been using to take over the running of a string of primary and secondary schools.

Their alleged ‘jihad’ was designed to ‘drip-feed our ideal for a Muslim school’ and went by the name Operation Trojan Horse.

It involved identifying target schools in predominately Muslim areas, getting sympathetic parents to join governing bodies and then using underhand methods to remove non-Muslim teachers from positions of influence.

After that, the curriculums, time-tables and cultures of the schools would be quietly altered to adhere to an Islamic ideal.

Alam, a governor of five schools in Birmingham, had supposedly ‘fine-tuned the Trojan Horse so it is totally invisible to the naked eye’, the letter said, allowing it to be quietly enacted across the city.

The plot would therefore spread to Bradford and Manchester, the letter continued, where Westernised teachers are ‘corrupting children with sex education, teaching about homosexuals, making children say Christian prayers and mixed swimming and sports’.


Probe: After the allegations surfaced, Ofsted commissioned an emergency report to investigate practices at 21 schools in Birmingham, including Park View (pictured)

It should at this point be stressed the letter has not been substantiated as genuine and cannot be held as proof that such a plot exists.

Indeed, since the day it emerged, Mr Alam has repeatedly described the document as a ‘hoax’ and ‘fabrication’ — a line he maintains.

'The factual errors in the letter are legion. The source has not been established. It can’t be taken seriously,' he said, when we spoke yesterday.

Yet while the provenance of the letter is murky, and the fact it contains several mis-spellings and factual errors, the problems it highlights are almost certainly genuine. Just as the letter states, several non-Muslim headteachers have, indeed, left their jobs in a small area of Birmingham (near to Alam’s home) in a very short space of time — five have departed in the past six months.

Thanks to a steady stream of concerned parents and teachers who have recently gone public, there also appears to be ample evidence of organised efforts to Islamicise local schools.


Alleged mastermind: Tahir Alam

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, has identified ‘concerted efforts’ to infiltrate at least six schools in Birmingham and ‘alter their character in line with the Islamic faith’.

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham’s Perry Barr, said: ‘There has been a serious bid to take over most of the schools in the east and south of the city.’ The local council admits receiving more than 200 complaints about the matter, prompting it to suspend recruitment of school governors.

Little wonder that the Trojan Horse allegations are being taken seriously at the highest levels of Government. Three inquiries into 25 Birmingham schools are underway.

One, by the former Scotland Yard anti-terror chief Peter Clarke — appointed by Education Secretary Michael Gove — will report in July. Another, by Birmingham Council, is due to release initial findings next week.

The third, and for now most important, is expected to be unveiled at a press conference next Thursday. It is the work of Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, who recently sent emergency teams of inspectors into 21 local schools.

They have been asked to establish exactly what has been going on in playgrounds, classrooms and assembly halls. And well-placed sources said this week that their findings are ‘dynamite’.

At least six schools are expected to be placed immediately in special measures by Ofsted — a move that gives the agency the power to remove staff and governors, and even close the school. Lesser, but nonetheless serious, action is expected at ten other schools.

Tellingly, at least three of the six schools said to be facing the most serious criticism have Tahir Alam as a governor. And all the others are said to be controlled by associates of Alam or people linked to faith-based organisations in which he takes a prominent role.

The three main establishments — Park View, Golden Hillock and Nansen primary — are within a few miles of each other in Small Heath, a neighbourhood just east of Birmingham city centre where Mr Alam lives with his wife and two children.

Far-reaching: Education Secretary Michael Gove was accused of knowing about the allegations since 2010

A fourth, Oldknow, has as its head governor Achmad da Costa, a friend of Alam and fellow director of an organisation called the Muslim Parents Association. ‘You get a sense of Alam’s hardline agenda from the views he espoused in the MCB document,’ adds the source.

‘What you don’t realise, until you visit the schools he’s taken control of, is the sort of environment it creates.’

At Park View, for example, there have been complaints of segregation in classrooms and of GCSE syllabuses being restricted to comply with conservative Islamic teaching.

Sex education lessons have allegedly seen impressionable teenage boys told that rape is legal in marriage, while religious education classes have apparently seen pupils given a list of Christian teachers and told to try to convert them.

At one assembly, a senior teacher is said to have endorsed terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. At another, detailed by a Sunday newspaper, he allegedly described non-Muslims to pupils as ‘kuffar’ — or infidels.

Sex education lessons have, according to reports in a Sunday newspaper, seen impressionable teenage boys told rape is legal in marriage, while religious education classes have seen pupils given a list of Christian teachers and told to try to convert them

Last November, Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, a preacher many regard as extremist, was invited to speak at the school.

Nigel Sloan, a former teacher at the school, has said Mozz Hussain, the deputy headmaster, preached ‘mind-blowing’ anti-American and anti-Western ‘propaganda’ to pupils, describing the U.S. as ‘the evil in the world’ and ‘the cause of all famine’.

Former Park View teacher Michael White told us this week that the problems dated to the Nineties, when Alam became a governor.

‘Within a few weeks he’d got his allies to become parent governors, which gave them a majority on the committee. Then things began to get very nasty indeed. I would describe it as a coup,’ he said.

‘They began to complain about the way we taught religious education, the way sex was dealt with in science, the teaching of art and music, that kind of thing.

‘They got parents to complain. It totally undermined senior staff.

‘I’ve no idea whether the Trojan Horse document is real. But the stuff it says is happening certainly is. Everything in that letter is what I experienced at Park View. It has been going on for years.’

At Nansen primary, Arabic lessons are compulsory, from the age of four, while entire year groups have allegedly been prevented from learning arts. Concerns have been raised over recently appointed deputy head Razwan Faraz, who once ran an online forum called Educational Activists, which pursued an ‘Islamicising agenda’ in schools, and is the brother of Ahmed Faraz, a bookseller jailed for terror- related offences.

Golden Hillock school has seen discussion of sexual orientation ‘banned’ in science, the arts and literature, and Creationism — the belief the world was created by a divine being and evolution is false — taught in biology, according to a whistleblower. Non-Muslim students were reportedly left to ‘teach themselves’ religious education, one newspaper alleged.


Inquiry: Earlier this month, the names of 18 schools at the centre of the alleged plot were revealed in a list by Birmingham City Council. Above, one of the schools, Gracelands Nursery School in Sparkbrook

At Oldknow school, meanwhile, Department for Education investigators found conservative teachers had introduced segregated PE lessons, led anti-Christian chanting in assemblies and banned the celebration of Christmas.

Three school trips have allegedly been organised to Mecca, and the study of French scrapped because the country has banned the Islamic veil, the inspectors have discovered.

School governors and senior staff they have appointed are blamed for the recent departure of Bhupinder Kondal, a non-Muslim head said to have been ‘driven from office’ for resisting their Islamising agenda.

'Whatever accommodations we are making to respond to the aspirations of [Muslim] parents, these are in addition to teaching the full national curriculum, which we are required to do as a community school.'

The Park View Educational Trust, which runs Park View, Nansen, and Golden Hillock, will be issuing a formal response to next week’s Ofsted findings via Communitas a 'strategic' PR company it has hired to handle its affairs. It put out an interim statement earlier this month, denying several allegations of wrongdoing.

Sources close to recent investigations disagree. 'What’s amazing about these places,' says one, 'is that you don’t have to look very hard to see what’s going on. I mean, take even a cursory glance at Tahir Alam, and it’s entirely clear where his loyalties lie. Indeed it is.

'Firestorm': Birmingham City Council CEO Mark Rogers predicted a 'serious' response from Ofsted's forthcoming report

A former BT engineer, Alam describes himself as an educational consultant. Ironically, given the nature of the Trojan Horse scandal, he has in recent years derived much of his income as a ‘trainer’ of school governors, mostly for Labour-run Birmingham Council.

He has strong connections to Labour activists and power-brokers in the city, counting prominent MP Liam Byrne as a ‘friend’ on Facebook. A Labour councillor, Habib Rehman, has sat on the governing body of a school with Alam,

Alam began getting involved in education in the Nineties and soon became governor of several schools. One, Washwood Heath Academy, terminated his directorship earlier this month, according to records filed at Companies House. No reason was given. Others ‘may well find themselves forced to dispense with his services in the near future’, according to a source.

Alam’s wider interests include a directorship of the Muslim Parents Association, a non-profit group that seeks to ‘empower Muslim parents to advance the education of their children’ and a place on the board of the Association of Muslim Schools.

The latter organisation runs the controversial Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which fulfils the role of Ofsted for private Muslim schools. The think-tank Policy Exchange has accused it of covering up extremism and called for its abolition.

Alam is also a director of a dormant company called the Bordesley Birmingham Trust, an organisation credited as encouraging creativity and learning for children, whose fellow board members include Bridge Schools Inspectorate and (bizarrely) a clairvoyant called Ivy Caesar.

A previously undisclosed fourth directorship of a company raises further pressing questions. Called Crescent Books Limited, it appears to be a publishing firm entirely owned by a charity called the Islamic Dawah Centre International (IDCI).

'Within a few weeks [Alam] had got his allies to become parent governors, which gave them a majority on the committee. Then things began to get very nasty indeed. I would describe it as a coup' (- Former Park View teacher Michael White)

On its website, the IDCI describes its raison d’etre as ‘conveying the pure and pristine message of Islam’. And this agenda has caused it to flirt with controversy in the past. In 2010, the centre invited Dr Zakir Naik to speak at an event, only to have it cancelled after discovering that the Muslim cleric was banned from visiting Britain due to an exclusion order after saying ‘every Muslim should be a terrorist’.

Shortly afterwards, the IDCI was investigated over the alleged sale of extremist books on its website, though no evidence of wrongdoing was uncovered.

Mr Alam tells me he’s seen the Ofsted reports but 'won’t comment on their contents until nearer the time.' In recent interviews, however, he’s described investigations as 'a witch hunt” inspired by Islamophobia.

Others aren’t so sure. ‘That’s Alam’s response to any criticism,’ said Michael White this week. ‘He claims Islamophobia or racism. But that’s nonsense. It’s not about who he is. That’s not the problem. The problem is what he and his associates are doing to children in our schools.’

It will be interesting to see what is in the report when it is published.

why is it that not one of you guys can ever paraphrase or give a synopsis?
were you never taught that your CV for example should not exceed a single side of A4?
have you never given a concise presentation, or do you just ramble on for 30/40 minutes or more with "death by power point"while your audience gets bored to tears?

DYH.

Lazy B!

DYH.

Lazy B!

Tip: Don't swat a bee when it lands on your eye....

at least i practice what i preach and put in the effort to paraphrase .... so who were you saying was a lazy B? .... look to yourselves you tosspots :-)

Nigel Farage has promised tax cuts and a grammar school "in every town" as he seeks to broaden Ukip's appeal beyond Euroscepticism.
Mr Farage confirmed that the party's previous commitment to abolish national insurance and have a flat 31% tax rate was being "rethought" - but said he believed the top band should fall from 45% to 40%.
He also insisted no-one on the minimum wage should have to pay tax.

is NF beginning to put forward some really silly ideas that cannot possibly be afforded?
for sure he'll get shredded if he continues down that line

It is really pointless Farage coming up with policies. He has no facilities to cost them. You need to model the economy and use the Treasury's estimates of costs and spending. Anything else is meaningless if it is not coated properly. Messing about with the tax/NI has knock on effects all over the place on available money. Who in UKIP has the knowledge or experience to come up with properly costed policies?

'Stolen election' in the heart of London

Andrew Gilligan reports from Tower Hamlets, where the borough's extremist-linked mayor Lutfur Rahman has been elected for a second term





By Andrew Gilligan

9:17PM BST 31 May 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10867666/Stolen-election-in-the-heart-of-London.html



As dawn broke over the Troxy, the converted cinema where they count the votes in Tower Hamlets, Sanu Miah, one of Labour’s candidates in the east-London borough, looked forward to becoming a councillor.


It had been a tense, chaotic wait. As the count dragged all through Friday May 23 and deep into the night, 2,000 supporters of the borough’s extremist-linked mayor, Lutfur Rahman, gathered outside, effectively barricading Mr Rahman’s Labour opponents in the building.


The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, was told by police that he could not leave for his own safety.


By the middle of the next morning, almost 36 hours after voting closed, Mr Miah’s count had finished. He was top in his ward with 2,270 votes, 149 more than his nearest Rahman-supporting rival. But then things started to go wrong.


“The returning officer was about to announce the result,” said Mr Miah. “Then the mayor in person came down and said you must recount.”


The recount, with five other wards, took place the next day. “When we went to the new count centre, we saw Lutfur talking to his candidate, saying, don’t worry, you will definitely win.” According to many witnesses, last Sunday’s count was even worse than the day before.

“There were far fewer controls over who got into the building. Lutfur Rahman supporters were everywhere, leaning over the count staff, shouting at them, intimidating them, jabbing fingers,” said Peter Golds, the leader of the Conservative opposition.

Rachael Saunders, deputy leader of the Labour group, said: “At one point senior council officers had to act as bouncers to protect the count staff, putting up a rope to hold the Rahman crowd back.”

The mayor himself, according to a senior Labour figure present, was “visibly throwing his weight around” and being “overly familiar with count staff, some of whom were telling him they had voted for him even as they counted the votes”. Mr Golds, another subjected to a recount, found his vote had changed by more than a fifth overnight, from 1,098 to 1,345.

And Sanu Miah? In the recount, his vote dropped by a quarter from 2,270 to 1,722 and he fell from first place to sixth. Two of the three seats in his ward went to Mr Rahman’s Tower Hamlets First party. “I think this election was stolen from me,” said Mr Miah.

Not everyone agrees with that. One of Mr Miah’s opponents had the same surname: the counters could have got them mixed up. But he might be right. The normal rules do not apply in Tower Hamlets. It was Britain’s most troubling election in Britain’s most troubling borough.

For more than four years, The Telegraph has been following the extraordinary career of Mr Rahman, a man thrown out of the Labour Party after this newspaper exposed his close links to a Muslim extremist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe.

Yet Mr Rahman has gone on to win two mayoral elections as an independent, his latest, last week, even though his council is under a police investigation for corruption and a government investigation for misuse of funds. How did he manage it? Khales Uddin Ahmed, another Labour councillor, claims he knows part of the answer. “There are so many fake voters,” he says. “I keep finding houses where there are people registered for postal votes who do not live there.”

In Bow, The Telegraph found two flats where postal votes were obtained, and cast, by people who did not live there and had never lived there, according to the real residents.

Helal Rahman, a businessman and former Labour councillor in Spitalfields, says that “several hundred postal votes” in that one ward alone were cast on May 22 by people “who used to live here but have moved out to the suburbs. They rent their properties to eastern Europeans but keep their electoral registrations and convert their votes to postal,” he says. This is, of course, illegal.

No evidence links any of this to Mr Rahman at this election, but there has been clear evidence of postal vote malpractice involving his close allies in the past. In April 2012, on a suspiciously high turnout, Gulam Robbani, Mr Rahman’s agent in the 2010 mayoral contest, narrowly won a council by-election.

Only 14 per cent of people in Tower Hamlets then had postal votes, but 36 per cent of votes at the by-election were postal.

Days before polling, the number registered for postal votes in one large council block doubled. Seventy-seven per cent of those votes were cast.

Residents and their families told The Telegraph that Mr Robbani’s supporters blitzed the building, signing them up for postal votes, then returned a few days later to collect the blank ballot papers. Mr Robbani has repeatedly refused to deny it.

If you wanted to vote in person on May 22, things were often a little more difficult. Large groups of Rahman supporters picketed polling stations, remonstrating with some voters who refused to take Rahman leaflets. The council has received 20 complaints of voter intimidation.

Twenty-one of the borough’s 74 polling stations — disproportionately those in non-Rahman wards — were moved to new, unfamiliar and sometimes harder-to-reach locations.

One, in the not very pro-Rahman territory of Canary Wharf, was placed on a traffic island in the middle of a four-lane road. Turnout there was 19 points behind the Rahman stronghold of Shadwell, where the polling stations were not moved.

Mr Rahman’s winning margin, after second preferences, was 3,250 votes, or 4 per cent. “My gut feeling is that there were enough [fraudulent votes] to have affected the outcome,” says one senior figure in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party. “But I don’t know whether we will be able to evidence it.”

In reality, though, the campaign was only the last phase. For several years, with the untrammelled power of a directly-elected mayor, Mr Rahman has been buying votes with public money. Almost uniquely, his council publishes a weekly newspaper, delivered to every house, each issue containing as many as a dozen pictures and articles praising the mayor. Thousands of pieces of direct mail have been sent to voters at public expense.

Mr Rahman pays tens of thousands of pounds to Channel S, a London-based Bengali television station influential with his Bangladeshi base. It gives him fawning coverage. He pays £50,000 a year from council funds into the personal bank account of Channel S’s chief reporter.

But it is the mayor’s politics of racial and faith favouritism which are doing most to poison the atmosphere. Tower Hamlets is a genuinely mixed borough, 45 per cent white and 32 per cent Bangladeshi, and no part of it is a ghetto.

Yet of Mr Rahman’s 18 councillors elected last week, all are Bangladeshi (and 17 are men). He has never appointed a non-Bangladeshi to his council cabinet, though he says that is because none will join.

For the cabinet post of finance, he chose Alibor Choudhury, a former employee of an IFE front organisation with a long track record of encounters with the police.


Under the two men, there has been a clear diversion of council funding away from secular groups serving the whole community towards race and faith-based bodies serving largely the Muslim community, including millions of pounds to front groups for the extremist IFE. Political allies and vote-getters have been rewarded not just with money, but with valuable council property sold at below-market rates.

Officially, Mr Rahman is an apostle of “One Tower Hamlets,” champion of East End tolerance. In practice, his supporters vilify all those who oppose him as racists. Council meetings have often been toxic, with Mr Rahman’s supporters in the gallery chanting homophobic abuse at his main opponents, who happen to be gay, as the mayor looks on.

For years, the authorities have essentially looked on too. Ofcom regularly censures Channel S, but it appears to make no difference.

The Electoral Commission refuses to act on suspect voting, despite its own report admitting it happened in 2012. The police broke their promise to stop crowds outside polling stations. The race card has worked its usual magic; many officials are afraid of being branded racist for criticising Mr Rahman.

In his first interview since the election, Mr Rahman told LBC radio yesterday that the atmosphere on polling day was “fantastic” and the misconduct allegations were the claims of “sore losers”.

His strategy and delivery adviser, Kazim Zaidi, said that if the result was not accepted, “civil war” would “spill out on to the streets”.

In the next few weeks, after its investigation is complete, the Government must decide whether it continues to look on, as a borough at the heart of London, in other ways an improving place, declines into a political slum.

Was that photo of someone trying to keep awake while Stan was talking

David Cameron has reportedly said Britain could quit the EU if Jean-Claude Juncker is elected as president of the European Commission.

According to German publication Der Spiegel, Cameron is so concerned that Mr Juncker's appointment would destabilise the UK Government, he would bring forward an in-out referendum.

Here's our Nigel having a go at him back in 2011, Juncker that is:

YouGov/Sunday Times – CON 33, LAB 36, LD 7, UKIP 15

Got a load of crap e-mails sent to me from this site over the weekend.

Turned my DM facility off.

I only had 1 but ever cautious just deleted it.
2517

Manuel, here is your chance.


"Women have long fought for justice for women who are the victims of extreme violence. It’s time men joined the fight"

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/women-have-long-fought-for-justice-for-women-who-are-the-victims-of-extreme-violence-its-time-men-joined-the-fight-9467813.html

gf
It is interesting that UKIP got an EU vote share that matched what they were polling before the election. This has not led to any breakthrough in the GE polls as above. If history repeats itself in the GE then UKIP will still not get any MPs.