I used to be an avid reader of Private Eye magazine. I liked its seemingly bottomless pit of bile that it spat out at politicians of all parties, government agencies and in particular to local government. Sadly, at least for me, it’s bile tank seemed to run out the magazine became stale and a bit metro-left in my opinion and I no longer was a regular reader. However, after seeing a recent article that the magazine did on the subject of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, I may have to revise my view on Private Eye.
They’ve done a stupendously good article on the subject of corruption in the Labour and Islam dominated borough. Private Eye has put together a comprehensive article that shows that corruption by Islamic and Labour interests has run rampant through the borough for many years. The article confirms much of what critics of Tower Hamlets Council have said about the place which is that it is dominated by Islamic separatists and a cynical and dangerous Left. Much of the article concerns the council’s response to the ‘Jihadi girls’ story where three Tower Hamlets girls, one of them the infamous Shamima Begum, went off to join ISIS. There appears to have been an awful lot of skullduggery going on within the council with claims that efforts were made to hide the identity of the jihadi girls from the eyes of the public by various means including spurious excuses about ‘safeguarding’.
In addition to this problem the article highlights a number of other corruption and competence problems afflicting this borough including money granted by the Home Office for the anti-terrorism Prevent programme being spent on what the article called ‘things that the Home Office would not choose to fund’.
I’ll put a few short excerpts of the article up along with my comments on them but I would strongly advise you to take the time to read the whole article over at the Private Eye site. It’s certainly an eye opener for those who didn’t realise that Tower Hamlets was really as bad as some had said. Having read the article myself, it seems that Tower Hamlets is in a far worse state due to Islamic and Labour Party conduct and corruption, than even I had previously presumed it would be.
Private Eye states that it is acting on documents that they’ve seen relating to the goings on in Tower Hamlets and are also being assisted by a whistleblower. This information does seem to be more detailed than some that has come out before from Tower Hamlets in recent years and it does seem to show that things are not just as bad as could be expected in Tower Hamlets but they are far worse than that.
Private Eye said on the subject of the council’s conduct following the disappearance of the ‘jihadi girls’:
Begum and two other schoolgirls aged 15 and 16 went to Syria in February 2015. They were part of a wider radicalised group from the same school, the first of whom had joined Islamic State two months earlier.
According to a whistleblower: “There was heightened sensitivity in the council after the girls had left that they may have been radicalised by groups linked to and funded by youth services. The council didn’t want the full corruption picture from coming out. [Data management firm] 15billionebp was asked to erase the names of the three girls from a database and replace them with unique numerical identifiers to neutralise any media requests under the freedom of information act.”
A lawyer for Begum, who was stripped of British citizenship last year and remains stateless in a Syrian refugee camp, blames Tower Hamlets for allowing her to be “groomed”. The council denies this but admits wiping the databases. “Heightened interest in the disappearance of these girls at the time meant it was necessary as a safeguarding measure to shield their identities on a number of council systems including the database operated by 15billionebp,” a spokesman said.
The use of the ‘safeguarding’ reasoning is little more than a very lame excuse for arse covering and censorship by Tower Hamlets council. It was almost inevitable that three young girls running off to join ISIS would become a big story and that their names would be released at some point by their families. There could have been no real need, given the inevitiblilty of the names coming out in public anyway, for these girls names to be replaced with anonymous numerical identifiers. Reading this Private Eye article gives me the distinct impression that the council did not want anyone to know just how badly run, ineffectual and possibly corrupt was its handling of the Prevent scheme.
Private Eye said that in 2014 an internal investigation into corruption in Tower Hamlets youth services after anonymous emails were sent alleging fraud, corruption and cronyism (sounds par for the course for Islam/Labour dominated areas – Ed). Andy Bamber a former Met Police Borough Commander, then head of the council’s Community Safety Team along with a former Home Office investigator Mark Edmunds, led the investigation. Unfortunately the investigators were not allowed to carry out this investigation as fully as they may have wanted because of obstruction which included death threats. The facts surrounding this obstruction came out in an Employment Tribunal that was held following Mr Bamber’s resignation from the investigation.
Private Eye added:
The employment tribunal heard that in April 2016, Bamber resigned suffering from “enormous stress” having received numerous “death threats” and feeling that political obstruction rooted in Labour’s reliance on the Bangladeshi vote was hampering his efforts. The following year, Edmunds brought a discrimination claim on the grounds he had been sidelined before the investigation was completed. In his witness statement, Edmunds said the council wanted to “cover up to avoid political embarrassment to the Labour party, whose members were involved in both the initial corruption and later the control of the investigations”.
I would not be surprised if Labour and the Islamic community that now control the party were found to have covered up wrongdoing in order to protect the party and the party’s cronies. The subsequent information that has come out of the investigation raised a number of queries as to where Prevent money may have gone and it appears that it has been misspent on fake ‘youth workers’ and companies including individuals who are alleged to be associated with organised crime.
But what I find the most chilling from the Private Eye article is that those in charge of the council’s Prevent scheme and who were in a position to stop Begum and the other girls from being turned into radical Muslim jihad supporters, failed to do so. We should ask why Tower Hamlets Prevent failed to do what they were supposed to do and divert individuals away from the ever present, in Tower Hamlets, problem of Islamic extremism? Some answer might be found in what Private Eye says about the council’s Prevent Strategy Coordinator.
Private Eye continued:
The investigation also looked at Nojmul Hussain, co-ordinator of the council’s Prevent strategy, which shared responsibility for safeguarding Begum and the other schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy. An external audit by accountancy firm Mazars concluded in October 2015 that Hussain should face immediate disciplinary action for “conflicts of interest” in the awarding of Prevent grants, including to “organisations the Home Office does not wish to fund”
Separately, Hussain abused his position to help a senior council official in a legal battle over access to his children. Documents show he tried to influence the court by sending an official Prevent letter that wrongly claimed the children attended schools regarded as “extreme”. The incident was kept from the Home Office. But when an official found out, he wrote an email to the council describing Hussain’s conduct as “shocking”. The official said the Home Office would no longer share sensitive information with him.
From reading this about Nommul Hussain, I can only conclude that this is probably the very last person you would ever choose to run anything that required probity and certainly nothing that had anything to do with national security such as Prevent. What are these ‘organisations that the Home Office would not wish to fund’? Are they extremist Islamic groups for example or are they groups run by people with bad reputations. Somehow I very much doubt that either the council or the Home Office will be forthcoming when it comes to releasing the details of such organisations.
Tower Hamlets is a mess. It’s a mess that has been wholly created by the Labour Party and by the local Islamic community. It’s a mess of corruption, nepotism and fear. This is what Labour and their Islamic community leader allies have created in Tower Hamlets and you can be damned sure that other places that are run by a Labour/Islam axis will be suffering similar problems. Tower Hamlets is a political cess-pit and one that urgently needs clearing out lest it afflicts more areas with the poison that it exudes.
