It’s always nice to hear about a council that decides to properly represent those who voted for it and not chuck voters and their wishes into the bin by appeasing Islam. Too often is the case that local councils, no matter what their political composition, have gone against the wishes of local residents and imposed mosques where they are plainly not wanted, just so that councillors can either burnish their virtue signalling credentials or shore up a perceived Islamic bloc vote.

Havering London Borough council, which controls planning applications for the Rainham, Essex area, has refused for a second time to impose a mosque in Rainham due to concerns about parking, the development being ‘out of character’ with the rest of the neighbourhood and vehement objections from local residents. This is damned good news for a council to refuse a mosque application. Too often councils just rubber stamp the applications whilst waffling on to the public a lot of bullshit about ‘diversity’.

I’m really pleased for the residents of Rainham that they’ve managed to fight off this mosque imposition via the planning system. It is the third case recently where a mosque proposal has either been refused or withdrawn by the applicant in the face of public criticism. First there was the abomination of the Piccadilly Circus mosque plan which was withdrawn after vehement objections from the public. Then there was the case of the Liverpool planned mosque imposition where mosque promoters got knocked back because of objections from among others an evangelical church who, quite rightly in my view, claimed that allowing a so called Islamic community centre to operate as a mosque would ‘bring tensions’. Now we have this case where a mosque that nobody wanted dumped on the people of Rainham has been refused.

Here’s part of what the Romford Recorder has said about this mosque application refusal: As is normal here the original text is in italics where as this blogger’s comments are in plain text.

The Romford Recorder said:

An application for a place of worship in New Road was submitted earlier this year after the council rejected a similar proposal in 2019.

The latest plans, put forward by agent Cityscape on behalf of the applicant, would have seen a single-storey mosque built with associated car parking.

As part of its supporting statement, Cityscape said a number of changes had been made to address reasons for refusal of the first application.

These included reducing the size of the facility, lowering the visitor capacity and adding cycle spaces.

Opening hours were also changed to 8am to 10pm seven days a week, revised from 6am to 11.30pm in the previous application.

But council planning officers refused permission for the latest plans and said the proposed use would cause “unacceptable character change”.

A report said: “It is considered that the increased levels of noise and disturbance associated with the scale of activity and the hours of usage sought, particularly for occupiers in close proximity to the site, would be unacceptable.”

Personally I’m delighted by the decision of Havering Council to put local resident’s needs and desires first and not just crap on them from a great height by approving this mosque for virtue signalling or base political reasons. Of course this development would have changed the character of the area, it would have turned this part of Rainham into something akin to the Islamised shitholes of Newham and Tower Hamlets which are also in the East of London. Similarly it is plainly obvious that the parking and other disturbances that this mosque would have brought to local residents would also have brought abject misery to them.

One thing that I would advise readers to note about this case is the use by the mosque promoters of a planning application or land agent in the form of a company called Cityscape to put together and submit the application. This use of a planning application or land agent is going to become a lot more common in mosque applications and this is in my view for the following reasons: The first is that using a company run by non-Muslims or having an identifiable non-Muslim company name is probably seen by mosque promoters as a way of hiding for as long as possible a planning application to build a mosque. In that scenario an application can be quite a way down the planning consent road before anyone in the local area realises what has been planned and organise effective opposition to it. An application in the name of the Al-Jihad mosque for example is going to be very quickly noticed by those who don’t want the bother of Islam in their area, but an application in a relatively bland company name is not so visible.

The second reason for the use of land and planning agents is to use their expertise to try to lobby councillors to approve an application or to stymie or frustrate objections with PR and other tactics. As I said, the use of non-Muslim frontmen, land agents and planning agents to force mosques on areas that don’t want them may become much more prevalent than it is now and it has, to my knowledge, already been used once before in the case of a, thankfully refused, mosque application.

Another thing that is noticeable about this Rainham case is how the applicant, Cityscape, attempted to play the ‘oh but it’s only a community centre’ game.

The Romford Recorder added:

A Cityscape spokesperson said: “The proposal was for a small community centre that would be open to and serve all members of the community.

I call ‘bullshit’ on Cityscape’s spokes person’s statement. This is because we’ve seen this ‘community centre’ excuse used by mosque promoters a lot of times in the past. A good rule of thumb is that if an application says that it is for an ‘Islamic community centre’, what this really means is that the project is a mosque in all but name. On the subject of the ‘community centre’ scam, we’ve even seen cases where mosque promoters have promised faithfully that the project for which the application applies will be ‘open to all’, only to have their promises swiftly revealed to be false once the mosque management have got their foot in the door.

This is a big win for local people and they should celebrate but also not rest on their laurels. Without doubt either these or some other mosque promoters will have another go at imposing a mosque either on this site or another site in the area and people need to be ready with campaigns and be lawyered up in order to fight off another application. The people of Rainham also need to be ready to get out and vote for council candidates who have stood up for them over the mosque issue and also vote for councillors who are willing to serve the people’s interests and not the interests of Islam. Low turnouts caused by voter apathy are all too easy to exploit by a whipped communal or potentially fraudulent postal vote scam put together by Islamic groups. A high turnout in elections does help to dilute the effects of both communal and fraudulent postal votes. In neighbouring Redbridge council, it is said to be the whipped Islamic vote that went a long way to turning the council from Tory to Islam appeasing Labour and I suspect that a failure to vote by normal decent honest Redbridge residents, assisted the Labour / Islamic bloc in taking control of the council. This need to be politically aware and organised in order to prevent mosques being imposed in areas of Havering that do not want them is especially relevant with the news that four new wards are being created in the borough. New wards may not just bring representation to those in new housing estates, but may also bring the sort of political change that the people of Havering may not want. The people of Rainham and indeed all of Havering need to be on their guard for the near future.

I’m absolutely delighted to see this mosque application refused and I hope and pray that we see other councils take note of objections to mosques and refuse their applications.