The case of former House of Lords member Baron Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham who has now been convicted of attempted rapes carried out in the 1970’s has dragged on for several years through the courts. Initially he was charged along with his two brothers but they were deemed unfit to stand trial and instead were subjected to a ‘trial of the facts’.
Ahmed denied the allegations but on the 5th January 2022 he was convicted by a jury. He’s likely to face a prison sentence but this case is just the tip of the massive iceberg of dodginess that is Nazir Ahmed.
Ahmed has been involved in a number of controversies including killing a man in a car crash which was caused by Ahmed texting whilst driving and then claiming that his conviction was the result of a ‘Jewish plot’. He’s also been accused of working with Pakistani Kashmir groups that are intricately linked to Pakistani military intelligence and threatening to gather 10,000 Muslims outside the House of Lords if a film promoted by counterjihad politician Geert Wilders was shown to peers. Some of Ahmed’s anti-Jewish nutbaggery was so extreme that he ended up being expelled from the Labour Party, although this was before Jeremy Corbyn became leader and the party became heavily influenced by the Jew haters of the far Left. Ahmed has also had some pretty slippery business dealings, such as promoting Nestle baby milk in Pakistan and becoming a paid consultant for Nestle. Ahmed had previously been against the promotion of breast milk alternatives in countries like Pakistan where the water supply needed to make up these milks is less than safe. It appears that Ahmed changed his political position on the baby milk issue in order to line his own pockets. He was also forced to resign from the House of Lords in 2019 after a sexual scandal where Ahmed had been accused of using his position as a peer to pressure vulnerable women into sex.
Nazir Ahmed was ennobled by Tony Blair in 1998 and although most of Ahmed’s controversies came after he was elevated to the House of Lords I believe that a more thorough investigation of his background prior to his elevation might have turned up stuff that could have precluded his ennoblement in particular his business dealings and his closeness to the Pakistani government. To choose Ahmed to be a peer looks to me to be extremely bad judgement on Blair’s part especially as there must have been at the time many hundreds of decent British Muslims who have integrated, contributed to Britain, built businesses and generally been more deserving of such high honours than Ahmed. It does make me wonder what was going through Blair’s mind when he made the decision to elevate Ahmed to the Lords? Was it in order to curry favour with the more extreme minded among Britain’s Muslim community? Was it a reward for keeping Muslims backing Labour or thoughtless tokenism? Whatever the reason the decision to elevate Ahmed to the Lords turned out to be a very very bad one indeed.
