| Royal Marines return from Sangin Families and friends welcome back Royal Marines from 40 Commando after Afghanistan tour bbc.co.uk |
Men sentenced for murder after Hallowe'en attack Three men have been sentenced with the murder of Ben Gardner who was trying to reclaim his girlfriend's Hallowe'en costume. telegraph.co.uk |
Tower Hamlets: a litmus test for Labour | Dave Hill The Shakespearean saga of Tower Hamlets' mayoral elections will have serious consequences for Labour's futureConservative candidate Neil King described it as "Shakespearean". The contest to become the first executive mayor of Tower Hamlets – a sort of mini-Boris – fits his description in many ways. King was referring to the feud between the two frontrunners, Labour's Helal Abbas and the independent Lutfur Rahman. The latter was once the former's protege and both are councillors for the ward of Spitalfields and Banglatown, a name resonant with East End history. To this drama we may add the themes of vengeance, betrayal, religion, death threats, the influence of competing Brick Lane "curry kings" and skulduggery alleged on every side. The Bard himself would have struggled to make this up.The saga has a local character as vivid as the borough itself, with a highly politicised Bangladeshi population at its heart. The contest's implications, though, are wider. Labour's first major test since the coalition came to power is a bigger deal than most parliamentary byelections. Tower Hamlets is symbolic as one of the five "Olympic boroughs" and its mayor will command a billion-pound budget.The vote takes place on Thursday. Until quite recently Labour looked set to win comfortably. The party reasserted itself in May, when George Galloway and Respect were beaten in the borough's two parliamentary constituencies and all but obliterated from the council, as the anti-Iraq war mood that had split Labour ranks and much of its support faded. Abbas, a long-serving Labour man, is the current council leader. His defeat is unthinkable for his party. And yet it now appears quite possible.If that occurs there will be claims that Labour brought disaster on itself. To the remains of the Iraq rage has been added fury over the picking of its candidate. Rahman, a solicitor specialising in family law, preceded Abbas as council leader and was replaced by Labour members after the May borough results. Now campaigning glossily as "the people's choice", he was Labour's own choice until just four weeks ago. He'd easily topped a ballot of local party members, though only after taking legal steps to fight his exclusion from the poll. He was then dropped after allegations of misconduct were made to Labour's National Executive Committee.These included a nine-page statement submitted by none other than Abbas, who was imposed in Rahman's place despite finishing only third in the selection race. The runnerup was John Biggs, the area's London Assembly member. Biggs is white. Like Rahman, Abbas is of Bangladeshi origin. That the NEC settled on him to be the candidate is bluntly indicative of how important Bangladeshi electors are to the result. Suspicions of a stitch-up are doing Rahman no harm. He has accused the top brass of treating Tower Hamlets like "the last outpost of the British Raj". Ed Miliband's victory promise was to rebuild his party "from the bottom up". Who decides what "the bottom" is?Tower Hamlets Labour has been in "special measures" for around 10 years due to concerns that bogus members were influencing its affairs. Abbas's statement to the NEC provides accusations along these lines, but little proof. Its torrentially leaked charge sheet, strongly refuted, closely resembles that compiled in a sweatily reductionist TV documentary shown earlier this year. It includes vote rigging, intimidation and the claim that Rahman has been "brainwashed" by a Whitechapel-based Islamic community organisation as part of an entryist plot.Conspiracy addicts including the English Defence League have seized upon such claims, massing in the blogosphere like poisonous flies and fostering the ludicrously false impression that a part of London where Irish and Jewish East Enders repelled Oswald Mosley's fascists in 1936 is now a "third-world" hotbed of scheming fundamentalists where no white citizen dares tread. Rahman's campaign accuses its opponent of pandering to the same narrative to justify the crushing of grassroots autonomy and of being an establishment puppet.Labour's campaign cry is for an East End unity transcending religion and ethnicity in defence of public services. It accuses Rahman of being a divisive Respect candidate in disguise: the latter party is backing him while standing no candidate of its own. Yet just below the surface lie the trickier issues of angry young Muslim Britons drawn to militant lslamic views, the political disconnection of non-Bangladeshi residents and the right relationship between faith activism and secular politics in a place where these have long been entwinedThe result will depend heavily on turnout – the higher it is, the better Labour's chances. Win or lose, Miliband's party will have some big thinking to do. Tower Hamlets may be distinctive but it highlights challenges Labour also faces in very different parts of Britain. Miliband wants to build a campaigning party rooted in communities. What shared values will mobilise them? How does it re-engage those it's lost?LondonLocal governmentLocal politicsLabourDave Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Top Gear's 'speciale needs' joke ruled offensive Top Gear 'speciale needs' joke offensive, says Ofcom bbc.co.uk |
Lauren Booth's conversion to Islam | Andrew Brown By becoming a Muslim, Tony Blair's sister-in-law has made a clear political statement about the society she has rejectedThere is quite a lot that could be said about anyone who converts to Islam in Iran under the impression that it is less inhumane than New Labour, but as a piece of theatre, Lauren Booth's conversion could hardly be beaten.We tend to think of conversion as an essentially solitary or individual choice: the classic picture is the kind of "conversion experience" described in William James, and central both to evangelical Christianity and Alcoholics Anonymous. But it is also always a political and social act, a statement about where you fit into the world. To convert is to announce your allegiance to a new tribe, or a new idea of humanity.It is also, by implication at least, a rejection of your old self, and of the people who thought they recognised you in it. In this it is more like a divorce or a remarriage than any kind of intellectual experience. This is why it is a little silly to mock Lauren Booth for saying she has got up to page 60 of the Qur'an, after reading it every day. The conviction precedes the reading, and drives it along. Besides, how fast are you supposed to read a holy book? It's not as if you're trying to discover who dun it, only how He did it, and that is a study which can take a very long time. I might think her more sincere if she announced she was still on page one after three months.But leave God out of this for the moment. Conversion always involves a conversation with the people around you, and just as with any other conversation, the meaning depends on where you are. To become a Muslim in Britain is a very different thing to becoming one in Indonesia, and in Argentina it's different again. This has absolutely nothing to do with doctrine. Baptists in the southern US can believe almost exactly the same things as Baptists in the Ukraine, but in one case baptism means you are becoming a normal person, and in the other that you are defining yourself as a weirdo.In theory, all of the monotheistic religions try to stress the way in which true conversion moves you away from worldly things and into a relationship with God, rather than one with society. But in practice, most of the time, most people find their theological beliefs are a way of expressing their relationship with society. Disraeli could never have become prime minister had his father not converted from Judaism to Christianity. Even within Christianity, Margaret Thatcher found it necessary as part of her social rise to move from Methodism to Anglicanism.To convert to Islam in a British prison is one way of expressing your disdain for the world outside, whereas conversion to Christianity is an attempt to come to terms with the dominant culture. To proclaim yourself an atheist in some parts of America is to invite derision, as much as it would be to announce in the BBC that you were a practising Calvinist.Of course the consequence of conversion can be very much worse than derision. In almost all countries there is some religion that is regarded as treacherous almost in its essence. Much of the present tension in the US over Cordoba House comes from the attempts to define Islam as communism once was – an ideology that is incompatible with patriotism. But at least the American constitution works against such efforts in theory. Had Lauren Booth had a different mystical experience in Iran, and converted away from Islam rather than into it, she would have been liable to the death penalty.ReligionIslamAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |