“Islam is not compatible with democracy.” He also says that a husband has the right to administer “some type of physical force… a very light beating” to his wife, to prevent her from committing “evil.”

Andrew Gilligan in The Telegraph has a fascinating piece about the latest happenings in Tower Hamlets where Lutfur Rahman was elected mayor in a bad tempered and dirty campaign, amongst Lutfur Rahman's supporters was Ken Livingstone, despite Lutfur Rahman not being the Labour candidate.

Here's the context of the remarks in this piece's title:

'Two weeks after the extremist-backed politician, Lutfur Rahman, became mayor of Tower Hamlets, his council has placed CDs of sermons by an extremist Islamic preacher in its Town Hall.
The preacher, Abdur Raheem Green, has stated that “Islam is not compatible with democracy.” He also says that a husband has the right to administer “some type of physical force… a very light beating” to his wife, to prevent her from committing “evil.” There is, of course, a considerable irony here. You may remember that Lutfur won the mayoralty with the help of smear literature falsely claiming that his Labour opponent was… a wife-beater.
The CDs are being handed out to council workers and visitors as part of an official council-sanctioned display mounted in the Town Hall reception area from last week by an organisation called One Reason. Two councillors have been given them and have passed them to me.'

Fascinating stuff...

Reasons to be angry - 1,2,3

1) The Telegraph report that: '

“The radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who is accused of inspiring the cargo bomb plot has been backed by a prominent British campaign group which has financial support from leading charities.
Cageprisoners, a self-styled human rights organisation, has a long association with Anwar al-Awlaki, who was last week accused of being one of the figures behind the terrorist plot to blow up cargo planes which saw a powerful device defused at East Midlands Airport.
Awlaki is believed by Western intelligence services to be an ideological figurehead of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group blamed for the cargo bombs. Last year he praised the Muslim US soldier who killed 13 colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas.
Cageprisoners was set up to lobby on behalf of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay and those monitored under control orders in the UK. The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that it is being funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, a Quaker-run fund set up by the chocolate-maker and philanthropist a century ago, and The Roddick Foundation, a charity set up by the family of Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder, after her death three years ago. The Joseph Rowntree Trust is giving Cageprisoners £170,000 in donations over three years – with the latest payment due this month – and The Roddick Foundation another £25,000

2) The Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan reports that:

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has established that the education watchdog has published positive reports praising Muslim schools for their contribution to community cohesion -- even in the case of a school which openly states that Muslims "oppose the lifestyle of the West".

The Ofsted inspector responsible for many of the reports, Michele Messaoudi, has been accused of having links to radical Islamist organisations.

This newspaper can reveal that another recent Ofsted inspector, Akram Khan-Cheema, is the chief executive of a radical Muslim educational foundation, IBERR.

Its website describes Islamic schools as "one of the most important factors which protect Muslim children from the onslaught of Euro-centrism, homosexuality, racism, and secular traditions".

Ofsted has also passed the inspection of dozens of Muslim schools to a new private "faith schools watchdog", the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which is co-controlled by Islamic schools' own lobbying and trade body, the Association of Muslim Schools.

The Bridge Schools Inspectorate allows Muslim head teachers to inspect each other's schools.

Among the schools directly inspected by Ofsted was the Madani Girls' School, a private Islamic school in London's East End.

Its Ofsted report, written by Mrs Messaoudi, said it made pupils "aware of their future role as proactive young British Muslim women" and left them "well-prepared for life in a multicultural society".

However, the Madani Girls' School's own website openly states: "If we oppose the lifestyle of the West, then it does not seem sensible that the teachers and the system which represents that lifestyle should educate our children."

It says that under western education "our children will distance themselves from Islam until there is nothing left but their beautiful names".

Last month, this newspaper revealed how girls at the school were being forced to wear the Islamic veil, a fact that was not mentioned in its 2008 Ofsted report. The Madani School declined to comment last night.

Ofsted also inspected the Tawhid Boys' School in Hackney, north London. Its Ofsted report, written by Mrs Messaoudi, said the curriculum was "good ... broad and balanced in Key Stages 2 and 3".

However, the school's prospectus says that the curriculum is kept strictly "within the bounds of Sharia [Islamic law]." Its art syllabus bans pupils from drawing human beings, animals and objects that Islam deems "unlawful". The school did not return calls.

Mrs Messaoudi also wrote the Ofsted report cited by Ed Balls, the then schools secretary, as "clearing" schools run by supporters of the racist, extremist sect Hizb ut Tahrir.

The schools, the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation establishments in Haringey, north London, and Slough, Berks, received more than £113,000 of public funding and became the subject of national controversy after being exposed in The Sunday Telegraph.

One of the Foundation's trustees, Farah Ahmed, who is also headmistress of the Slough school, wrote a chapter in a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet attacking the National Curriculum for its "systematic indoctrination" of Muslim children "to build model British citizens".

She criticised "attempts to integrate Muslim children" into British society as an effort "to produce new generations that reject Islam".

She described English as "one of the most damaging subjects" a school can teach and attacked fairy tales, saying that these "reflect secular and immoral beliefs that contradict the viewpoint of Islam".

She also attacked the "obvious dangers" of Shakespeare, including "Romeo and Juliet, which advocates disobeying parents and premarital relations".

Mrs Messaoudi's Ofsted report on the Haringey school said it was "satisfactory." [...]

Unlike "mainline" Ofsted inspections, which are carried out entirely by professional inspectors, BSI inspections of Muslim schools are often done by a team of three which always includes one head teacher of another Muslim school.

The BSI report into Bury Park Educational Institute, a mixed but gender-segregated Muslim secondary in Luton, claims that "the quality of education is good" even though the report itself admits that girls at the school get less teaching than boys.

"Some aspects of National Curriculum subjects are in a few respects currently less for the girls than for the boys," it says, and there is not yet "full, equal access to National Curriculum subjects" between girls and boys.

3)  The Telegraph also reports that: At least 46 convicted Islamic terrorists who have been either released from prison or are close to being freed “pose a risk” to the public and face tight new controls on their freedom, a secret Government document discloses.


So we have  UK charities supporting 'charities' with seeming links to Islamic terrorists, Islamic schools being inspected to a lesser standard than non-Islamic schools & apologies being made for their lack of equality and finally Islamists who 'pose a risk' to the public being freed from jail so they can 'pose a risk' to the public.

Reasons to be angry? I should say so!

Some questions for Peter Mandelson should you meet him on Thursday, or any other day

The Telegraph has a fine article partly by Andrew Gilligan, headlined 'The mystery of Lord Mandelson's finances'. I urge you to read the whole piece, maybe take a printout and carry it with you at all times, especially if near Hatchards in Piccadilly on 15th July...

'Wind turbines are a poor way to harness energy - but a very good way to generate public subsidies' says Andrew Gilligan.

The most important piece that I read this weekend was Andrew Gilligan's piece on Wind Farms in The Telegraph. You must read the whole article so as to have the facts to hand the next time you meet someone who thinks that wind power is the saviour of the UK. Here is one long extract that I thought most interesting:

'RUK (Renewables UK) says that “every unit of electricity from a wind turbine displaces one from conventional power stations”, and even the existing wind turbines have “the capacity to prevent the emission of 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum”.

The key weasel word in that last sentence is “capacity”. The CO2 reduction figure assumes that all wind turbines are able to generate electricity to 100 per cent of their capacity, 100 per cent of the time. But the basic problem with wind power is that most of the time, the wind does not blow.

A typical commercial turbine needs a wind speed of between 6-10mph to start operating – and automatically stops when the wind is more than around 55mph, to protect its mechanisms. Even when the wind is blowing between those speeds, it – and therefore the amount of electricity generated – is variable, and usually below the turbine’s full theoretical capacity.

According to government figures, the average wind turbine operates to just 27 per cent of its capacity – even the industry only claims 30 per cent – and there are some grounds for suggesting that even this is a significant exaggeration. Professor Michael Jefferson, of the London Metropolitan Business School, says that in 2008 less than a fifth of onshore wind farms achieved 30 per cent capacity.

One analysis of the government figures, albeit commissioned by wind farm opponents, suggested that Britain’s biggest wind farm – the 140-turbine installation at Whitelee, near East Kilbride – operated to just 7.3 per cent of its capacity that year.

That might be all right if we could store electricity for when it is needed – but we can’t, at least not in large quantities. The power companies have to generate it at exactly the moment you want to use it.

Unfortunately, the wind might not be blowing when millions of people want to put the kettle on after Coronation Street ends. If it only starts blowing when everyone has turned off the lights and gone to bed, that is of very little use.

Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users’ Group, which represents heavy industrial users of electricity, says: “Wind is a particularly useless form of power if you don’t have a way of storing the energy. It just seems the politicians have been taken in by the wind lobby, and they’ve taken leave of their senses.”

The wind industry argues that the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK or off its shores, so provided the wind farms are widely enough spread, it should not matter.

But Professor David MacKay, who is now chief scientific adviser at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, has pointed out that in autumn/winter 2006/7 there were 17 days when output from Britain’s wind turbines was less than 10 per cent of their total capacity. On five of those days, output was below 5 per cent and on one day it was only 2 per cent. And those were the windier seasons.

To cope with what’s called “intermittency”, you must do two things.

First, you have to build far more wind turbines, in far more places, than you theoretically need. Prof MacKay says: “We need to be imagining industrialising really large tranches of the countryside.” Every view, from every summit in Britain – apart, perhaps, from a handful of specially preserved recreational mountains – will be like the view from Plynlimon.

The wind turbines required in Britain alone, says Prof MacKay, would amount to about double the number of all turbines in the world. Even then, “the maximum plausible production from on-shore windmills is 20 kilowatt hours per day per person”, about a sixth of Britain’s actual consumption.

Offshore offers further potential, but is much more expensive – meaning it will never provide more than a minority of wind generation in Britain. It also requires huge and ugly infrastructure, such as new harbours and power lines, on land.

The second thing you have to do is build more conventional, carbon-emitting power stations. Unlike wind farms, these can provide electricity predictably and more or less on demand.

Campbell Dunford, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), says that Germany – which has the largest number of wind turbines in Europe – “is building five new coal power stations, which it does not otherwise need, purely to provide covering power for the fluctuations from their wind farms. I am not sure [wind] has been a great success for them.” Mr Dunford claims that Germany’s CO2 emissions have actually risen since it increased its use of wind power. Though the wind itself might, in RUK’s words, be “free,” the cost of backup capacity is likely to be astronomical.

The figures are fluid, and fiercely disputed by the industry, but the House of Lords’ economic affairs committee estimated that wind was at least 50 per cent more expensive per unit generated than the other main non-CO2 option, nuclear. '

I have blogged before about the problem about relying on wind power for electricity generation but the facts just seem to go on being ignored by the politicians and environmentalists. I always blamed this on ignorance and/or blinkered dogma, but now I wonder if it might also be at least partly due to money. REad the end of Andrew Gilligan's article for more about the money to be made from wind power. Then have a think about who Nick Clegg's wife now works for and Chris Huhne's seeming obsession with wind power...

BBC news priorities

THe Independent are reporting that (my emphasis):

"Andrew Gilligan, left, was named Journalist of the Year last month for a series of scoops that led to the resignation of Lee Jasper, aide to the former London mayor Ken Livingstone. But I can reveal that the information Gilligan had access to had previously been seen by the BBC. I'm told that his source within City Hall, a Conservative member of the London Assembly, initially offered the leaked emails to BBC London's political editor, Tim Donovan, who rejected the story as being of no news value. It wasn't until a year later when Gilligan saw the info and investigated further that the scandal was uncovered, leading to Jasper's ignominious departure, and a triumph for the 'Evening Standard', Gilligan's paper."

I think "no news value" translates to "not of any value to our news agenda".

Ken's lies

As well as pointing out the regular lies that Gordon Brown tells, I am forced to bring to your attention this article by Andrew Gilligan in the Standard.


Here are a few examples, do read the Standard article for the complete list:

1. "Claim: Speaking to the London Assembly on 12 March 2008, Mr Livingstone said: "Children are safer on the streets now than they've really been since the 1950s." (Approx. 17 min 45 sec into the webcast on the London Assembly site.)

Reality: There were 27 murders of children and teenagers in London in 2007. This is more in a single year than in the first seven years of the 1950s. In the first 13 weeks of 2008, there have been 11 child/teenage murders."


2. "Claim: When the Standard raised concerns about 11 City Hall-funded projects linked to Mr Livingstone's then adviser, Lee Jasper, the Mayor dismissed the story as a "pack of lies... For all the projects, there's a full audit trail, with chapter and verse on how the money's been spent" (BBC London, 5.12.07).

Reality: At the time of the interview the LDA was already conducting an emergency audit of one of the projects, Brixton Base, and suing it for monies owed. A subsequent LDA investigation found that there was no audit trail for six projects and called in the police. Three arrests for fraud and theft have already followed."


3. "Claim: "Over the eight years since my election, we've doubled the number of homes being built in this city from 17,000 a year to 33,000 a year and we've doubled the amount of affordable housing." (Speaking at campaign launch, 18.3.08.)

Reality: According to the Mayor's own London Plan Monitoring Report (29.2.08, p66), the net number of self-contained homes built in London was in fact 19,500 in 2000, the year of his election. It rose to 27,500 in the year to April 2007, the latest for which figures are available.

This is an increase of 41 per cent, not a doubling. Nor have "we" [ie the Mayor] accomplished it - it is largely private development fuelled by the house price boom."


3. "Claim: The Olympics will produce "40,000 new homes" (Ken, Guardian 9.3.07).

Reality: According to the Mayor's own London Development Agency, the correct number is in fact 9,000."


4. "Claim: The Olympics will produce "50,000 new jobs" (Ken, Guardian 9.3.07).

Reality: According to the LDA, the Olympics will produce 12,000 permanent new jobs. There will also be 8,000 temporary jobs during the building phase."


5. "Claim: In February 2003, Mr Livingstone pledged not to raise the congestion charge from its then level of £5 until at least 2013.

"It won't be necessary," he said. "It's now quite clear that £5 was enough. I can't conceive of any circumstances in the foreseeable future where we would want to change the charge, although perhaps 10 years down the line it may be necessary." (Times 26.2.03.)

Reality: The congestion charge was raised by 60 per cent (to £8) in summer 2005, and changed to encompass a wider area in

2007. It will increase again to £25 for some vehicles if the Mayor is re-elected."


6. "Claim: In a speech on 2 December 2003, Mr Livingstone pledged: "I will save the Routemaster." In 2001, he said: "Only some ghastly, dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster."

Reality: Mr Livingstone got rid of the Routemaster from normal service in December 2005."

To be fair, Ken Livingstone was right that only "some ghastly, dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster", one did.


Maybe Ken just "misspoke" on all these occasions?

Burning underwear?

Andrew Gilligan has a very interesesting article in the Standard. It analyses the answers given by Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson during their separate interviews on Radio London's Vanessa Feltz programme. Andrew Gilligan reports that "Allowing for the questions, news and travel bulletins and station promos, Mr Livingstone spoke for approximately 35 minutes. In that time, he said 36 things that were untrue or misleading, an average of one every 58 seconds. Over the same length of time Mr Johnson said 11 things that were untrue or misleading, an average of one every three minutes 10 seconds."

So is Ken more than three times as dishonest as Boris? Read the article and decide for yourself, although I must say that some of Ken's remarks are so wide of the truth that you have to admire his nerve. Here are just three example:

"The Mayor was asked about how he justified The Londoner, his official newspaper. Was it “propaganda”?

It has to be objective [in fact, it is produced by the Mayor's communications team. Headlines in the current issue include: “Transport upgrades across city”, “Crime falls to nine-year low” and “Feeling happier and feeling safer”]. This close to the election, there's no reference to me anywhere in there ... I don't think [this month's issue] even mentions the word “mayor” [it mentions the word 14 times, including on the masthead] … I don't think in the last one it mentioned me [Mr Livingstone is mentioned 43 times, is the bylined writer of the front page lead story, and is given a further nine quotes and his own column inside]. I know in this one it doesn't mention me at all [it includes a quote from Mr Livingstone and refers to him 11 times]."


"On TfL's spend on marketing

This idea that there's a vast number of people just being press officers has always been rubbish [TfL has 27 press officers — by comparison, the Prime Minister has 14]."


"On mayoral candidate debates

We're having real trouble pinning down Boris to these debates [in fact over the last month Johnson has done at least four joint debates with Ken and is scheduled to do several more]."



I also bring to your attention a comment from a reader:

"In an interview in the Sunday Times Ken claims that the Standard was out to get him for:
1 25 years
2 20 years and
3 that he did not go to swanky Restaurants.

So far as I remember he was the Restaurant critic for the ES before he became Mayor.

- Dave, London, UK"

Is this true?

Andrew Gilligan on Ken Livingstone, again

Andrew Gilligan isn't going to let go, is he? From yesterday's Standard come a piece entitled "How much longer can Ken's greenwash last?". It starts "People sometimes ask me why, as a self-proclaimed Lefty, I am so hard on Ken Livingstone. I answer, perhaps a little priggishly, that it is our job as a newspaper to apply scrutiny to power - and if Boris Johnson should ever attain power, he can expect much the same treatment.

But the other part of the answer is simpler. Like many people, I used vaguely to admire Ken, but that was before I started to look more closely. And after several years of looking closely at Mr Livingstone, I have reached the considered conclusion that he is a phoney, a charlatan and a fraud.

Let's just take the past three weeks. Within that time (could there possibly be an election coming up?) we've seen no fewer than three big Mayoral announcements: each, on the face of it, extremely good news, and each winning what seemed well deserved good headlines. The problem is that every single one of those announcements was a deceit."


Do read Andrew Gilligan's article in full for details of Ken Livingstone's deceipt over the "1,000 more police for London", the reworked £25 congestion charge and the 12 uninterrupted "cycle superhighways".


Poor Ken, he's been found out at last and I don't think he likes it.

Another day, another piece on Ken Livingstone

Andrew Gilligan has yet another piece on Ken Livingstone's troubles, this time. The piece is exceedingly interesting and I am repeating it all here because I wish to comment upon parts of it - my comments in italics, my emphasis in bold.

"Whistle-blower to sue Mayor over 'bullying' claims
Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard 25.01.08
The whistleblower who exposed a key part of the City Hall scandal is to sue Ken Livingstone for libel, the Evening Standard can reveal.

The move comes after the Mayor claimed on BBC radio that Brenda Stern was sacked for bullying her staff.

Ms Stern, a former London Development Agency manager, was forced from her £70,000-a-year job after she complained about serious irregularities in a project run by a friend of the Mayor's equality adviser Lee Jasper.

A complaint of bullying was made against her but in a letter seen by the Standard, LDA chief executive Manny Lewis says the allegation was investigated and was "not founded".

But speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today, Mr Livingstone described Ms Stern as a "very embittered former member of staff we had to get rid of after complaints she was intimidatory to the staff working for her, and the entire senior management team said it was impossible to work with her".

Ms Stern said today: "One of the Mayor's most unattractive characteristics is the way he responds to any legitimate question with personal abuse. What he said about me to six million listeners was completely untrue, and I have that in writing from his own LDA chief executive.
"I am not a political opponent who can respond in kind. I am an ordinary member of the public who has no means to defend her reputation from this bullying other than the courts. I will not be intimidated into silence."

The Mayor's office hit back, threatening that if Ms Stern sued, the GLA would investigate "other matters" apart from her stint at the LDA, including her past life and previous employment. "

This is the sort of claim that Martin Bright made in this week's Dispatches programme which "alleged that public money was used to smear one of Livingstone's adversaries". The standard response of Ken Livingstone and his team to criticism is to smear the critic, rather than answer the criticism. To be fair, they are not alone as it was also a tactic used by Labour in the Tony Blair/Alastair Cambell days with regard to such people as Rose Addis.


"As criticism of Mr Livingstone has mounted, he and his supporters have made personal attacks on their critics, including the Standard, which has been accused of "racism" and of conducting a "lynching" of Mr Jasper. "

One of Ken's favourite "get out of jail free cards" has always been to cry "racist" at critics, it used to work rather well but I get the feeling that those days may be numbered.


"Ms Stern was programme manager for the LDA's Diversity Dividend, an interactive website allowing companies to assess their diversity performance. Before she arrived, the £295,000 contract for the website was given to a company called Diversity International, run by Joel O'Loughlin, a longstanding friend of Mr Jasper's, even though DI had no expertise in computers and was based in Liverpool.

The website never operated properly. Mr O'Loughlin deceived the LDA about his company's financial health and overcharged it by more than £50,000. In emails and letters leaked to the Standard Mr Lewis threatened in writing to sack Mr O'Loughlin and claw back the money, but within days performed a 180-degree turn following an intervention by Mr Jasper.

After Mr Jasper became involved, the threats to sack Mr O'Loughlin were withdrawn and he was offered a further £250,000 and a lucrative consultancy. Ms Stern was forced out after she voiced strong internal objections to the volte-face and the deal, calling it "extortionate", "outrageous" and "against the public interest". Mr Jasper had the final say on her fate.

Mr Livingstone also claimed on the Today programme: "The moment that management [of DI] was shown to be defective, we made certain that the company was wound up. It was brought much more in-house and is now thriving." In fact, DI was wound up by Mr O'Loughlin in a bid to keep his grant, and the Diversity Dividend website is now defunct."


Can someone please get Ken Livingstone in an interview studio and keep questioning him and not allow him the wriggle room that Radio London etc. allow him.

Andrew Gilligan comes clean

Andrew Gilligan has a Comment is Free article mainly attacking Alastair Campbell and I am all ion favour of that. Hidden in amongst this article is this admission "For my part, I confess I've never in the least minded criticism from Alastair. I'm part of a long list of people on the left - Ken Livingstone, George Galloway, Rhodri Morgan - whose careers have received the priceless boost of being attacked by New Labour." Yet another (now ex) BBC man who is "part of the left", how many more are there there?