HnH's silence over segregated Labour meeting explains how Rotherham happened

Labour have finally broken their silence over the segregated meeting attended by MPs Tom Watson, Liam Byrne, and Jack Dromey and MEP Sion Simon in Birmingham over the weekend. According to a story just published by the Daily Mirror a Labour spokesman is quoted as saying:

"Labour fully supports gender equality in all areas of society and all cultures... the seating arrangements ensured women from Muslim communities could take part."

As Orwellian newspeak and doublethink go, it is pretty standard Labour fayre which translates to "we accepted illegal segregation by sexes rather than illegally denying women entry". Presumably just refusing to attend the meeting unless it was in accord with the law didn't cross anybody's mind as there were votes at stake. By attempting to gloss over such blatant inequality while taking part in it and then trying to excuse it on the basis of 'culture' is such a sickening evasion that we can scarcely believe they had the gall to put out such a statement, not least as the meeting was arranged by Labour councillor Ansar Ali Khan. Surely it would make more sense just to expel Khan for sexism if he is unable to arrange a Labour Party meeting where men and women are treated equally.

Meanwhile, Hope not Hate - the great self-appointed moral arbiter of equality - has so far had nothing at all to say on the subject, and we can't see that changing.

We have blogged before on this subject: The responsibility for the grooming crisis lies within the culture Hope not Hate has infected the Labour Party with , and nothing we said then has changed: if anything, the current sexism scandal simply underlines the double standards at play. In Birmingham, Labour MPs went along with the meeting because they saw not the injustice and inequality of women being segregated, but only the votes that could be delivered by attending. And, of course, there were the concerns that by speaking out, they would be accused of 'cultural insensitivity' and 'racism'. Exactly the same reason that police officers, council officials, Labour councillors and Labour MPs did nothing in Rotherham over child abuse.

Are there any women here? - meeting
addressed by Liam Byrne

Sadly, the meeting at Hodge Hill has proved that nothing has changed either within the Labour Party, or within its associated hard-left, anti-UKIP organisations who pretend to believe in equality, who are the first to shout 'sexism' at UKIP, and yet are right at the back of the crowd mutely acquiescing when it is there in front of them in the own party. The hypocrisy is staggering - if it is against the law for the Christian owners of a B&B to turn away homosexual guests because of their beliefs, then how can it be right for a Labour Party meeting in a community centre to require segregation of men and women?

If nothing will convince you of the cynicism of both Labour and Hope not Hate, then consider these facts: Tom Watson is an active campaigner for Hope not Hate, writing recently how "We did a Hope Not Hate thing in Sandwell". Liam Byrne on his Flickr photostream - and without apparent irony - is pictured addressing several all-male Muslim gatherings in addition to being pictured delivering Hope not Hate leaflets. Sion Simon on his website boasts of meeting local Hope not Hate activists to 'celebrate the cultural harmony we enjoy' - the women were left outside in the rain, we assume.

Liam Byrne delivering (with no sense
of irony) Hope not Hate leaflets

Hope not Hate themselves frequently revisit what they claim is UKIP's sexism; a couple of minutes searching their website will return hundreds of results, with most articles based on a wilful misunderstanding of what was actually said by the UKIP person they are attacking at the time. Despite this, we don't recall UKIP ever having arranged a meeting where women were made to sit separately from men or - as in the case of one meeting addressed by Byrne - where women were excluded altogether.

It is these very double standards which bring us to the heart of the argument. In Rotherham, former MP, convicted thief and Hope not Hate activist Denis MacShane said of the child grooming scandal that:

""I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that. We were aware of the oppression of women within bits of the Muslim community in Britain but....Perhaps yes, as a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.”

UKIPs sexism? When did they hold a segregated meeting?

This attendance at segregated meetings is simply putting an official, Labour Party rubber stamp on behaviour which would be unacceptable elsewhere; an acknowledgement that 100 years of women's suffrage, 50 years of Women's Lib and 40 years of equality legislation don't apply if you believe in certain religions. As others have said elsewhere, if the meeting had been segregated by race or by sexual orientation there would have been hell to pay.

It is sadly this same approach which has seen Labour councils across the UK face similar problems with paedophilia, or as it is now politely called, 'Child Sexual Exploitation'. We saw in Rotherham - and heard from then MP MacShane - that Labour didn't want to rock the boat for fear of being called 'racist'. Council employees, police officers and politicians alike were infected by this top-down fear of being branded with the one label which is guaranteed to halt any career in its tracks where Labour are involved. And so - just like Watson, Byrne, Dromey and Simon - they held their tongues, and let thousands of school age young girls pay the price of their right-on political correctness.

What we should be worried about is the law against Islamophobia promised by Laobur leader Ed Miliband should he become Prime Minister. We wonder which crimes could then be reported by the media: would reports of the Rotherham scandal and the Birmingham meeting be considered Islamophobic?

 Here in the UK, most of us were brought up to believe that justice is blind, and took that to mean that we were all equal before the law, without excuse. When will Labour, Hope not Hate and their bully boys in Stand up to UKIP and Unite Against Facism learn that a crime is still a crime even if the person committing it is a Muslim?

Senior Labour Party figures Miliband and Ummuna closely associated to man with links to 'Britain First'

A 'Mr Robinson', happily posing with
Britian First candidate

Senior figures within the Labour Party including leader Ed Miliband and shadow Business Secretary Chukka Ummuna had been repeatedly photographed engaged in earnest discussion with a man known to associate with far-right group 'Britain First'.

Left wing commentators and campaign groups showed their outrage by not saying anything, and threatened to protest at such outrageous behaviour by not highlighting it in any way and by not flagging up the connection on their blogs at all.

Labour shadow business secretary clearly
associating openly with 'Mr Robinson'
despite his far-right links

Neither Miliband nor Ummuna had any comment to make on photographic evidence that they had repeatedly been seen in public with a Mr Nick Robinson, the political editor of the BBC, despite recent photographic evidence that he was in a 'selfie' photograph with the deputy leader of Britain First and their candidate in the Rochester and Strood by-election Jayda Fransen.

Mr Robinson, 51, of North London, has a long history of talking to people involved with politics, and has previously spoken to Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP.

Self-appointed 'anti-fascist' leader of Hope not Hate Nick Lowles has remained strangely silent on the subject, despite earlier tweets during the by-election campaign demanding to know "Why are UKIP campaigners having photograph taken with Britain First candidate in Rochester today?" after Fransen 'ambushed' them for a picture. At the time, Lowles

Labour leader Milliband and Robinson

rubbished claims that they did not know who Fransen was, and said it was 'clear proof of a link between UKIP and Britain First'.

We asked Hope not Hate whether Robinson's photograph was clear proof of a link between the Labour leadership, the BBC and Britain First based on exactly the same logic, but their press officer put the phone down without responding. We also e-mailed the question to Mr Lowles, but on attempting to e-mail again 12 hours later after he had failed to respond, discovered that they had blocked our e-mail address. We were going to contact both the BBC and the Labour Party with the same question, but then remembered that we weren't Nick Lowles, and that drawing conclusions based upon photographs taken out of context was absurd, stupid and the sort of puerile childish behaviour one expects from an anti-UKIP organisation.

Hope not Hate's '85%' campaign runs into some factual difficulties

Hope not Hate's 85% campaign appears to have run into some difficulties, most of them factual. To make up for this, we've created our own '16%' campaign to highlight the share of the vote Labour gained in Rochester and Strood. See if you can spot which one is ours below.

 

Labour MP photographed with known NF activist in her constituency

 

UKIP MP pictured with stranger

 The top picture of course shows Labour MP Dame Anne Begg photographed with her local Scottish NF activist during the recent referendum campaign. She knew who he was. The bottom picture shows UKIP MP Mark Reckless photographed with a stranger who came into the constituency office and who was unknown to him. Even HnH don't name her. Somehow this makes him racist in a way that Dame Anne Begg isn't.

Don't worry, Nick - it'll be all white. UKIP can teach you what equal opportunities really look like.

A deafening silence has surrounded UKIP leader Nigel Farage's final speech of his tour of the UK last night in London, not least because of the picture Hope not Hate don't want to see:

'Bloody racists'

In the interests of fairness, we thought we'd take a quick look at Hope not Hate's record of equal opportunities over the past year or so.

Hope not Hate leadership: (LtoR) Nick Lowles, Ruth Smeeth, Matthew Collins, Carl Morphett - doing all white

No luck there in our search for equal opportunites. Still, perhaps they're training people from our minority communities how to 'Stand up for HOPE'? Maybe pictures of their training events will prove more fruitful?

Still doing all white......

 

Oh, OK then. Not there either. Maybe we're just looking in the wrong place? Perhaps on their action days when they get all their supporters out delivering leaflets?

It's all looking a bit white and middle class

Hmmm. After all that, we're still struggling to find the inclusiveness that Hope not Hate constantly trumpets - indeed which is part of its founding statement - being shown in practise.

Unlike Hope not Hate, UKIP is a party of inclusiveness, with senior members from the Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Islamic faiths; from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, India, Pakistan and Europe; from the rich and from the poor. All that is required is a love of our shared nation, its values and its culture.

If you were planning to get to the top of an organisation because you're white, don't bother with UKIP - all it takes is dedication, commitment and belief wherever you're from.

If what you want is a colour bar to help you get on, Hope not Hate is the obvious place to be.

PS It helps if you're middle class too. Hope not Hate are just as committed to selling out the working class as their Labour and Union paymasters.

Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood - I agree with Nigel. On HnH's website!

In a 'guest blog' on Hope not Hate's website, Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood desperately tries to

PC leader Leanne Wood - a surprising convert to UKIP's
point of view!

save her party from electoral oblivion in Wales by making statements which would see her branded racist if she was a UKIP candidate. Normally we wouldn't link to HnH's website, but we feel the article to be so remarkable an admission of defeat that we will make an exception in this case - you can find it here. It's not every day that Nick Lowles blog contains a guest post which essentially says 'I agree with Nigel'.

Wood - who just a couple of months ago said of UKIP that "your politics have no place in our country, not now, not ever" - appears an unlikely convert to UKIP's point of view. In her Hope not Hate article, she argues:

"Not enough has been done to clamp down on gang-masters who exploit migrant workers by paying below the minimum wage and in doing so pricing out local – often low-skilled workers - from the labour market with devastating consequences for both parties...

A borderless trading bloc... was not meant to include narrowing the economic options of the people in its poorest regions to westward migration.

The principle of EU wealth redistribution... should and must result in enhanced living standards and prospects for all EU citizens in their home communities so that moving to another state is seen as an option rather than a necessity."

In other words, that UKIP are right - unlimited immigration does drive down wages, create wage compression, and reduced employment for British workers, while the EU's disastrous economic policies have made the UK the country of choice for people whose home nations have been devastated by the Euro.

Wood now belatedly supports all the things Hope not Hate have been denouncing as lies for the past year in their campaign against UKIP. Still, a consistent argument was never one of Hope not Hate's strong points as their 'head of intelligence', former BNP thug Matthew Collins trawls UKIP member's social media desperately seeking past links to, er, the BNP.

What is interesting is that this is published not just on Hope not Hate's website, but on HnH director Nick Lowles own blog. It is difficult to see this as anything other than an admission by Hope not Hate that UKIP are correct in their assessment of the problems facing the working class, and also a tacit admission that Hope not Hate's aim is not to fight racism, but to fight UKIP on behalf of what it defines as 'the left' - which includes Plaid Cymru and the watermelon Greens just as much as Labour.

Brits in EU countries: 2.2m. Foreign born residents of the UK: 7.54m. HnH distorting figures again.

Hope not Hate this morning posted a graphic from the IPPR showing the number of British citizens - ie emigrants - who live in other EU countries. The figure was 2.2m.

What they failed to show were the corresponding figures for immigration to the UK. The 2011 census - available from the Office of National Statistics - showed that as of 2011 there were 7,354,000 foreign born residents of the UK, or 9.1% of the population, against an EU average figure of only 8.6%. Of these, 4,760,000 were born outside the European Union, and 2,240,000 were born within the European Union (these figures are rounded off, hence the total not equalling the 7.354m).

Since the census, there are figures for a further 2 years: in the year to October 2012, net immigration was 152,000, while in the year to October 2013 a further net increase of 183,000 was recorded for a total net immigration figure of a further 335,000 people. By comparison, the Leicester metropolitan area has a population of 330,574.

Some other interesting facts from their 'favourite infographic'.

The Foreign Office estimates that of the 1,000,000 British citizens resident in Spain, as many as 800,000 are retirees living on either their pensions or their savings. British residents under pensionable age have no free access to the Spanish healthcare system following a change in the law in 2006.

Of the 330,000 British citizens resident in France, the Foreign Office estimates that 250,000 are retirees or early retirees. In 2007, the French government withdrew free access to the French healthcare system for retirees under the age of 65: 100,000 people were affected.

Of the 107,000 British citizens resident in Germany, over 40,000 are servicemen, families of servicemen, or otherwise employed in British Forces Germany, formerly the British Army of the Rhine.

Of the 31,000 British citizens living in Belgium, up to 15,000 are employees of either the European Parliament, the European Commission or SHAPE/SHAFE.

The list goes on. Needless to say, their infographic is not what it appears to be. Why are we not surprised?

Lowles ignores the blatant lie in his rush to attack UKIP

Yet another story which doesn't make sense on Nick Lowles 'Purple Rain' blog, although for regular

Sinclaire - quickly wrote a book and had it published and
printed in order to head off slow-moving threat

readers that will not be a surprise.

The lastest story is a repost of a BBC article about former UKIP MEP Nikki Sinclaire, who is now claiming that 'UKIP made sex change revelation threat'. The article begins "An MEP has told the BBC she revealed her gender reassignment secret because of threats from journalists and her former colleagues in UKIP."

Contrast this with Sinclaire's quotes in the Daily Mail just last week when she said,

"her fellow UKIP politicians had been very accepting of her sexuality, whereas she had encountered the most homophobia from Liberal Democrats"

 

and that

 

 "'There was one great secret that Nikki never shared with anyone other than her family and close friends."

We find ourselves mystified as to how someone who never told anyone apart from family and friends could be threatened with exposure by UKIP politicians who only last week she described as 'supportive'.

Part of the reason for this is revealed by the following quote. Miss Sinclaire, 54, said, "They threatened to expose this and this is why I felt the need. Because people asked: 'Why are you saying this now? Basically, I wanted to put my side of it before someone else put a distorted side out."

Most people who wanted to 'put their side' before 'someone else put a distorted side out' would call a press conference. Such traditionalism is not for Ms Sinclaire, who speedily responded to the supposed 'threat' by not just writing an entire book, but also having it published and printed.

Not unnaturally, speculation about Ms Sinclaire had existed at all levels of the party for almost 20 years. She is after all a 7' tall flamboyant lesbian with a lantern jaw the size of Norfolk and a voice like she's been gargling with gravel. Had she simply told the truth, UKIP members would have shrugged their shoulders and moved on. Nobody cared about her much flaunted sexuality, and nobody would have cared whether her lack of penis was natural or not either.

Ms Sinclaire's current story contradicts what she said only last week, and this has been her problem throughout her career. Hope not Hate are perfectly well aware that what she says bears little relation to reality, and while they have occasionally used her self-publicising outbursts against UKIP on their own blog even Lowles apparently gives it little credence. As Sinclaire remains on police bail following her arrest for expenses fraud in 2010 this is hardly surprising, while her response to being expelled from UKIP has been online for many years with her explaining how it will 'make her very rich' as she gets to keep her MEP expenses all for herself.

Sinclaire standing head and shoulders above her team -
Cartwright is on the far right

For Lowles and Hope not Hate, their glee in publicising Sinclaire's latest flim-flam is doubly surprising as despite her oft-repeated reasons for leaving UKIP, she continues to employ a former National Front activist and far-right candidate as her political adviser. Gary Cartwright stood as a National Democrat candidate in a Southwark by-election some years ago and continues to write articles defending historian David Irving, who denies the Holocaust. Despite her long-running association with Cartwright, HnH continue to publicise her self-serving nonsense without criticism, although it is difficult to imagine any other person being given such an easy ride. Perhaps it is her sexuality which accounts for it? - while Hope not Hate are happy to mock the mentally ill, sexual preference remains an achingly trendy topic for the far-left. That said, they were happy to allow the EDL leadership to be described as 'gay' and 'faggots' on their Facebook pages. Perhaps the truth is more prosaic: to Lowles and his fellow travellers, the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and sod the morality of it. HnH do themselves employ a number of former BNP and NF activists.  

 

 

A request - Please spread the HnH Googlebomb!

We thought we'd make a quick request to our many regular readers.

Everybody can help with this, whether you've got a blog, a website or just your Facebook page.

Can you post the following link somewhere on it:

Hope not Hate

Just copy the link and paste it somewhere, and please encourage others to do the same. Needless to say, it doesn't go to Hope not Hate, but to this blog. It is known as a 'Googlebomb', as it confuses Google's search ranking system, and will help this blog to appear in Hope not Hate's search results.

Please also don't forget to sign up to Hope not Hate's Facebook page - remembering to ensure they appear in your newsfeed - and then mark their posts as 'Spam' using the pull down arrow next to their postings.

Both of these will help ensure that HnH will have to waste funds promoting their own page that they would otherwise use to attack legitimate, non-racist political parties such as UKIP.

The last time we posted such advice, it prompted a complaint from HnH as it means less money in Nick Lowles' pocket, so it is having some effect. It was, of course, a rather hypocritical complaint, as HnH do this to our Facebook page and have done it since it was founded.

Thanks for your help!