Karen Tandy

November is Islamophobia Awareness Month. Good. Let us do some awareness of our own. A girl's tongue nailed to the table for threatening to talk. A kettle of boiling water held over a pinned down girl's face. Another threatened with a gun to blow her face off. A girl told her family would have their throats cut and be decapitated. Oxford victims scratched, choked, beaten, branded, burnt, gang raped, assaulted with knives and a baseball bat. Girls locked in bedsits like animals, no food, no toilet. Deliberate addiction to hard drugs and alcohol. Pregnancy as punishment, then backstreet abortions. A 13 year old found on examination to have been raped more than 50 times. A 12 year old, Samantha, abducted in Oldham, thrown out of a moving car, then locked in a room and raped by five men for nearly 24 hours. Another 12 year old was doused in petrol and told she would burn if she talked. Now the pattern. Average age of the convicted, 29. Most of them married. Most of them with daughters the same age. Not confused boys. Grown men who knew. Mainly from Pakistan. For a quarter of a century the word was racist. Not a case, not a report, not a counter argument. Just the word, thrown at every parent, every councillor, every copper and every journalist. It worked. Councils wrote reports commanding that culture must not be mentioned. Police told mothers to do the detective work themselves. The victims were called prostitutes. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to take Rochdale in 2009. A twenty minute film was made for exactly this, paid for by the state, trialled in a few Sheffield schools and left on a shelf for nearly twenty years. The man in it is Asian, not even Muslim, and still that was too much. Meanwhile the borders are wide open and the queue keeps growing. Eritrean, Sudanese, Afghan, Somali, Kurdish, Albanian and Roma names now sit in the conviction lists alongside the Pakistani ones. But the boats bring more than rapists. Two IRGC operatives who arrived by small boat were charged in 2026 with plotting an attack on Jewish targets in Manchester. An Iraqi already convicted of Islamic State membership came in on the identical route. Nineteen suspected of terrorist activity, some with Daesh links, were picked out of Channel arrivals, and officials admit Islamic State fighters could use it too. Every new cohort brings its own version of the con, and nobody at the top is counting. Islamophobic is the new word doing the old job. It is not an argument. It is a stop sign. For twenty-five years the pattern was known, the reports were written and the cases were coming through the courts, yet naming the men who did it was treated as the greater offence. The same refusal continues. Inquiries are narrowed or delayed. Police and councils still treat the ethnic pattern as a problem of messaging rather than a problem of crime. The result is plain: networks that rape, traffic and torture girls on an industrial scale have operated with relative impunity, while those who document the pattern face the greater official hostility. That is the cost of the word. A twenty-minute film was commissioned by a government agency, trialled in Sheffield schools and then left unused because the perpetrator was Asian. The girls it was meant to warn never saw it. The pattern it illustrated has not stopped. November is Islamophobia Awareness Month. Be aware.

One Fraud Backs Another Andy Burnham flew down from Manchester on 11 September to save a drowning candidate. Touching. He need not have bothered. The fix was already in, and the adults had already agreed who was allowed to fail upward. Sagal Abdi-Wali is standing on housing reform. Of course she is. As Camden’s cabinet member for housing she presided over 124 maladministration findings, 20 of them severe, and a 92% failure rate on complaint handling. A cancer patient was told smoke seeping through her walls was “unlikely to be harmful.” A deaf resident was refused a sign-language interpreter in case the budget ran out. A suicidal man with PTSD was managed, which is the polite word for ignored. One resident waited 605 working days for a complaint to be acknowledged. Another waited 766 for a reply. Staff were not trained to fix problems. They were trained to file them somewhere quiet and call that a service. Confronted in January 2025, she told her critics to “have some humility.” Then the Tories. Then national trends. The one sentence she did not manage was the obvious one. She attended one meeting in the first six months of 2026, while holding the portfolio, while the failures were on the record, while 31,000 repairs a year were being mismanaged. She was not running Camden. She was auditioning for Westminster, and Camden was the prop. Burnham calls her the future. He would. He has already made Miatta Fahnbulleh Energy Secretary, so his eye for talent is not in dispute. Fahnbulleh’s ECO4 scheme is under Serious Fraud Office investigation. £44 million missing. Four men arrested. Thirty thousand families left with botched insulation. She admitted “systemic failure” to Parliament, which in this party is not a confession. It is a job application. Burnham promoted her. The daughter of a Liberian dictator’s foreign minister now holds Britain’s energy brief. Her brother is named after a revolutionary. Her grandfather was convicted of treason. She attended private school, then voted to strip winter fuel payments from pensioners in one of London’s most deprived constituencies. She failed to open a constituency office for over a year. She resigned to help bring Starmer down, and collected the reward. Then she campaigned for Abdi-Wali. So did Burnham. One set of wreckage introducing the next. That is the pattern, if anyone is still pretending to look. Housing failure becomes a housing campaign. A fraud investigation becomes a promotion. The connected destroy, confess, and climb, then hold hands on the steps of the London Irish Centre and announce that they are the solution. The shield is just as tidy. When Zia Yusuf noted that Abdi-Wali was born in Somalia, Labour did not defend the record. It could not. A cabinet minister called it straightforward racism. Piers Morgan called him a racist clown. Good Morning Britain cut him off. The 124 findings, the 766-day wait and the cancer patient vanished on cue. Scrutiny became the offence, which is convenient when the record will not survive a question. Holborn and St Pancras is being counted on to stay home, or to split, or to flinch at the right moment. This is not left or right. It is whether a cabinet member with that record, who managed one meeting in six months and survived her own council election by sixty votes, should be thanked for it with a seat in Parliament. One fraud backed another. They would like you to applaud. Break the chain.

@SadiqKhan You speak of "disinformation" and the "outrage economy." The disinformation is your claim to competence. The outrage is your record. You complain of a "global industry" attacking you while your own office was convicted of failing to tax a vehicle registered in your name. You call it a scam. The courts call it your paperwork. The hypocrisy is industrial. You warn of bonds "eating away at society" while your ULEZ scheme extracts £500 million from London drivers for a policy your own assessors admit had "negligible effect on air quality." You bankrupted small businesses. You taxed pensioners off the road. You told them it was for the children. The science says it did nothing. The receipts say you raised half a billion. You do the maths. You lecture on disinformation while the Office for Statistics Regulation publicly rebuked you for falsely claiming knife crime was falling. Knife crime rose 72% under your watch. 15,639 offences. 16,147 in 2024/25, the highest of your mayoralty. 30 teenage homicides in 2021 alone. You were corrected by the state's own watchdog and you continued to lie. You shared platforms nine times with Suliman Gani, who called women subservient and demanded an Islamic state. You represented Louis Farrakhan, who calls Jews "termites," and overturned his ban. Your law firm consulted on the defence of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted of direct involvement in 9/11. You signed a letter blaming 7/7 on British policy, not the bombers. You visited Babar Ahmad in prison. These are not smears. These are the public record. You turned the London Eye into an EU flag on New Year's Eve and "joked" about declaring independence for London. You fly foreign symbols over the Thames and wonder why the bonds fray. You blocked the Met's £50 million Palantir contract, the AI that catches corrupt officers, after your own force was described as "fighting criminals with their hands tied behind their backs." You preside over record phone theft, record shoplifting, and a grooming gang epidemic you dismiss as "malicious" and "politically motivated" when survivors accuse you of living under a rock. TfL is £12 billion in debt, "effectively bankrupt," bailed out seven times by central government, while you raised the GLA precept 71%. You broke the transport system and made Londoners pay for the privilege. The disinformation is not the criticism of your record. The disinformation is your entire career. You are not a victim of a global industry. You are a victim of documentation. Every failure is logged. Every tax is counted. Every stabbing is recorded. The mirror reflects a man who has taken the greatest city on earth and made it a warning. The outrage is real. You built it. You taxed it. You watched crime rise and called it progress. You are not the victim of disinformation. You are its architect. We are on to you.

They are not in charge. Labour is the shopfront. The men you see on the news are hired to look like government. The architects sit behind them. No seat. No vote. They write the brief. The minister reads it. While the country shouts at the face, they dismantle the rest. We are shouting at the dummy. The hand is behind the curtain. James Purnell runs No10. Blair’s old minister. Flint Global. He writes the day. Matthew McGregor writes the story. 38 Degrees. Hope Not Hate. Obama’s campaign. He writes the feeling. Jonathan Powell runs the dangerous bit. Blair’s chief of staff. National Security Adviser under Starmer. Still there under Burnham. Chagos. China. He stays so the policy does not die when the face changes. Then the cage. Strasbourg. The Hague. The Human Rights Act. Treaties you never voted to keep. Lawyers who call it values. The minister reads it out and goes home. That is why they all sound the same. None of them can answer a question that was not in the pack. The row stays on the dummy. The minister takes the hit. The man who wrote the line is not even in the shot. That is the trick. Keep the country busy with the face. The hand never has to answer. The MP is the mouth. The machine is the author. England is not being failed by idiots. England is being administered by people who will never stand for election, through people who will.